Friends, just as an update with what I have been writing to do with the residential schools over the past several years. I want to mention that like many others before I have a hearing coming up with this soon.

There are now up to about 80,000 survivors of residential schools in Canada. I would say that the majority have no idea about what else they could do for their own healing process to take place.

As for myself, I was happy enough to hear our prime minister speak up on national television and publicly apologize for the deplorable way mine and former generations of native people were treated in these institutions of learning.Of course, it only took less than a year and a half for this same man do a complete about-face and state that Canada really has no history of colonialism after all.

Yet again that is politics, friends, and just about anything goes except for the truth, which is what the residential school settlement process is all about.

When I think of the many years that I personally took for my own healing journey I am saddened to note that not a lot of us survivors know enough about our own native cultures to realize that we can do a lot of this healing work ourselves. There are tried-and-true ceremonies like the sweat lodge, the sun dance and others, to walk again the true Amerindian Red Road.

There are also those who went through these residential schools, some close relatives, who simply gave up and committed suicide or have and are still destroying themselves slowly with alcohol and drugs. It pleases me, too, that there are some amongst us, like Mountain Dene Filmmaker Raymond Yakeleya, who is now working on a documentary about the ones who went ahead and killed themselves in moments of supreme despair. It does take courage to do a project like that, and I applaud him.

And, with my own residential school hearing coming up soon I want to dedicate each further step I take on my healing journey to all of those we have already lost.

Finally, I should also mention that I am getting some real professional help along the way, from one Dave Forbes, who is with Almstrom, Wright, Oliver & Cooper, a legal firm which had been working for residential school survivors many years before the federal government agreement was reached three - going on four - years ago. They now represent some 1,500 survivors and many from my own home-town of Radilih Koe, with more just now learning that this is possible and a good thing to do, for themselves and their children.

This has been a very trying time for me, friends, but with God's good grace I do hope to put this part of my own painful past behind and move on to a brighter day!

Mahsi Cho!