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Melodie’s story: the ripple effect of abuse in indigenous communities

Nov 6, 2016 | 12:15 PM

OTTAWA — At the age of five, Melodie Casella remembers calling her mom to tell her “something” had happened. It was enough to send her mother rushing home.

A babysitter on her B.C. reserve had sexually abused her, Casella recalls.

“My mom was so angry,” she said.

A myriad associated traumas followed — she was terrified of the dark, of being left alone. She couldn’t sleep with the door closed.

The Canadian Press has a policy of not identifying the victims of sexual assault, but Casella, now 45, agreed to be identified in hopes of raising awareness about the ripple effects of abuse in indigenous communities.

“You spend the majority of your adult life trying to make peace with the past and trying to recover from the scars of growing up in your community and then trying to break the cycle because of what happens.”

Within her own family unit, Casella recalled chronic alcohol abuse by her parents in her early years — both of them became clean and sober, she noted — and a strict regimen of unbending rules, the legacy of her own mother’s experiences in residential school.

“You had to have everything completely clean, you have no wrinkles on your bed, which of course perpetuates into a feeling of obsessive compulsive disorder,” she said. “It starts to overpower your life.”

Forgiveness has taken her a long way towards healing.

“They literally had no choice … in being in residential school,” she said. “It was a bad law that was made by the government, taking the children and removing them and forcing them into a place that completely stripped them and violated them of having no tradition or cultural values.”

Casella, who still lives in the Sechelt (Shishalh) First Nation, has had demons of her own to confront: she’s been in treatment three separate times, struggling with alcohol and drugs.

She went looking for help, she said, to finally break a cycle “everybody was getting lost in” — including a relative, Cheryl Joe, who ended up becoming involved in sex work in Vancouver before she was killed in 1992.

A man named Brian William Allender was convicted of first-degree murder in Joe’s death, Casella said. The family is now fighting to keep him from being released on parole.

— Follow @kkirkup on Twitter

Kristy Kirkup, The Canadian Press