"Aboriginal health access centre set to open"

BRANTFORD - The first health facility designed to specifically meet the needs of aboriginal people open its doors here Thursday.

"De dwa da dehs nye s Aboriginal Health Centre" will open across from the Pine Tree Native Centre, on King Street and offer a choice of culturally appropriate Western medicine and traditional Aboriginal healing and will house an Aboriginal family physician, nurses and traditional healers.

Dr. Mike Monture, from Six Nations, who will be the main physician at the two health centres, told a crowd of about 80 people at the Pine Tree Native Centre Thursday, he was happy to be back at Six Nations and practicing.

"This is quite exciting to see this come together for me. It's been about 20 years since I saw my first patient."

Dr. Monture said the centre will fill a void in the health field offering culturally appropriate health programs and services by offering contemporary practices and traditional Aboriginal healing methods and medicines.

The centre, he said will focus on preventative and holistic health care that affect "the whole person, both mentally emotionally, physically and spiritually."

Dr. Montour said a lot of the time, "we feel like the middle man for the drug companies." He said this new approach to treating people will include awareness and what it takes to be healthy.

Jan Longboat a Six Nations herbalist said she was happy to be a part of the new centre. She is one of several local healers that will be called upon when patients ask for traditional healing.

Len Tomah, New Brunswick regional chief of the Assembly of First Nations, holds the Health Portfolio as the AFN, and told the group the centre was the kind of culturally appropriate healing centres, the AFN was happy to support.

"This is a much needed centre dealing with quality of life issues and family violence."

He said the centre will lend validity to traditional health practices and provide services for 12,000 aboriginal people in the Brantford-Hamilton, Six Nations areas.

He told the Six Nations band council last Tuesday the centre will service all aboriginal people.

Dr. Monture has spent several years as a physician in many northern communities.

He said the new health access centres, one in Brantford and a second in Hamilton, will service aboriginal people mainly in urban centres and will offer both traditional healing practices and contemporary medicine.

He said he hopes to be part of setting the new model for aboriginal health care. "We are able to show there is a need to make changes to the existing model and there is a need for additional funding."

Band Council Chief Wellington Staats said Six Nations had bid for a health care access centre to be located here. "But they told us we had to take aboriginal people from all over but the province never really identified who is an aboriginal person and at what cost that will be to the band. If you cannot identify the aboriginal person, and with Metis, you can't trace them, or identify them. So what could happen is; they would end up using our health care monies, that are distributed to Six Nations because we can't get any identification numbers on them. We can't get any claim back. So we had to decline. We couldn't see the value of trying to stretch our dollars to cover people we couldn't get a claim in for."

Dr. Montour said that problem has not been elevated. He told council the centre is already getting a lot of interest from Six Nations residents who want to use its services.