John Louie
John Louie is Men’s support counselor at the Tla’amin community health center, http://www.tlaaminhealth.com/. He counsels aboriginal men on drug addictions, domestic abuse, alcoholism, and depression. He’s also a member of the Aboriginal Suicide Critical Incident response team. He’d been a logger for 27 years until injuries in a work accident ended the only career he’d ever known. An alcoholic, he checked himself into a drug abuse treatment center to point his life in a new direction. This direction empowered him to proudly acknowledge his peoples’ spiritual teachings, which he’d been taught to disregard by the Indian residential school to which he was sent at age six. At the treatment center, he learned truths that restored his pride as a man and as a native. Truths he uses when counseling others. “I learned what can be learned can also be unlearned’, he says, adding that “for a person to change their current life they need to know where they have been and where they come from.”
