She created space for healing in her community, and then she created healing for herself through her art. Amanda Baton is a Délı̨nę First Nations member who was born in Edmonton and moved to Yellowknife, Northwest Territories when she was six weeks old. Her father is German and her mother is Délı̨nę. Now working as a full time artist, she does beading, tufting and quillwork.

In the past, she’s worked as an addictions counsellor and community wellness worker, inspired by her own struggles with addiction as an intergenerational trauma survivor. Aware of the needs in the North, she wanted to create spaces for healing. “I just wanted them to know that they're not alone because I felt like I was alone at one point and I started reaching out for that help,” she recalls.

Doing that social service work, Baton found she was getting burnt out and her art was helpful for her own healing journey. “I'm not a superhero. I'm not invincible. I have feelings and a lot of the caseload that I had was super heavy,” she remembers. As the justice coordinator, mental health and addictions counsellor, she was deeply impacted.

Beading and creating relieved her stress and helped her feel grounded. All the compliments Baton received showcasing her work felt good and she found a lot of healing in her creations. Stepping back from her professional work and into making her art helped light a spark in her and uncovered a new layer of feeling better.

Educating herself for her work, Baton did a one-year drug and alcohol treatment specialist diploma program while working full time. She balanced her family obligations and personal needs. Later, she took a trauma treatment certificate program and other training programs that helped her in her work as a resolution health support worker at the Friendship Centre. Working with residential school survivors on their claims, she dealt with a lot of vicarious trauma and found she started to get burnt out. That’s how she learned the importance of listening to her body.

Her advice for Indigenous students leaving their communities for work or school would be “Go for it….get out of your comfort zone.” Baton encourages youth to explore the world and all of its opportunities, to break cycles and have new experiences. While family responsibilities can sometimes be a barrier to leaving home, Baton encourages exploring where possible. “There's so much opportunity out there and we can't be limiting ourselves because that doesn't allow us to be who we are meant to be,” she urges.

When it came to obstacles, one of the biggest ones she faced was her sobriety. Early on, Baton had to avoid people, places and situations that were a risk to her sobriety, setting boundaries early on with her triggers to avoid people who would enable her. Making tough choices with family members was especially hard but at the end of the day, she had to do what was right for her, even when people closest to her didn’t understand or weren’t happy about it.

If she could share a message with her younger self, it would be, “I love you.” Raised by survivors of war and residential school, her family was dysfunctional and her parents worked, drank and gambled their trauma away. They didn’t express their love so she is mindful to do so with her own children, building a house of love and nurturing. “That's the reality many of us face, right, especially if we're intergenerational survivors. We had tough love and it made us who we are, very resilient,” Baton observes.

To help balance her mental health and well-being, Baton goes to therapy every two weeks, talks to a mental health nurse, a psychologist, a psychiatrist and uses other mental health services as needed. She also has the support of traditional healers and elders, her ancestors and Creator and her spirituality to help her through. “I find going and being out on the land is very important, especially to us Indigenous people, because that's where we come from. It's where we came from, and the land is always going to be there,” she explains.

When it comes to inspiration, Baton looks to her late maternal grandmother’s and her auntie’s beadwork. She learned to bead and tuft from YouTube and her creative relatives have inspired her to explore her artistic side. In doing so, she’s found healing, connection and deep gratitude. The message she wants to share to inspire Indigenous youth is, “Don't give up! Just keep going.”

She created space for healing in her community, because she knew all too well what it was like to need that.  Through traditional practices and contemporary wellness services, she takes care of herself so she can show love to her family that she needed growing up. Amanda Baton’s made beautiful art and a beautiful life, giving back what she could the best way she knew how.

Thanks to Alison Tedford Seaweed for authoring this article.