By Lily Yumagulova and Cindy Marven
As part of HazNet’s Indigenous emergency management practitioners interview series, Lily Yumagalova had the pleasure of speaking with Serenna Besserer, an Inuit woman and a member of the Nunatsiavut territory of Labrador, who is currently a Senior Emergency Management Program Advisor of the Indigenous Engagement and Support Programs Unit for Emergency Management Ontario (EMO). EMO is responsible for emergency management in the Province of Ontario. Serenna was born and raised in Labrador.
Serenna Besserer
Serenna brings generations of community service, 15 years emergency management experience, decades of community service, and an Indigenous perspective, to her current position as Senior Emergency Management Program Advisor with the Indigenous Engagement and Support Programs Unit for the Province of Ontario.
Walking in her family’s footsteps
Serenna has “public service in her blood”. Her childhood after-school hours were frequently spent jumping from ice pan to ice pan near her father’s marina in Happy Valley-Goose Bay, Labrador, or playing games and having snacks with seniors at the long-term care facility where her mother was the activities director for, while her grandmother (the administrator) and her aunt (counsellor) worked at the women’s transition house they were instrumental in establishing. Her father was in the military at a young age and retired from the NORAD radar base in Nunavut and her grandfather was in the Royal Canadian Armed Forces.
She highlights her grandmother – Inuit Elder Jean Crane – as an inspiring example of community service. In addition to the womens’ transition house , her grandmother also helped to establish the first Canadian Red Cross chapter in Labrador at Goose Bay and provided health services as a nurse’s aid for fly-in communities and communities along the Labrador coast . Recognized as an artist, teacher, and healer blending Indigenous knowledge and nurse’s aid training, Elder Jean Crane was awarded Queen Elizabeth II’s Diamond Jubilee Medal in 2012, and an Honorary Doctorate from Memorial University in 2021 for her leadership and commitment to health, community, and education. Serenna notes that her family also has roots in search and rescue. Elder Crane’s father, Gilbert Blake famously helped lead the operation to rescue Dilllon Wallace, of the ill-fated Wallace-Hubbard expedition in 1903, and in 1905, returned with Leonidas Hubbard’s wife, Mina Hubbard along with George Elson, a Cree trapper, and others, to successfully lead and complete the mapping expedition in Labrador. The story of Serenna’s great grandfather Gilbert Blake’s rescue mission has been captured in books (https://breakwaterbooks.com/products/the-lure-of-the-labrador-wild).
At the age of 11, Serenna moved with her family to North Bay, Ontario for education opportunities and for her father’s work. She met her husband at college and soon thereafter, moved to Timmins, Ontario where they lived for almost two decades. A stay-at-home mom, she volunteered at her childrens’ schools, in many coaching and leadership roles for their sports teams, for Girl Guides, Big Sisters and Big Brothers as well as for Search and Rescue. Serenna currently volunteers on the Board of Directors for the North Bay Indigenous Hub (NBIH), which provides a wide range of programming services including traditional healing, primary care, health promotion, chronic disease management, family-focused maternal/child health care, mental wellness care, diabetes care, and a culturally integrated licensed child care facility. All of the programs are to be delivered in a culturally safe manner to the local urban Indigenous population in addition to their partner First Nations, Nipissing, Temagami and Dokis First Nations. Serenna also volunteers on the Board of Directors for the Ontario Association of Emergency Managers covering the important portfolio of Indigenous emergency management.
While volunteering for Search and Rescue, she noticed an advertisement for a position with the Canadian Red Cross, coordinating community volunteers for disaster management. She applied, got the position, and fell in love with the work. She took advantage of available training opportunities, and went back to college to study emergency management and holds a designation with the International Association of Emergency Managers as an Associate Emergency Manager, a very tough designation to achieve and to maintain. Over the next 10 ½ years with the Canadian Red Cross, she worked as the Timmins’ Disaster Management Community Service Coordinator, then as the Assistant Manager for James and Hudson Bay Coastal Offices, and subsequently as the Regional Manager of Operations for the Red Cross emergency management program, encompassing all of Northern Ontario. Working with First Nations leadership, her team established a Canadian Red Cross satellite office in Moose Cree First Nation. “It was the first Red Cross office on a reserve in Ontario. And only the second in Canada. So a lot of working with the First Nation leadership to get that rolling. Emergency Management was an area of focus for this office. office.” The Canadian Red Cross also set up programs to train community members to be Personal Support Workers (PSW). “To help the local health centre we taught the PSW course, we flew in nurses to teach the college level PSW program. This work was in partnership with Northern College. It was a huge logistical undertaking getting the mannequins up, hospital beds to practise on, and an office.I think we did that in every community on the James Bay. They now have four offices on the James Bay Coast: Moose Cree First Nation, Moosonee, Attawapiskat and Peawanuck (Weenusk) First Nation. ” These offices provide different services at each community but some examples of programs are social recreation for elders, assisted living and disaster management. Her last position with the Canadian Red Cross was as Regional Manager of Operations – Disaster Management Program for Northern Ontario from December 2018 through June 2021. She then took a position as the Emergency Management Coordinator for the Anishinabek Nation representing 39 First Nation communities. In this role she supported the 39 Anishinabek Nations as needed with emergency management matters such as training, emergency response plans, HIRA’s etc.
Gilbert Blake. Image credit: Serenna Besserer
Now in her capacity with the Ontario government, and with provincial ministries, First Nation Chiefs and their leaderships, the federal government, host municipalities and organizations, as well as supporting non government organizations (NGO’s) to support evacuations, Serenna marvels at her grandmother’s ability to pull people and resources together with little formal support. “I would just get people who wanted to help together,” her grandmother told her. Serenna added “The church groups would make lunches and dinners, people would donate clothing, the seamstresses in town would make clothing. And then she would call people and say, “Do you have room for two people in your basement”, and then place them all in the communities.”
Serenna acknowledges that her family’s Inuit heritage, history, and Traditional Knowledge is difficult to pass down to her children who grew up away from Serenna’s family, culture and traditions. Her children are very aware of their family’s heritage, but without a direct connection to that land and family in Labrador, deeper learning is challenging. Serenna and her mother still forage for natural medicine and it is important for them to pass this knowledge along to the children. “They see me, I make natural medicine, my mom forages and does natural medicines as well. So definitely it’s in their blood but they don’t get to witness it on a bigger scale; but it’s very important that they know that they are Inuit.” Serenna has been welcomed by the First Nations people and that while they have different food, culture and ceremony, she notes they share strong connections with Mother Earth – fire, land, and water.
Connecting Indigenous and non-Indigenous emergency management
Serenna has practised emergency management in both Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities and notes there are key differences. “So as an example, municipalities have certain obligations under the Emergency Management and Civil Protection act (Ontario legislation) to, every year, update their emergency plan, conduct emergency tabletop exercises, etc., and that is not a requirement for that to happen in First Nation or Indigenous communities, nor is there as much funding to do this work”. People play multiple roles in a community and the emergency manager may also be a band council member and the public works provider. People performing multiple roles have little time or funding to accomplish their tasks as they are being pulled in multiple directions. There is increasing interest in developing capacity in Indigenous emergency support services within and among Indigenous communities, something Serenna is strongly supportive of.
Serenna’s grandfather. Image credit: Serenna Besserer.
One of the challenges faced by Indigenous communities is communicating the importance of traditional hunting grounds and their role as critical infrastructure to urban or non-Indigenous people. For example, if a forest fire passes near a community and destroys the plants and animals and ecosystems that feed the community, it creates an emergency. It takes a long time for an area to recover to provide food. “The forest fire may not be in my community but that is where we fish and hunt and that’s gone now. That is emergency management in Indigenous communities, that is critical infrastructure. That feeds entire communities, if that was our traditional hunting ground and the forest fire went through it.” Similarly, the construction of roads and other infrastructure to support mining can harm a community’s ability to harvest food. First Nations have very unique needs.
Serenna’s perspective as an Inuit woman enriches and informs her work in Indigenous emergency management. For example, she is keenly aware of the cultural and spiritual needs of people evacuated from Indigenous communities. “You crave that wild meat, you crave berries and access to culture, so it’s important just to provide those resources to the people that are being evacuated. If they’re religious, maybe have contact with the church. Maybe they need somewhere to smudge or maybe elders need a quiet room – but to think of that cultural aspect during an emergency instead of just food, clothing, and registration – you need to think “the people need this” and it provides a lot of mental health and sanity, I don’t know, ease of mind, to have those cultural things.” She is aware that the stress of emergencies can amplify existing problems like domestic abuse, addiction, or mental health conditions, so meeting these needs is important as well.
With these significant challenges it may be difficult to remain hopeful, yet Serenna points to the response of Canadians to the plight of the community of Attawapiskat. In 2011, the community declared an emergency. They were facing winter with a severe shortage of housing for residents and many existing homes were in need of major repairs. This brought international attention to the situation, and Canadians sent money and items to the Red Cross who set up an emergency shelter. “Kids wrote cards of hope to other kids in school. While it took calling a state of emergency, it created awareness of what was going on in this community, and that they needed more physical infrastructure. While the rest of the world could not provide that physical infrastructure, they all sent love and that really gave me hope.”
Advice for youth
To Indigenous youth, Serenna encourages them to “Stay in school. Graduate high school. After that just follow your passion, live each day to its fullest, try not to get absorbed into bullying online, just try to be the best person that you can be. There are a lot of opportunities for youth to get involved with different initiatives. Keeping some kind of focus or direction when they’re young will lead to healthy adults.” And if youth are interested in emergency management, she suggests they “put their name out there and get involved. Teenagers now have to do 40 hours of nonprofit work to graduate high school in Ontario so if it’s emergency management work, contact your local EMS, or fire department or Chief and Council and ask what programs there are for emergency management and see if you can get involved to help with activities such as emergency preparedness week or fire prevention week . Maybe you can do a research project. Even youth can become involved with the Canadian Rangers, search and rescue, take the training – there are a lot of free resources out there and a lot of different capacities to get involved with.”
To conclude, Serenna speaks of changes that give her hope for the future. “I think that this role that I am in now, and the other First Nation Emergency Management Coordinators that are funded through Indigenous Services Canada, is giving me hope. These are brand new roles – this is bringing skills, assets, and connections to the communities. She also emphasizes the value of Nation-to-Nation support. “We’re all trained in the same job, let’s work together and make better stronger communities and a better stronger response”. Nation-to-Nation support gives me hope in emergency management. Having indigenous people trained at the community level in emergency management is the difference between a positive navigating of a crisis, and mitigating long term impacts versus a detrimental, harmful experience adding to an already existing crisis.
