Though Stacey Swampy has not been an active gang member in almost 17 years, he can readily list the many benefits they offer to poor youth: protection, a sense of belonging, family, and, not least, money.

Swampy grew up on a reserve in Alberta, and he, like a startling percentage of aboriginal youth in Canada, went through the foster care system. In Saskatchewan in 2008-09, aboriginal people made up just over nine per cent of the population, but aboriginal youths comprised 66 per cent of the children going through foster care.

While Alberta sat at 38 per cent in 2001, Manitoba had numbers much more similar to Saskatchewan: in 1999, 68 per cent of the children in its foster care system were aboriginal.

“A gang is to me, at the time it was, a dad, a mom and a brother,” Swampy said. “They gave me love, they gave me a sense of protection, they gave me a sense of belonging.

“You belonged to a brotherhood, you belonged to a family. Whereas most of us, where I come from, are from the reservation lifestyle, which is plagued with alcohol, drugs, unemployment, poverty.”

Because many of the families Swampy grew up around were dealing with generational alcohol and drug abuse, as well as poverty, they were not stable families for children to grow up in. In this respect, Swampy was very much typical of a prairie gang member.

Consequently, many children in this situation end up looking outside their homes for community.

“The first time that I was involved [with a gang] was with a whole bunch of my friends back home,” said Swampy, who now lives in Saskatoon. “There were two sets of brotherhoods — at that time they were called brotherhoods. I had friends from both sides and they kept asking me to join each other, each brotherhood.”

Fed up with getting into trouble with the opposing brotherhoods every time he saw his friends, Swampy started his own, which he ran for seven years. Eventually, he became disillusioned with the lifestyle.

“I couldn’t stay out of jail, and I stepped down because I had too many people challenge me, fight me. I had too many young kids trying to challenge me, trying to make a name” for themselves, he said.

Though he would later spend “around 29 months” with another gang, Swampy says he left gangs behind him more than 16 years ago, though some of the things that go with that lifestyle — using and selling drugs, for instance — have proven more difficult to abandon.

This is where an innovative Saskatoon program sees an opportunity to help.

Str8 Up began several years ago in Saskatoon. Father Andre, a Catholic priest and chaplain in the Saskatoon Correctional Centre, “basically started to recognize that people who want to get out of the gangs have a long, hard, difficult road ahead of them,” said John Howard Society District Director Shaun Dyer. “So he started to be intentional about working with them and befriending them.”

The John Howard Society, which claims as its mission the “effective, just and humane responses to the causes and consequences of crime,” is a national organization. The Saskatoon chapter has been running Str8 Up for three years.

Str8 Up requires participants to commit to spending four years in the program, which Dyer says is partially because most people leaving gangs have attendant alcohol and drug problems.

“Going to rehab, it’s 28 days and then you’re out,” Dyer said. “But the reality is that to overcome an addiction takes an awful lot longer than that.”

Both Swampy’s personal experience and what he witnessed bear out with what Dyer said about drugs and gangs going hand in hand. Though he has not been affiliated with a gang for almost 17 years, Swampy continues to deal with alcohol and drug abuse.

“I took a six-year sobriety chip from AA and NA on Sept. 30 this year,” Swampy said.

But it was a struggle to make it that far.

“Being in a gang is doing drugs, selling drugs, drinking alcohol,” Swampy said. He said it would be difficult to imagine anyone joining a gang and not developing any addictions.

Aside from helping get people into treatment, Str8 Up does everything from helping those freshly out of jail get proper identification to partnering with them in their daily lives.

“What we do is we begin to hang out with them, get to know them and walk alongside them, essentially, as they try to get out of the gang life,” Dyer explained.

One of the biggest opportunities Str8 Up represents is the chance to make amends. Swampy, who had long been away from gangs when he joined the organization a year ago, says doing presentations on his life is an important act of healing.

“What Str8 Up gives us is hope,” Swampy said of himself and other members. “They give us a chance to make a new life as a productive member of society.

“A lot of us heal from going back and talking about our life stories. Most of that is healing for us. What we do is, we go share our life stories.”

Swampy and other Str8 Up members give presentations and mentor in elementary schools in an attempt to, as Swampy put it, “give them the chance to make that choice: ‘Well, if I go down that way, I’m going to be like those guys.’ ”

Unfortunately, disadvantaged youth often see gangs as the way to escape their impoverished, sometimes lonely lives. Swampy said he was drawn to the gangs he grew up around because they offered money and family, two things he craved.

“Growing up, what I wanted was nice clothes, nice women, cars, money,” he said. “They gave me a sense of belonging because nobody messed with you; you had protection.”

Swampy’s hometown, Hobbema, is a dramatic example of how gangs have impacted the prairies. With four reserves and a population of just 15,000, the small city is notorious for gang-related violence. A Sept. 6 CBC article listed nine people who have been killed in and around Hobbema since April 2008.

In a particularly tragic case, five-year-old Ethan Yellowbird was killed in July as the result of a drive-by shooting. Just two months later, his 23-year-old aunt was stabbed at a party and died as a result.

Although Saskatoon’s crime problem is not as bad, per capita, as Hobbema’s, Str8 Up’s Dyer estimates that there are between 250 and 300 gang members in the city. If Dyer’s estimation is correct, slightly more than one per cent of the city’s population is involved in gangs.

Dyer says an especially important function of Str8 Up is to give gangs a human face.

“One of the really profound things to notice is that people who are in the gangs in Saskatoon are people,” he said. “They’re human beings, they have kids, they have families. They live a way of life that many of us could never imagine, and wouldn’t want to imagine, and don’t think is right, absolutely, but they’re human beings.”

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Graphic: Matthew Stefanson/The Sheaf