New Video Targets Smoking During Pregnancy

“The rewards of smoking weren’t greater than my son,” says a young Aboriginal woman. “My son’s the biggest gift of my life.”

That’s why she refused to smoke during pregnancy and afterward, she tells filmmaker Ross Friesen in a new Health Canada-sponsored project being produced by Alcohol-Drug Education Service (A-DES).

Friesen and Project Coordinator Jay Niver visited the Tsow-Tun Le Lum Healing Centre near Nanaimo earlier this month, where more than a dozen participants, mostly Aboriginal women, were eager to share their experiences, thoughts and feelings about smoking and pregnancy.

Misuse of tobacco is a problem in First Nations communities, where rates of smoking run significantly higher than in non-native B.C. populations. The problem is especially critical during pregnancy, when the harms of tobacco can wreak damage on a woman’s baby, not only herself.

Complicating the issue is tobacco’s traditional, ritualistic place in Aboriginal cultures.

Working with Friesen and Niver at Tsow-Tun Le Lum was consultant John Raven, who lives on nearby Gabriola Island and has extensive experience with First Nations bands in his work with the B.C. Cancer Agency.

Raven arranged the shoot at Tsow-Tun Le Lum, which is a residential, substance-abuse treatment facility in Lantzville, and helped facilitate interviews with the young women, men, and elders who volunteered to participate.

The video footage is being edited at Friesen’s studio in Port Coquitlam, and additional shooting may take place early in August. The finished DVD will be distributed to Aboriginal health and friendship centres, clinics, hospitals and provincial health authorities throughout British Columbia.

The project is an outgrowth of an earlier A-DES program that focused on young adult smokers, “Ever Thought of Quitting?” An update (also funded by Health Canada) to that 9-minute DVD was recently completed and will be delivered to secondary schools across the province around the start of school this fall.