INVICTUS GAMES
It’s a healing journey
Tim O’Loan tells people that he comes from two wounded communities: one military, one Indigenous.
A member of the Dené Nation and a retired Canadian Forces master corporal, O’Loan experienced trauma in both communities. It was something he didn’t fully recognize until he worked for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission as it examined the legacy of Canada’s residential school system.
“Sitting there, listening to the survivors’ stories, I realized how much of their story was my story,” says O’Loan, 52, who experienced sleeplessness and exhaustion as the hearings unfolded.
He was eventually diagnosed with a severe form of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), the result of a lifetime of dislocation, racism and pain.
O’Loan, an Ottawa-based policy analyst with Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada, has been on sick leave since November.
He has spent much of the past year immersed in therapy while also pursuing healthier outlets for his trauma, and he has lost 40 pounds while training full time for the Invictus Games.
He’s now in Australia with the Canadian team and will compete in three Invictus disciplines: swimming, cycling and wheelchair rugby. The games are an international athletic competition for ill and injured soldiers and veterans.
“It has been an important part of my therapy,” O’Loan said in an interview before he left for Australia. “I’ve been cycling my rear end off.”
O’Loan joined the army at 17 — partly to escape an adoptive father who was physically and emotionally abusive — but he walked into a 1980s Canadian military that was about to engage in a series of standoffs with Mohawk communities in what came to be known as the Oka Crisis. Soldiers had no qualms, he says, about sharing their feelings about Indigenous people.
“I thought I was getting away from something,” O’Loan said. “I wasn’t. I went from the pot into the fire.”
Anxious to avoid confrontations with fellow soldiers, he endured taunting, bullying and other abuse. Sometimes, the racism was in-your-face, O’Loan says, the barroom kind, which he recreates for an interviewer: “You stay the f--away from me, you drunken chug. If you talk to me again, I’m going to punch you in the f------ face.”
O’Loan served at military bases in Cornwallis, Wainwright, Winnipeg, Petawawa and Baden, Germany, but he struggled with issues of identity and self-worth. He gained weight and seriously injured one knee during a fitness run.
At 27, O’Loan decided to leave the only career he had ever known: “I couldn’t do it anymore. I left the military physically and spiritually wounded.”
He packed away his trauma and pondered his next steps. He had promised his mother he would go back to school if he ever left the military, but he never thought he’d actually have to act on the vow. His abusive father had called him “Dim Tim;” his only non-military job had been pumping gas.
Undeterred, he enrolled as a special student at Carleton University. O’Loan studied political science and received failing grades on his first four essays. He persisted and celebrated when he received his first ‘D.’ It took him four years to earn a three-year bachelor’s degree. The diploma set him on a new path.
In 1997, O’Loan moved to the Northwest Territories, where members of his Dené family, including his grandfather, still lived. His grandfather was a trapper who had moved to Yellowknife after losing a child to tuberculosis. The family’s surviving children — including O’Loan’s birth mother — were sent to residential schools.
O’Loan spent time with his grandfather, a Dené elder and storyteller, while working for the Northwest Territories as an intergovernmental affairs adviser and, later, a land claim negotiator.
In 2006, eager for a new challenge, he moved with his wife and two young children to Ottawa to pursue a graduate degree in Canadian Studies. He finished his master’s degree in 2008 and accepted a job as a federal government policy adviser.
Two years later, he agreed to join the staff of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission on secondment. He became a special adviser to commission chair Justice Murray Sinclair and helped navigate a testy relationship with the federal government.
O’Loan spent four years with the commission, and listened to countless hours of testimony.
“I witnessed some amazing moments of heroism,” he said. “These survivors were sharing their stories with the intent of Canada learning from their uncomfortable truths.”
After a hearing in Edmonton, his birth mother told him about the abuse she had experienced in residential school and the reasons behind her decision to give him up for adoption.
The carefully constructed box where O’Loan had stored his trauma slowly crumbled under the weight of so many painful stories. “I crashed,” he said.
An administrative assistant at the commission recognized that O’Loan was struggling and she pushed him to seek help at the Wabano Centre for Aboriginal Health. “She saved my life,” he said.
He finished work at the commission and went into therapy. Three years ago, a psychiatrist diagnosed him with severe PTSD.
Veteran’s Affairs has acknowledged that O’Loan’s military career played a role in his psychological injury. Two years ago, he began to attend the operational stress injury clinic at The Royal with other veterans. A colleague told him about the Invictus Games.
“On Invictus, we’re all wounded: some have physical wounds, some PTSD, and I suspect a lot people have some combination of those things. But you’re on a team of people with similar learned experiences, so there’s no judgment. People share their stories.”
O’Loan is focused now on reconciliation: building a new relationship between Indigenous peoples and Canadian society. He was pleased to be invited to give a fullday presentation on the subject to senior members of the Canadian Forces’ personnel command. He has also co-founded an Ottawabased organization, Màmawi Together, dedicated to small, schoolbased reconciliation projects.
“I’m deep into my healing journey,” he said.