Photo: Contributed

Following a six-day trial last fall, Joseph Camille was convicted of a single count of sexual assault

An Indigenous healer who groped and kissed a client during a 2021 treatment was taken into custody Tuesday for the start of a year-long prison sentence.

Joseph Camille, 69, was sentenced to 12 months for a charge of sexual assault he was convicted of last fall by Justice Briana Hardwick.

Camille stood with his head bowed, shaking while being sentenced. HIs friends and family held him as he sobbed, moments before he was taken into custody.

Once he's released he will be on probation for 18 months and will have to inform future female clients of his history. He will not have to register as a sex offender.

Hardwick considered a conditional sentence — a form of incarceration that is served in the community under specific conditions— but said she found a custodial sentence to be more appropriate.

"What should have been a safe and culturally sensitive environment instead (saw a woman's) personal integrity violated," Hardwick said, adding that Camille is acutely aware of the intergenerational trauma of indigenous people and that increases his moral blame worthiness in this crime.

Hardwick said that Camille was considered to many ongoing clients a respected healer on July 20, 2021, when he cupped a woman's breasts, touched her inner thigh and kissed her neck at the end of a one-on-one healing session at the Ki-Low-Na Friendship Society, where he often worked.

The woman, whose identity is protected under a publication ban, told Camille he'd not been given consent for his actions, Hardwick said.

Later, when delivering her victim impact statement, Hardwick said the woman said she suffered significant hardship, including PTSD and losing trust in her spiritual practices in the assault aftermath.

Despite being victimized, Hardwick said the woman said she hoped that Camille could make amends, not by contacting her, but instead means balancing his life to reflect "the gifts that are gifted to us."

Hardwick considered this in addition to Camille's circumstances when reaching a sentence. She said that Camille and his parents survived extended stays at the Kamloops Residential School and suffered a wide variety of abuses— physical, sexual and emotional— during his time there.

After a long period of his own healing, he turned to working with people living with grief, addiction issues and traumas from abuse and that's how he became an Indigenous healer.

Camille lives in Kamloops and was not an employee of the Ki-Low-Na Friendship Society, but worked out of the downtown Kelowna offices since 2018 and held a position of trust.

Another woman also accused Camille of sexually assaulting her during two healing sessions, but Justice Hardwick was left with some doubts about that woman's testimony, and acquitted Camille of those allegations.

At trial, Camille denied inappropriately touching either women.