Across Canada, Indigenous men are dramatically overrepresented in the federal correctional system, and they face some of the steepest barriers to successful community reintegration upon release. Decades of investment in mainstream correctional and reintegration approaches have failed to address the root causes of incarceration or support long-term healing and community belonging.
That trajectory began to change in 2009 when the Na-Me-Res (Native Men’s Residence) launched the Sagatay program.
The Sagatay program is an Indigenous-designed and Indigenous-led transitional housing program supporting formerly incarcerated Indigenous men in Toronto. Sagatay has 26 beds; six are dedicated to Indigenous men leaving the federal prison system. The rest are community residential beds. Sagatay (meaning ‘A New Beginning’ in Anishinaabemowin) offers 26 beds of culturally rooted transitional housing, six of which are dedicated to men leaving federal custody. Sagatay offers a culturally rooted residential program that integrates traditional teachings, Elder guidance, ceremonial practices, and wraparound supports to address residents’ complex needs during this critical transition.
To better understand Sagatay’s impact, Na-Me-Res partnered with Hub Solutions, a social enterprise within the Canadian Observatory on Homelessness, to evaluate the program’s effectiveness in supporting successful reintegration outcomes for Indigenous men post-incarceration.
The evaluation provides compelling evidence in favour of expanding this model. It also raises the question: if this approach delivers better outcomes and costs less than incarceration, why isn’t it being funded to scale?
TL;DR: When reintegration is grounded in Indigenous culture, holistic healing, and community sovereignty, outcomes improve, especially for individuals assessed as “high risk” and routinely failed by mainstream systems. The Sagatay evaluation shows this approach works; the only barrier to expanding its impact is insufficient, sustained funding.
What’s Behind Sagatay’s Success?
A Wholistic Model Grounded in Indigenous Worldviews
The Sagatay program is built on the Medicine Wheel framework, supporting participants’ spiritual, mental, emotional, and physical well-being simultaneously. Rather than treating housing, life skills, health care, and culture as disconnected services, Sagatay integrates them into a unified, culturally grounded model of healing and reintegration.
Our evaluation found this integrated approach to be one of Sagatay’s greatest strengths.
Participants consistently described profound growth in self-confidence, emotional regulation, cultural identity, and practical life skills. Importantly, healing in one dimension often catalyzed progress in others, demonstrating why fragmented service models are insufficient for populations impacted by intergenerational trauma, colonial violence, and systemic exclusion.
Culture is not an Afterthought; it’s the Intervention
Mainstream reintegration models often treat culture as supplementary. Sagatay positions it correctly: at the centre of all programming. Our evaluation confirms that Indigenous men are not failing programs; rather, the programs are failing Indigenous men by ignoring what actually supports their healing.
Participants spoke powerfully about reconnecting with Indigenous identity by building relationships with Elders and knowledge keepers, accessing sweats and ceremonies, spending time on the land, drumming, language learning, and cultural teachings. Many arrived at Sagatay deeply disconnected from their culture due to the traumas of residential schools, child welfare involvement, and incarceration. Sagatay provided pathways to reclaim their identity, which also led to an increased sense of belonging and purpose.
Drumming, in particular, emerged as transformative, not only as a cultural practice but also as a source of brotherhood and community connection. The Medicine Wheel Garden, where participants spend time on and care for the land, was described as a sacred space for reflection and spiritual grounding.
This cultural foundation distinguishes Sagatay from mainstream reintegration programs, which often operate from Western risk-management frameworks. The evaluation confirms what Indigenous communities have known for generations: cultural grounding is essential to healing complex trauma, leading to the success of Indigenous reintegration.
Supporting the Highest-Need, Highest-Risk Population
Sagatay primarily serves Indigenous men assessed as high risk, a population that mainstream programs struggle to support effectively and that is least likely to succeed under rigid parole conditions. Quantitative analysis of 87 former participants between 2001 and 2025 shows that 41 to 44% successfully completed parole.
At first glance, this figure may appear lower than national parole completion averages. But such comparisons are misleading.
National benchmarks aggregate outcomes across low-, medium-, and high-risk individuals. Research consistently shows that high-risk individuals, especially Indigenous men, face significantly lower completion rates due to systemic barriers, rigid supervision conditions, and discriminatory risk assessment tools. They also do not measure:
- Cultural healing
- Community belonging
- Family reconnection
- Emotional stability
- Capacity to navigate systems without crisis
What Sagatay’s data reveal is important: the program is reaching those most likely to fail elsewhere, and supporting meaningful healing and reintegration that parole statistics alone cannot capture.
Sagatay also accepts men with Dangerous Offender designations. Healing lodges and community residential facilities are not prohibited from taking high-risk or Dangerous Offender cases, but admission decisions rest with each organization, and in practice most decline them. Sagatay is one of the few places in the country where these men can access culturally grounded support outside of custody, and the evaluation found meaningful success in supporting their reintegration.
Participants demonstrated growth in cultural identity, emotional stability, system navigation skills, family reconnection, and community belonging. These outcomes matter deeply to Indigenous communities but are invisible in correctional metrics.
Building Community and Confronting the Loneliness Gap
During program participation, Sagatay creates a powerful sense of community. Shared meals, ceremonies, life skills programming, and daily routines foster mutual support and accountability. Many participants described Sagatay as the first place they felt truly understood and supported.
However, the evaluation also identified one critical vulnerability of the program: the transition from Sagatay to independent living.
After months of structured community life, participants often experienced profound loneliness and isolation upon moving into their own housing, while at the same time, they were navigating employment, parole conditions, and other day-to-day responsibilities. This transition period carries heightened risk for relapse and instability.
Fortunately, Sagatay’s two aftercare programs, Housing Aftercare and Big-Eya-Waah-Anduyaun, provide eviction prevention, housing maintenance, and health and spiritual support, and both staff and participants named them as a key strength. What is missing is a structured way for men to come back: an alumni network, peer mentorship, and regular invitations to ceremony and community events. The evaluation recommends building exactly that.
The evaluation identified one other gap, and it was the one staff and participants raised most consistently: Sagatay does not have dedicated addictions and mental health counselling on site. This is not a weakness of the program’s abstinence-based approach. The evaluation describes Sagatay’s model as Healing First, where sobriety is not the goal in itself but the foundation that makes engagement with culture, life skills, and community possible, sustained through ceremony, Elder guidance, and shared accountability. What the men need is clinical support that works alongside that foundation, and that takes funding the program does not currently have.
Navigating Systems Designed to Exclude Indigenous Peoples
Sagatay also plays a critical role in helping participants navigate complex systems such as health care, housing, employment, education, and legal processes, which are often inaccessible or unsafe for Indigenous Peoples.
Through case management, on-site health services, and life skills programming, participants build both supported access and independence. Digital literacy training was especially valuable, though participants identified the need for more comprehensive computer skills and career development support.
Importantly, the evaluation highlights a key truth: individual skill-building alone cannot overcome systemic barriers. Discrimination, bureaucratic rigidity, and under-resourced services continue to undermine reintegration outcomes.
One of those barriers sits inside the correctional system itself. The evaluation documented a case in which a participant had been trying to get into Sagatay since 2017, only to learn that his parole officers had never submitted applications on his behalf. Staff reported that some parole officers do not understand what the program offers, and asked for more regular visits from CSC officials so that the men who could benefit most are actually referred. When the referral pathway fails, no amount of program quality can reach the men waiting on the other side of it.
Programs like Sagatay succeed not because participants “comply better,” but because they provide culturally safe navigation through systems that remain fundamentally inequitable.
The Status Quo Fails on Fiscal Grounds Alone
Beyond cultural inadequacy and poor outcomes, Canada’s reliance on custodial and institutional responses represents a poor use of public money. The Sagatay evaluation makes this case with the program’s own audited numbers rather than sector-wide estimates.
Drawing on Na-Me-Res’s 2025 audited financial statements, the evaluation calculated that delivering one night in a Sagatay bed dedicated to a man leaving federal custody costs $194.70. That figure covers housing, cultural programming, on-site health care, life skills training, and intensive case management. It is roughly 47% of the daily cost of a CSC-operated healing lodge ($413), 48% of the daily cost of a federal correctional institution ($410), and about three-quarters of the cost of an Indigenous-run healing lodge ($257). Over a year, a CSC-dedicated Sagatay bed costs about $71,000, compared with roughly $150,700 for a bed in a CSC-run healing lodge and $93,800 in an Indigenous-run one.
Sagatay sits below every custodial and residential comparator for which published figures exist, and it does so while serving a population where roughly three-quarters of the men carry a high-risk designation. The institutions that cost more are not serving harder cases. In most instances they are declining them.
The pattern of underfunding Indigenous-led alternatives is not unique to Sagatay. The Office of the Correctional Investigator has documented that CSC funds community-run Section 81 healing lodges at roughly 62 cents on the dollar relative to its own facilities, even as those community-run lodges deliver comparable programming at lower cost.
Nor is Sagatay a program struggling to justify its beds. Occupancy of the CSC-dedicated beds rose from 31.7% in the program’s first year (2012-13) to 88.8% in 2024-25, and has held at or above 78% every year since 2014-15 with a single exception. Yet CSC funding for the program in 2023-24 was roughly level with 2018-19 once inflation is accounted for. Demand has been sustained for more than a decade. Real funding has not moved.
Continuing to invest in systems that cost more, deliver less, and fail Indigenous Peoples, while holding proven community-based models like Sagatay at flat funding and six beds, is a costly policy choice.
Sagatay is a Model Ready to Scale
The program’s most pressing challenge is capacity
With only six federal corrections beds, waitlists are long, and many Indigenous men who learn about Sagatay while incarcerated are unable to access the program. Men are being turned away from this life-saving program because the current facility is at maximum capacity.
Expanding Sagatay’s capacity would require:
- Capital investment to acquire or develop property
- Stable operational funding for staffing and programming
- Indigenous governance and leadership to maintain cultural integrity
- Integrated spaces for housing, ceremony, healing, and life skills
- Small sites of no more than 30 residents, so that the relational care at the heart of the model is not lost
- Sustained aftercare resources to support long-term success
Staff and participants were unanimous that Sagatay should grow, and equally unanimous that it should not grow into a large institution. Staff put the ideal size at 20 to 25 residents per site, and the evaluation’s recommendations cap it at 30. Participants were blunt about why: a facility of 70 men would lose the family-like environment where staff know every man’s story and can see when someone is struggling. The evaluation therefore recommends expansion through additional Sagatay-style homes rather than one larger building, ideally in the same neighbourhood so residents keep access to Na-Me-Res’s on-site health services, Elders, and community relationships.
Crucial to point out is that Indigenous sovereignty over property is required for this model to work. Ownership enables the flexibility, safety, and cultural integrity necessary to serve a high-need population within Indigenous principles, rather than under restrictive institutional constraints.
The Cost of Inaction is Already Being Paid
Every man turned away from Sagatay due to a lack of beds represents a missed opportunity for healing, increased risk of instability and re-incarceration, and the continued cycle through systems proven to fail Indigenous Peoples.
Our evaluation demonstrates that Sagatay achieves stronger, more meaningful outcomes by addressing root causes, not just risk indicators. Enhancing Sagatay’s capacity, and developing more programming like it across the country, aligns with federal commitments to reconciliation, Indigenous self-determination, and justice reform, while also advancing public safety by supporting stability, healing, and community reintegration.
Sagatay shows what’s possible when culture and community are placed at the centre of reintegration. With sustained investment, this model can reach more people and be replicated in communities of all sizes across Canada.