TANYA TALAGA - ALL OUR RELATIONS : finding the path to healing after indigenous genocide.

ALL OUR RELATIONS

Tanya Talaga is the acclaimed author of Seven Fallen Feathers , a multi-award winner including the RBC Taylor Prize, the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing, and the First Nation Communities READ: Young Adult/Adult Award. The book was a finalist for the Hilary Weston Writers Trust Nonfiction Prize and the BC National Award for Nonfiction. Talaga was the 2018 CBC Massey Lecturer, and is the author of the US bestseller All Our Relations . For more than twenty years she has been a journalist at the Toronto Star . Talaga is of Polish and Ojibwe descent. Her grandmother is a member of Fort William First Nation. She lives in Toronto with her two teenage children.

Scribe Publications
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1820 Edward St, Brunswick, Victoria 3056, Australia

Published by arrangement with House of Anansi Press, Toronto, Canada.

Published by Scribe 2020

Copyright Tanya Talaga and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation 2018

This book was originally published in Canada as part of the Massey Lectures Series, co-sponsored by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Massey College in the University of Toronto, and House of Anansi Press. The series was created in honour of the Right Honourable Vincent Massey, former governor-general of Canada, and was inaugurated in 1961 to provide a forum for radio where major contemporary thinkers could address important issues of our time.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publishers of this book.

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

9781912854530 (UK edition)
9781925849547 (Australian edition)
9781925693942 (ebook)

Catalogue records for this book are available from the National Library of Australia and the British Library.

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For my sister, nimisenh ,

Donna Warren

(19602015)

CONTENTS

Chapter One:

Chapter Two:

Chapter Three:

Chapter Four:

Chapter Five:

To the person who is struggling at this moment:

We can choose to continue to think of ourselves as victims and always look to justify our own fears and inadequacies and our own failings by blaming colonialism, or residential schools, or government paternalism, or other realities of our past.

We can also decide, if we choose to do so, that this is a way of thinking that is no longer useful for us as we look to the future.

These factors were certainly part of our past, but it is a past which we have struggled to overcome, and the reality is that we have overcome them.

It is no longer useful for us as individuals, as communities, and ultimately as a Nation to remain stuck in a way of thinking which does not reflect the possibilities for the future.

Matthew Coon Come

Grand Chief, Grand Council of the Crees
(19871999, 20092017)

The Peoples Inquiry , Mushkegowuk Council, 2016

But dont say in the years to come that you would have lived your life differently if only you had heard this story.

Youve heard it now.

Thomas King

The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative

CBC Massey Lectures, 2003

ONE

WE WERE ALWAYS HERE

IN THE SPRING OF 2017, I was driving down May Street in Thunder Bay, Ontario, with Ricki Strang. We had just gone on an emotional walk along the McIntyre River, which weaves around a strip mall, past a parking lot, and underneath an overpass. We were remembering his younger brother Reggie, whose body was found in the water there on November 1, 2007. Reggie was one of seven First Nations students who died while attending high school in Thunder Bay between 2000 and 2011. Ricki was only sixteen when he woke up in the river on October 26, 2007, the last night he saw his fifteen-year-old brother alive. Ricki mentioned that he had to leave the next day so he could attend a memorial service for Amy Owen, a girl back home in Poplar Hill First Nation, a remote fly-in reserve more than six hundred kilometres northwest of Thunder Bay. He quietly told me that she was really young and that she had died by suicide.

On the evening of January 8, 2017, Amy Owen ran out of her Ottawa-area group home and headed straight for the train tracks across the street. This was where the thirteen-year-old planned to die. The head of the Beacon Home remembers that in the evenings, Amy would talk about how she needed to do it. She wrote it on the walls, on pieces of paper. I need out of here was one message. I want to die was another. The night that Amy ran, staff at the seven-bed facility for teenage girls were ready and right behind her. Amy would not be successful that day.

One of Amys closest friends would be: that same night, more than one thousand kilometres away, in the remote Northern Ontario fly-in First Nations community of Wapekeka, twelve-year-old Jolynn Winter took her own life.

Two days later, on January 10, also in Wapekeka, Sandra Fox stepped out briefly to get pain relievers for the persistent discomfort in her leg. When she came home, she found that her daughter, Chantell Fox, also twelve years old and Jolynns best friend, had hanged herself.

Amy would follow suit, but not for another three months.

Seven girls in all, whose lives had intersected back home or in group homes or care facilities far away from their First Nations communities, took their lives within a year of one another.

Alayna Moose, twelve. Kanina Sue Turtle, fifteen. Jolynn Winter, twelve. Chantell Fox, twelve. Amy Owen, thirteen. Jenera Roundsky, twelve. Jeannie Grace Brown, thirteen.

Far beyond the dense, brightly lit skyscrapers and condominiums in the cities that ring the Great Lakes of southern Ontario, the people of Nishnawbe Aski Nation ( NAN ), a political organization comprising forty-nine First Nations spread out over the northern two-thirds of the province, have been trying to stop their children from dying.

The seven girls were from Poplar Hill First Nation and Wapekeka First Nation, both communities with populations of less than five hundred people. The anguish over the loss of the girls blankets NAN territory, covering the land east from the Manitoba border to James Bay, and then north to the shallow shores of Hudson Bay. The deaths of Jolynn and Chantell granddaughter of Wapekekas chief, Brennan Sainnawap hit the community so hard that nearly all the teenagers living there were put on suicide watch. Counsellors and mental health experts from the cities were flown in, and distraught children were sent on medical flights to be assessed by psychiatrists and doctors in southern hospitals, far away from home. The sadness overwhelmed the tiny, tight-knit community.

Some people have called the deaths of the seven girls a suicide pact, implying that the action was designed and formulated as a grand plan. Anna Betty Achneepineskum, former deputy grand chief of NAN , bristles at that term. She sees things differently. It was not a pact; that word covers up the root of the problem what the girls were experiencing was tremendous grief, and as a result they were struggling to cope.

Kids dont talk about suicide or talk about a pact for no reason, says Anna Betty. They are talking to each other about their trauma. And in a small community, you just cant isolate yourself from trauma.

It did not have to be this way. In the early summer of 2017, six months before his granddaughters death, Chief Sainnawap sent a note to Health Canada, the federal bureaucracy in charge of health funding for all the Indigenous people in the country, begging for assistance. The community leaders had discovered that some of their youth had made a suicide pact. The leaders were seeking $ 376,706 to immediately hire a mental health team of four workers who could deliver prevention and intervention programs and help create a healthy community environment. The request was denied. When the girls deaths made national and international news, the community later heard through the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation that Wapekekas request had come at an awkward time during the budgetary cycle there simply wasnt any funding available.