“... And I hope that we will not have to bury one more innocent child – the future of our communities and the future of our nation.”
Sheila North Wilson, grand chief and representative of more than 75,000 indigenous people living across northern Canada, was in Ottawa last February to discuss the many issues plaguing First Nations communities. The memory of the conference speech she made there is now etched on her mind.
“Throughout the speech, my phone wouldn’t stop buzzing,” she recalls. “I didn’t think much of it.” But what she read next brought her to the floor.
“The text said my cousin Gabe had died – he had committed suicide that morning. I just went numb. Here I was giving a speech about the detrimental impact suicide had on our communities – and in the cruellest irony, my cousin had taken his life that morning.”
[For more of this story, written by Selena Randhawa, go to https://www.theguardian.com/in...ons-suicide-epidemic]
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