Chapter Outline Chapter 1: Wapekeka In January 2017, two twelve-year-old girls from the community of Wapekeka First Nation (population 400) committed suicide. A third would take her life five months later. All three had been part of a suicide pact that included other girls. Talaga examines the historical impact of convicted pedophile Ralph Rowe, a former Anglican minister and Boy Scout leader. Rowe, who would fly into remote First Nations, including Wapekeka, in the 1970s and '80s, was convicted many years later of more than three dozen counts of indecent assault on young boys. His legacy can be traced directly to the high rates of suicides in some First Nations. This chapter is about the history and after-effects of colonization. Lecture 2: Why Some Indigenous Communities Are Prone to High Suicide Rates, While Others Are Not Not all Indigenous communities are plagued by a series of suicides. In Canada, the suicide rates vary wildly in different regions, communities, and reserves. Some communities in northern British Columbia have sky-high suicide rates, yet those in the south do not. There is no national suicide database in Canada. Using coroners' information from each province and territory, Talaga will look at the numbers to identify the trends. Lecture 3: The Crisis in Mental Healthcare In Canada, the communities in the North are woefully underfunded. Communities are without clean, drinkable water, or nurses and doctors. Help in a time of crisis is hours away by charter aircraft. The small town of Sioux Lookout in Northwestern Ontario shoulders the consequences of a lack of a healthcare system in Indigenous communities. Sioux Lookout may have a brand new hospital and airport, but there are no psychiatrists, let along pediatric psychiatrists, to handle the onslaught of daily flights coming in from the North carrying suicidal teens. This chapter is about how the health system is failing Indigenous youth. Lecture 4: A Global Humanitarian Crisis This chapter looks at other Indigenous communities in the world with high suicide rates, such as Greenland, which has one of the highest suicide rates in the world, and Australia, where suicide was the second leading cause of death for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island kids under the age of fourteen in 2014. Lecture 5: Early Warning Signs, Prevention Strategies, and the Call for Self-Determination This chapter looks at gains made in suicide prevention, from the example of the Nunavut government building community programs with the help of the Embrace Life Council and the RCMP; to an Indigenous-led suicide prevention program in the Sto:lo community of Seabird Island, returning kids to their traditional ways of hunting and fishing; to the work being developed by global social media platforms such as Facebook's global safety department's development of artificial intelligence software to actively link those in crisis with mental health providers. But those are short-term solutions. Now, First Nations leadership in Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and Northern Ontario are pushing Ottawa to fix the long-standing inequality of healthcare services and for a change in how healthcare funding is transferred to their communities. This would involve Indigenous communities hiring their own doctors and mental health professionals and creating their own national suicide prevention strategy -- not having one created for them. Paramount is a return to land-based therapy, cultural practices lost during the residential school era, and telling truths of the pain inside communities that must be rectified in order for healing to begin. Excerpted from All Our Relations: Finding the Path Forward by Tanya Talaga All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.