Mind Picker: All Our Relations: Finding the Path Forward

When children are born into adversity, into communities without clean water or proper plumbing with unsafe housing, parents suffering with addictions and traumas, when they have to leave their communities to access health care and education – basic rights easily obtained by other children in this country – when they do not have a parent to tuck them into bed at night or tell them that they love them, children die.

All Our Relations is a compilation of the five Massey Lectures that Tanya Talaga presented across Canada in coordination with the CBC. Focussing on the suicide crisis among the Indigenous Peoples (and particularly of the Indigenous youth) of Canada's Northern communities, this book is vital to our national conversation: eye-opening, far-ranging, and prescriptive, this is the kind of book that I wish I could put directly into every Canadian's hands and say, “Read this.”

It should come as no surprise to Canadians at this point that the Residential School System (in which Indigenous children were taken from their families and sent to mostly church-run, mostly abusive boarding schools in order to forcibly assimilate them) and the Sixties Scoop (in which Indigenous children were taken from their communities to be raised by white families in order to forcibly assimilate them) have perpetuated a cycle of trauma throughout the succeeding generations: people who have had the self-worth beaten out of them are less capable of raising children to feel their own self-worth. And while most Canadians respond to this with, “That's a terrible thing, but it happened long ago so let's call it history, offer an apology, and move forward”, Talaga insists that this history is still playing itself out. Starting with the anachronistic and paternalistic Indian Act that still governs every aspect of the relationship between the Canadian Government and who they decide count as “Indians”, there is apparent racism against First Nations in every federal department: Justice, Health Care, Housing, Family Services; with Indigenous peoples over-represented in jails, dying of preventable diseases, living in substandard and crowded conditions – often without proper sanitation or clean water – and alarmingly, Indigenous children are still taken from their families of origin at a high rate and placed into revolving foster care. The historical effects of colonization are very much alive for our Indigenous peoples: people who have been removed from their ancestral lands, who have had their language and culture forcibly erased, who have been represented in popular culture as savages (noble or otherwise), these are people who are being denied basic human rights. And when these societal pressures lead to suicide pacts (among children as young as nine), and when desperate requests to the federal government for suicide prevention funding is met with silence, there's very little difference between our current government's response and that of Duncan Campbell Scott, former head of Indian Affairs, who in 1907 refused to close the Residential Schools during a TB epidemic because of their importance as a “final solution to our Indian Problem”.

Throughout All Our Relations, Talaga gives an interesting historical overview of the fates of Indigenous peoples around the world – from the Sami of Finland, the Aborigines of Australia and the Torris Strait Islands, to the Guarani of Brazil and the thousands of First Nation communities here on “Turtle Island”. And throughout every one of these colonized country's histories, there's the theme of a denial of basic human rights; as though Indigenous people are self-evidently inferior to the settlers who came and took away everything. How can that not impact the self-worth of Indigenous children even today? At one point, Talaga met with a physician in Sioux Lookout, Ontario; a man who grapples daily with the suicide crisis to be found there:

When Mike Kirlew looks at the way health care is administered in the North, he sees a population of people who have been denied services from the very start. “The system isn't broken; it is designed to do what it is doing,” he said.

One of his patients, an Elder, once told him, “I don't want to talk about reconciliation. I want to talk about rights.” Mike couldn't agree more: “The goal of reconciliation isn't just to be friends. Civil rights legislation needs to occur here.”

It's pretty common in Canada to think of the “Indian Problem” as a financial black hole; a constant demand for funding by greedy and unaccountable chiefs that taxpayers (justifiably or not) resent. What Talaga does most brilliantly here is to reframe the issue as one of universal human rights – what we Canadians somehow feel justified to lecture the world on – and once the whole picture is assembled, it would take a very petty mind to reduce this to money. This is about lives, and there are people who are working on the path forward:

The National Inuit Suicide Prevention Strategy identifies key priority areas: creating social equity, creating cultural continuity, nurturing healthy Inuit children from birth, ensuring access to a continuum of mental wellness services, healing unresolved trauma and grief, and mobilizing Inuit knowledge for resilience and suicide prevention. What is clear is that at the heart of the suicides is a lack of the determinants of health and social equity – health care, housing, and a safe environment.

I remember that when I read The Inconvenient Indian, I was sometimes turned off by author Thomas King's (however justifiably) angry tone while outlining the history of North America's First Nations post-colonization. Talaga employs a more journalistic, but no less urgent, tone, and that made this book more accessible for me: I don't feel a burden of blame, but I do feel a burden of action. In both an opening epigraph and in the concluding words of this book, Talaga quotes Thomas King from his own Massey Lecture Series in 2003, The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative: