Workers from international relief agency Save the Children have recently toured Canada, focusing on poverty and despair in aboriginal reserves of remote northwestern Ontario.

Webequie First Nation, population 700, located over 500 kilometres north of Thunder Bay, has seen 24 suicides in the past twenty years.  Thirteen-year-old Krystal Shewaybick thinks about death a lot.  She misses her fifteen-year-old cousin David Shewaybick, who hung himself outdoors a year ago.

Krystal’s family moved to another reserve to get away from Webequie's misery after her cousin’s death, but returned after she began drinking.  Her father’s employment-insurance benefit is their main source of income; they own almost nothing.

Drinking, drug abuse, and violence are common on the reserve, especially among those under 25, who make up about two-thirds of the population.  About one-quarter of babies are born suffering the effects of excessive alcohol exposure in utero.

As bad as conditions are at Webequie, Mishkeegogamang First Nation is even worse.

Surrounded by an achingly beautiful landscape cut through by the headwaters of the Albany River, this sprawling Ojibwa reserve of 1,510 is 250 kilometres north of Sioux Lookout by road. Formerly known as Osnaburgh House First Nation, it is infamous for having succumbed over the years to the temptation of the liquor store in nearby Pickle Lake — a down-on-its luck former gold-mining town a half-hour's drive away. Most people don't have vehicles, but there is a thriving black market run by bootleggers who charge more than double the liquor-store price.

Alcohol's toll is steep. Children have drowned, drunken men have been stabbed, car accidents have killed some, and a young mother and a teenage boy committed suicide in the last year alone.

While accidents are blamed for about 6 per cent of deaths in Canada, they account for more than half of Mishkeegogamang's staggering death rate.

Run-ins with the law are frequent, with band members incarcerated last year for a combined 3,000 nights — an average of about two nights for every person on the band list.

The Save the Children aid workers visited as part of a large-scale project to involve charitable agencies in the struggle to improve the lives of these aboriginal peoples.

This is a terribly sad and tragic story.  Money is clearly needed to improve the living conditions of those living in the Webequie and Mishkeegogamang reserves.  Gainful, reliable employment is also needed, without which improvements will almost certainly not be sustainable.

A very important aspect of the problem, it seems to me, is spiritual.  Without solid grounds for hope and a vision of a brighter future, can long-term improvement occur?  The article does not mention any involvement by religious leaders, but I would hope that, along with government and aid agencies, the church is being called on to support this effort.

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