All Our Relations: Finding the Path Forward by Tanya Talaga

Elders remind us who we are and where we need to go.

The Spirit created the universe by forming a circle from heart and mind.  The circle is a fundamental concept of Indigenous Intelligence, underscoring how everything is interrelated and life operates in a circular pattern.

The name Mississaugas derives from the Anishnaabemowin Missisakis, or "many river mouths".

In Ojibwe and Cree culture, leadership didn't mean power; it meant caring.

Before an Anishinaabe women gives birth to a child, Elder Sam Achneepineskum tells me, she sings to them.  She speaks to them when she is in a good place, and she thanks them for coming into the family's life.

In Indigenous cultures, family units go beyond the traditional nuclear family living together in one house.  Families are extensive networks of strong, connective kinship; they are often entire communities.

Profound trauma serves to isolate everyone from each other and everything they know, leaving them in a state of disrepair, feeling lost and unknowing.  The isolation, the loneliness of having no belonging, is almost like a force field that surrounds you; you can't reach out, and no one can reach in.  You can't talk to anyone or bring anyone into your world of grief, and the only time you feel safe is when you are alone, when you are completely isolated and cut off from everyone else. These feelings shatter any chance of creating healthy human attachments.

Through the Indian Act, the Canadian government controls nearly all health, education, and social services for Indigenous people.  A 2 percent funding cap put in place in 1996 as a temporary fiscal restraint has never been lifted, even though the First Nations population has increased by more than 25 percent.

Doing nothing is not an option, yet Canada is the only G8 country without a national suicide strategy.

"So far in this country, we haven't seen any movement towards recognizing Indigenous rights as human rights.  Our rights to clean drinking water, our rights to housing. They're not considered as human rights in this country".  Romeo Saganash

Seven Fallen Feathers: Racism, Death, and Hard Truths in a Northern City by Tanya Talaga

Nearly half of Ontario's Indigenous communities have a boil water advisory at any given time.

For nearly a century, the Manitoba city of Winnipeg has used an aqueduct to suck away water from the Northwestern Ontario Indigenous community of Shoal Lake 40 to provide the city of nearly 700,000 people with drinking water.  Meanwhile, the water left for the residents of Shoal Lake 40 is laced with bacteria and a boil water advisory has been in place for nearly twenty years.

The Indian Act has been described as a form of apartheid, a piece of legislation designed to control and tame the Indigenous population.  The act has historically outlined every aspect of life for an Indigenous person in Canada.

The Crown used the treaties not only to take land from the Indigenous people, but also to absorb the next generation into Canadian society.

Again, the numbers of kids who were sexually and physically abused will never be truly known.  Only now are survivors coming forward.  As of the end of January 2015, the Independent Assessment Process, created under the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement, received 37,951 abuse complaints.  By the end of 2014, 30,939 cases had been settled and $2.69 billion paid out in compensation.

In 1996, the last residential school was finally shut down. About 150,000 children had been sent to these schools, passing down the horror and trauma of the experience to their children, grandchildren, nieces, and nephews.

In traditional Indigenous culture, it was rare for people to take their own lives -- and it was especially rare for children to do so.  From 1986 to 2016, there have been more than five hundred suicides in the Nishnawbe Aski Nation territory alone.  A staggering seventy of these suicides were of children between the ages of ten and fourteen and more than two hundred were youth between the ages of fifteen and twenty.