BIANCA, 17

‘C an you hear me?” Bianca is standing in her grandmother’s living room, a smartphone in her outstretched hand, trying to FaceTime with her mother.

Her mother finally appears on the screen — hours and hours away on the isolated northern Manitoba reserve where she is an addictions counsellor.

Bianca grew up at God’s River. But school on the reserve ends at Grade 10 — “We’ve been waiting years and years to get our high school built” — so she’s living with her grandmother, a 90-minute flight from home, while she finishes her diploma.

In her last year on the reserve, there were only six or eight kids in class, anyway.

“Many had babies or they would be shacked up and not going to school,” Bianca says. “I’d probably get grounded till I’m 30 if ( my parents) found I dropped out of school. Every day they’re like, ‘Are you at school? Are you in school? You’d better go to school.’ ”

At first, going to school in Winnipeg meant enrolling in an indigenous-run boarding school (Rinelle Harper was a fellow student).

But it wasn’t what Bianca expected: Two hours by bus from her family downtown, 10 p.m. curfews, mandatory chores such as mopping and cleaning the washrooms.

“(I was ready to) pack up and just go back home ’cause I couldn’t deal with the loneliness and the school.”

But then she heard about another way to keep going in Winnipeg — a spot at the Maples Collegiate public school, a 10-minute bus ride from her grandmother’s home.

Even here, as she works hard to change her own life, she is not immune to tragedy. Her 16-year-old cousin went missing in downtown Winnipeg, she says. She was last seen at the St. Regis Hotel.

“I want a better future for myself,” the girl says. She plans to go to Red River College and become a nurse.

Her mother helps motivate her.

“I feel better and less lonely when I see her face.”