MENDING A BROKEN HEART
Struggling La Loche comes together to mourn its lost souls and begin the journey toward healing
LA LOCHE, SASK.— Deano Lemaigre, 23, holds the small hands of his 4-year-old daughter in his as she wobbles and glides along the snow-dusted rink in white leather figure skates for the first time in her life.
“Give her something different to do other than staying inside at home,” says Lemaigre, who on any other day would no doubt be a little perplexed as to why his family outing would be of interest to anyone from outside this remote northern Saskatchewan community. On this day, though, he knows why. On Jan. 22, La Loche, Sask., suffered a heartbreaking tragedy after four people were killed — including one of his cousins, 21-year-old Marie Janvier — and seven more were injured in a shooting at the local high school and a nearby home.
Like many of the people in this predominantly Dene and Métis town about a seven-hour drive north of Saskatoon, Lemaigre is reluctant to connect this tragedy, which many residents link to bullying, to its other challenges.
“I sort of hate it, because it’s my hometown, too, right? I grew up here and there (are) always bad things and good things about where you go, about every place,” he says.
The sense of community here is obvious and strong. But the suicide rate is the highest in Saskatchewan, and three times the national average. There are more people without a job than with one. The closest bank is about 100 kilometres away.
There is a shortage of mental-health resources. Alcoholism, drug addiction, poverty, sexually transmitted infections and chronic diseases abound.
These are oft-repeated assertions in news reports about this town of roughly 2,600 people and a reason politicians flew in to promise more than immediate trauma counselling and greater security for it when the high school reopens its doors.
“Young people need a sense of hope and I think a lot of mental-health issues flow from a lack of hope for people,” Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall told reporters at a news conference on Jan. 24. “We are going to be back,” Wall said. The people of La Loche recognize the opportunity in those words, but also do not want to contribute to the impression that their hometown is, as one muchdiscussed newspaper headline suggested last week, without hope.
“If we lived in a utopian community and everything was hunky-dory and this happened to us, would we be having this discussion?” says Leonard Montgrand, executive director of the La Loche Friendship Centre.
But he, too, wants something good — namely, more economic opportunity — to come from this tendency to look for root causes.
“If it doesn’t change, nothing in this community will change. We will continue down this same, destructive path,” he says.
Often, though, well-meaning ideas can become meaningless words when they do not take into account the wider context of poverty, remoteness and a colonialist history of top-down solutions.
Dr. Lettie Kgobisa, one of the doctors at the La Loche Health Centre and Hospital who rotates in and out of the community every two weeks, says she runs up against this obstacle when she counsels her patients on nutrition.
“You say, ‘Go eat green, leafy vegetables,’ ” says Kgobisa, who recalls one patient whose response to that routine advice — “I eat what’s available” — made her realize why it was not working in a community where fresh produce is not always affordable or even available.
New Democrat MP Georgina Jolibois (Desnethé—Missinippi—Churchill Riv- er), who served four terms over a dozen years as mayor of La Loche, says many of the locally developed solutions are already there.
In the boardroom of the village office, Jolibois recalls how the provincial government asked municipalities in the north to develop and submit plans for local infrastructure projects.
“Where it always ends is the lack of funding or the kind of funding coming forward,” she says.
Asked for a concrete example, Jolibois spins around in a swivel chair set up at the boardroom table in the village office and jumps up to point at a large piece of paper on the wall depicting detailed plans for an improvement project for La Loche Ave., the main drag through town.
“This has been up here for five or six years,” she says. Many people are finding their own way. Shawn Montgrand, 40, says he realized he needed to change his own path about two years ago.
“My drinking use was starting to escalate. It was causing a lot of problems at home and I was on the verge of losing my family,” says Montgrand, a former youth intervention worker at the La Loche Friendship Centre.
“Being from the North, what our elders have taught us, our teachings, was to keep our families as strong as we can, keep that circle strong,” says Montgrand, who lives on the nearby Clearwater River Dene Nation reserve.
Now, he helps support others with drinking problems by volunteering with Alcoholics Anonymous, and assists other parents by being a facilitator with a family skills training program.
“We are very humble and we are very kind people and when it comes to a tragedy like this, there are no words to describe how the community pulls together,” he says.
That closeness can provide support to those who are hurting, but it also can also mean the pain is more deeply felt.
“The trouble is, we all know each other. The whole community, to a certain extent, we know each other, so that makes it a lot harder,” says Andrew Lemaigre, 65, who says he experienced deep fear as he waited to hear whether his grandchildren, who are students at the school, and his daughter-in-law, who works there, were safe.
Leonard Montgrand, the Friendship Centre’s executive director, says he is worried about the impact the shooting will have on the town as it tries to continue on its path to improvement.
“It will create ripple effects for our community. Unfortunately, that’s one of the things that happens when a community is in crisis. You can’t move forward, because you’re busy healing yourself,” says Montgrand.