Northern siblings are making hope go viral
Tunchai Redvers is on a layover in the Ottawa airport, talking about the broken lives she saw growing up in a northern aboriginal community.
The high rates of drug and alcohol addiction, the suicides, the ongoing trauma of residential school, passed down by her late grandmother to her sons and daughters.
At 15, Redvers almost became a statistic herself, ingesting a toxic amount of pills before phoning her mom.
“Me taking the pills was hitting rock bottom and was my cry for help,” Tunchai says. “I began to learn the importance of breaking the silence and reaching out for help.”
Now 22, Redvers is hoping a national non-profit she co-founded with her brother, Kelvin Redvers, will help other aboriginal youth do the same.
The pair launched We Matter last month, a website with video messages of hope from First Nations youth and leaders, as well as heartbreaking stories from community members who tried to take their own life, or thought about it.
Writer Joseph Boyden on his 16th birthday. Melanie Mark, the first woman from a First Nation to serve in the B.C. legislature, at 19. Comedian Don Burnstick at 20.
The videos have been viewed hundreds of thousands of times since the launch and the online comments have been “overwhelmingly positive,” Kelvin says.
The Redvers hope it will at least start a conversation about mental health, a subject that Tunchai never thought to bring up when she started to have suicidal thoughts at 12.
“My fight with mental health was silent so I never reached out for help,” Tunchai says on her way to the annual Canadian Association for Suicide Prevention conference in Iqaluit.
Tunchai and her brother grew up in Hay River, a town of 3,600 on the south shore of Great Slave Lake in the Northwest Territories. Their father, who is not indigenous, was working as a community development consultant in aboriginal communities throughout the territory. The family spent a lot of time on the nearby Hay River Reserve, where Tunchai’s mother taught.
“Growing up in the North was pretty different from the rest of Canada,” Tunchai says. “We’re very isolated. It was pretty tough.”
Her grandmother didn’t talk much about the residential school in Fort Resolution, where she lived for a decade, “but there was a lot of physical abuse, sexual abuse and emotional abuse in residential schools,” Tunchai says. “And no parenting.”
Her grandparents had eight children, including Tunchai’s mother, all born and raised in Fort Resolution. Drug and alcohol addiction affected generations of her family, she says.
Tunchai had problems of her own as she grew up, enduring bullying and abuse and struggling with her identity.
“I didn’t really know what it meant to be indigenous in Canada because there were no role models in the media or anyone to look up to,” she says. “You’ve seen movies. It’s always the stereotypical portrayal of native people.”
Her attempted suicide made her realize she needed help.
“I kind of broke at that point,” she says, and began to reach out to family and friends to talk about what she was going through.
Tunchai got into competitive sports, drama and dance, and in high school moved to Yellowknife, a larger town. During her years there, she broadened her social conscience, raising money for Haiti and volunteering at 16 at an orphanage in Bolivia.
In Guelph for university, Tunchai volunteered at a women’s shelter and with an after-school program in a low-income neighbourhood. She volunteered in India and, in the summer of 2014, interned with Right to Play Canada, which empowers youth through sport, in two First Nations communities in northern Ontario.
Her internship sparked a passion for working with aboriginal youth — and changed her career path.
Her intention was originally to work overseas after a degree in international development studies from the University of Guelph, but she was more interested in indigenous child welfare here.
This fall, while working on the launch of We Matter, Tunchai began a master’s in social work at Wilfrid Laurier University.
She says she has embraced her culture and learned about traditional teachings, which “shaped who I am today.”
At the recent WE Day Toronto event, Tunchai talked about the importance of reconciliation and support for indigenous youth as one of eight young people who presented with Jacob Hoggard, lead singer of Hedley.
“The suicide rates in indigenous youth and indigenous people have always been high, but in the past year it’s been outrageous,” Tunchai says, citing the 100 suicide attempts in an eight-month period in Attawapiskat First Nation in northern Ontario, home to about 2,000 people.
In October, six girls between 10 and 14 killed themselves in northern Saskatchewan.
“It’s really overwhelming and tiring to keep hearing about young people . . . taking their life,” she says. “We decided we want to do something about it.”
Making sense through film The recent suicide of the sixth young girl in northern Saskatchewan has motivated Kelvin to figure out how to get We Matter videos into remote communities. The website launched in early October, but Internet access is unreliable in parts of the North.
“We’re going to try to mobilize as quick as we can to deliver some of these videos into that region because it’s so hard hit,” Kelvin says over the phone from Vancouver, where he lives.
That day, he was preoccupied with finding more people to tell their stories, as well as a sponsor that will pay for the Redvers siblings to deliver the videos on USB sticks personally to areas without reliable Internet access.
During his visit to Ulukhaktok, N.W.T., students in three classrooms all put up their hands when asked if the recorded messages would be valuable.
“Every time we talked to a youth, every time we went to a community, we would get further emboldened that this is the right thing for these places,” Kelvin says. The need was also clear to him, he says. In Vancouver, all 10 kids at an early workshop eventually revealed they had been part of a suicide pact or had attempted suicide. And in Attawapiskat, 18year-old males who looked a bit tough “welled up while watching some of the videos because it resonated so clearly,” Kelvin says. “In these communities it landed, it connected with them.”
The 29-year-old left a promising career in TV journalism and documentary work eight months ago, at about the time of the Attawapiskat crisis, to launch what would be called We Matter.
Kelvin got the idea after talking about indigenous problems and online suicideprevention sites to a co-worker.
His colleague mentioned It Gets Better, a U.S. organization with more than 50,000 videos of support uploaded for LGBT youth.
He called Tunchai and asked her what she thought.
“It was a really strong compulsion that this can make a difference,” he says.
Kelvin grew up in Hay River and lived there until he went to university in B.C.
He lost two young cousins in Alberta, 14 and 16, in a drunk-driving accident. A 15-year-old cousin was killed when a semi hit him while he was drinking and walking by the side of a road in Saskatchewan.
“So many lost, so many cousins or uncles or aunties early — a lot of uncles actually — because of things like drinking and sort of a rough lifestyle,” he says.
Kelvin says growing up he faced bullying and, like his sister, he didn’t see aboriginal role models in film and television.
“And so in a way — this happens for many kids — it sort of distances them from who they are,” Kelvin says of his peers. “When they get distanced from who they are, or they’re ashamed of who they are, it causes a lot of internal problems.”
But, he says he had a connection to his culture after learning how to hunt as well as eating wild game at home. And he found an outlet in sports and later in filmmaking soon after he picked up his first camera at 15.
Until then, he says, “I felt like there was a world inside my head that I didn’t know how to get out — that felt weird. Then everything made sense to me and I started to make films.”
He made “little comedies” in high school with his friends. His father noticed his interest and helped him get a government small business loan and at 16, Kelvin launched his own company, Crosscurrent Productions.
At first, he worked with his dad, filming interviews with elders or environmental initiatives as part of his father’s community development job. Then, he branched out and did work for local businesses and First Nations.
His filmmaking not only took him out of his head, but out of his world.
Kelvin went to Long Island, N.Y., when he was 18 to accept an award from the Hamptons International Film Festival for Sheep, a film about fads and popularity. “It gave me a lot of confidence that I could follow my dreams.”
He majored in film production at Simon Fraser University in B.C. and after graduation was hired by CTV to work on First Story, an indigenous current affairs show.
A number of his stories won awards, including one about an oil spill near the Dog River First Nation in B.C. that wasn’t remediated for years while caribou licked the salt in the crude oil.
In 2012, a satirical musical he made about the power imbalance between police officers and First Nations called Dancing Cop premiered at TIFF.
“The purpose of making the musical was to make it so it didn’t feel heavy and overwhelming, but to make it digestible,” he says of the subject matter.
In April last year, he left his job with Great Pacific TV, where he worked as a documentary researcher and field producer, to launch We Matter and do some of his own writing.
For nearly six months, he and Tunchai pressed forward with no real funding, although some companies, including a Toronto law firm, offered to do pro bono work. And in Vancouver, an accounting company donated expertise, as did Hot Soup Media, which created logos and the We Matter site. The Inuvialuit Regional Corp. and the Nishnawbe Aski Nation covered travel to the Northwest Territories and Attawapiskat.
The It Gets Better organizers were “the first supporters” and a big help, Kelvin says.
It wasn’t until the end of September, just weeks before the launch date, that RBC signed on as a founding partner, which has taken them to this point, he says.
“This entire project was built on people who wanted to help.”