La Loche bond goes a long way
Second visit by kids rocked by tragedy inspirational as first
David Wolfman was teaching about the little things. The Indigenous chef has been teaching people how to cook at George Brown College since 1994, and had a TV show for many years. He talked about the details: types of knives, how to make mayonnaise, how to bone a chicken. “I once said on my show we made vinegar in an oak casket,” Wolfman said to 15 high school students from La Loche, Sask., as he prepared three types of sandwiches.
“People dying to eat your food?” said fellow chef Brian Morin, who was assisting along with student Emily McCann.
The kids — almost all Indigenous — were shy, the way high school kids can be, but they laughed. These were the second group brought to Toronto from La Loche by Toronto Raptors team president Masai Ujiri and award-winning CTV broadcaster Marci Ien. After a school shooting in the northern Saskatchewan town in 2016, Ien noticed a picture from a vigil in which one kid was wearing a Raptors hat. She and Ujiri visited La Loche together.
And last year they brought 10 kids to Toronto for a weekend, 10 kids who had never really left La Loche before. The group visited Ryerson, toured the city, took in a couple games, and met the prime minister at the Raptors practice facility. It’s hard to ask for one weekend to change things, but people say it did. The kids shared their experiences when they came home, and were dubbed The Toronto Ten.
“They came back different,” says Alex Mendez, the career counsellor at Dene High School in La Loche. “They came back with changed attitudes, with more motivation, not just at school. A lot of these kids, life happens to them, right? They came back with a sense of optimism that — it was always there, like, these are happy kids and it’s a happy community, but there was something different there when they came back. I don’t know if optimism was the word, but there was a light that was lit here, and they brought back with them.”
“On a small scale,” says Donna Janvier, a vice-principal and volleyball coach, “it made a huge impact on our school.”
A small thing, and a big thing. Ujiri has tried to extend his platform in as many directions as he can: his charity Giants of Africa, his support of women in the organization, the first You Can Play night for LGBT equality in NBA history. He intends to continue these trips as long as he’s in Toronto.
This group was chosen based on academic performance, and Wolfman taught them about making sandwiches, about cooking, about his own life story — he is Xaxli’p First Nations, from Lillooet, B.C., and has built his career from noth- ing — and made them lunch. Like everyone they are being exposed to on this trip, he told them about following dreams, and believing in themselves.
“The more we talk about these stories, just like our language, even if we don’t say it perfectly — I had an Ojibwe teacher and I was trying, and I said I’m sorry, it’s wrong,” said Wolfman. “And he said, ‘it’s OK. You’re trying. You’re keeping it alive.’ And that’s it: if you don’t talk about it, it just disappears.”
Later, the kids attended a reception at Ryerson with Senator Murray Sinclair, whose distinguished career included being the chair of Canada’s Indian Residential Schools Truth and Reconciliation Commission. And the kids went to the Raptors game against Utah in the evening, with another one on the schedule for Sunday before they fly home. This was the start of their weekend, and they were already wide-eyed. The buildings, the mall, their hotel. As Mendez said, some of these kids had never been on an escalator before.
“It’s a whole lot different than where I’m from,” said senior Jazz Mois, a big boy with bleached-blond hair, sleeve tattoos and a fake fur coat. “First I was kind of scared, but when I got here I was so excited. There’s so much to see, the people we get to meet, the Raptors. Everything is exciting.” He would like to go into the film industry, but wonders about the culinary industry, too.
“It was pretty inspiring, I guess,” said Cayleen Park, 17. “Wolfman, how he said he did it all on his own, and now he’s here. It’s pretty inspiring.” She wants to be a lawyer.
“I want to go to school for culinary,” said Taylen Lemaigre, a softspoken 17-year-old in Grade 12. “So maybe it’ll be here.
“(This trip is) something I want to remember for a long time,” said Emily Balaneski, 15.
“If you put the kids in the right atmosphere and the right environment surrounded by the right people, like these events, they will blossom,” said Martha Morin, the school’s administrative assistant. “So we’re hoping the same thing happens with this crew. They have the potential.”
So why did the first trip have an impact? It was one weekend, if an extraordinary one. Janvier is Dene First Nations, and she got her teaching degree at the University of Saskatchewan before returning home. She says, “It is important to see an Aboriginal person having a lot of success,” and believes that when kids can see beyond their town, beyond the triangle of Fort McMurray, Saskatoon, La Loche, it broadens their sense of possibility.
“If we do this every year? Oh, you’re just going to build that sense of hope and optimism exponentially,” said Mendez. “It’s going to grow exponentially to the community. This is the next generation of elders, right? And if they are grounded in the community with that sense of hope and optimism, that is what will permeate the community. So we’re trying to build that. To build a foundation of that within the community for future generations.”
Greg Hatch, the longtime La Loche educator who came back as interim principal after the shootings, has his own theory. He’s been at this a long time, and as he watched the kids receive bags filled with gifts from George Brown chefs he said quietly, “I think the one thing is we were just immersed into just positive energy, respect, generosity, caring, kindness, love, all of that. That’s the big takeaway. And that changes you.”
Little things. Sometimes they get big.