Bella Bella, B.C.: The town that solved suicide

[JHan]

How remote Bella Bella emerged from its ‘dark time’ by reconnecting troubled youth with the land by Nancy Macdonald

How did the Heiltsuk overcome some of these problems, and could their journey offer insight to other remote communities similarly struggling?

During the suicide crisis, Jan Gladish’s mother moved her and her six siblings out of the community, for fear they might be swallowed up by the despair claiming so many Heiltsuk youth. Bella Bella was also undergoing massive social change back then, she adds; running water had just arrived. Like many, her family only had a few hours of electricity every day. “Too much change came too quickly,” says Gladish, who five years ago returned to Bella Bella to take the job as principal of the Bella Bella Community School after 40 years outside the community.

The start of the turnaround can be traced to Larry Jorgensen, a young, mental health bureaucrat from southern Ontario who arrived in Bella Bella by way of Alberta, where he’d helped reorganize the province’s mental health department. Jorgensen, tasked with creating programs to keep Heiltsuk kids in school, fell in love with the Heiltsuk lands, and ended up selling everything and moving there permanently, eventually marrying into the Heiltsuk.

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Jorgensen, seeing how detached Heiltsuk kids had become from their lands, began taking them out into the watershed, building cabins with them, teaching them about the vast territory, which stretches over 17,000 sq. km.
When they’d built 10 cabins, Jorgensen approached provincial justice officials, managing to convince them to allow Heiltsuk youth sentences to be served alone in these cabins, a traditional practice, rather than in detention facilities. Young offenders were forced to chop wood and fend for themselves after being dropped off all alone to serve out their sentences. (Jorgensen and their families would bring them groceries every week, and Jorgensen kept watch on them from afar.)

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For years, Heiltsuk leaders had been searching for ways to get youth back onto the territory, to teach them traditions that were being left behind. “They knew that if the kids stopped caring, they might as well give up,” says Jorgensen. By then, many had stopped going out to seaweed and salmon camps.

In the 1990s, Jorgensen and the Heiltsuk leadership formed the Qqs Projects Society. The non-profit runs Koeye Camp, a summer science and cultural camp for Heiltsuk youth in a river valley about an hour south of Bella Bella by boat. The idea behind Koeye is to take kids out of their comfort zones and into the wild, so they can better understand where they come from. (Qqs, pronounced “kucks,” is the word for “eyes,” in Hailhzaqvla, a Wakashan language.)

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Seeing youth flourishing on the land this way, Qqs and Heiltsuk leaders began formulating deals with the myriad universities and global environmental organizations conducting research on Heiltsuk lands. They created a working model: To gain access, visiting marine scientists would agree to spend time (sometimes as much as two weeks) with a group of local youth, teaching them about marine science or coastal mammals. Over time, scientists began hiring Heiltsuk youth to assist with research, teaching them to count the male-to-female ratio in crabs or collect grizzly bear hair snags to send away for genetic analysis.

Heiltsuk elders and leaders decided that on the days that youth were learning about marine life they could spend time in the evening learning the Heiltsuk songs and history of the undersea world. “We needed to get families living once again in ways that reflect the way our ancestors did,” says Kelly.

[GeoWilliam750]

1. Good read

Thank you for posting

[JHan]

3. I think there's so much to learn from this story:

How we treat with delinquent teens, and the larger story - high suicide rates among indigenous populations in Canada and in the U.S.

In this case, rooting youth to their community ( and land) made a huge difference.

[jesskirablue42]

2. in other words..

someone cared.

[JHan]

4. yes! cared and took action.