PART 1: THE CRISIS

Just past a bend in the road is a tidy house with a satellite dish on the roof and an empty recycling bin by the porch. It looks very much like any other on the street except for the padlocked door and boarded-up windows.

This house on Massen St. is at the centre of the suicide crises that have shattered this town over two generations. Four members of Annie Vollant’s family killed themselves here.

The house should be destroyed, says Vollant, and her lips tremble.

Her uncle hanged himself in the shed, her brother in the basement. Years later, so did her nephew and his mother.

She is desperate to save not only her own children, but everyone’s children from the latest wave of suicides breaking over Uashat and neighbouring Maliotenam.

Across the room her 3-year-old grandson Jake, oblivious to the adult talk, watches cartoons while eating Ketchup-flavoured chips. Over the TV, candles are lined up in memory of dead relatives.

“You know, nearly my whole family did that,” she says.

Vollant’s brother Charles had talked about suicide since he was a boy. The siblings’ lives were set adrift first when their grandmother passed away, then when their younger brother, barely 14, dropped dead on the street while sniffing solvents.

Vollant had begged her older brother. “I told him, ‘We’re just two in the family now. I need you. I couldn’t stand it if you did it.’ ” But he killed himself in the basement of the house on Massen St. His son and namesake was just a boy.

So when Charles Jr. stood in her doorway last February, asking for help, Vollant shivered. The young man looked so much like his father. They shared the same gaze, she says, and the same urge to flee their pain.

Charles Jr., whom everyone called Wabush, had just left his girlfriend and their baby. He said he was lost with nowhere to go — could he stay with his aunt a while?

Of course, Vollant told him, but she set some ground rules. You can’t drink here.

It felt good to be with Wabush, she says. “It was like being with my brother, and I took care of him.”

But after three weeks he disappeared, and when he showed up days later, lumbering outside because he’d been drinking, Vollant saw he was in a bad way: “He was crying. ‘I can’t go on anymore, I’m going to die.’ ”

Vollant, who agonized for years about what she might have done to save her brother, felt a fresh rush of guilt.

“I said, ‘It’d be a shame to go now, you haven’t really lived yet. You haven’t experienced real joy and happiness, you don’t know that yet. … Give it a try at least once, and then tell me what you think.”

But she saw that her words failed to reach him. “He said, ‘Like father, like son. My father was 24, me too, I’m going to leave at 24.’ And he fled.”

Later, Vollant called the house where Wabush’s maternal grandmother lived. A cousin answered the phone and said Wabush was sleeping. “I felt such relief.”

Another two days passed and Vollant’s door banged open at midnight. Her niece crashed into her bedroom crying. Come quick, she said, Wabush is hanging in the basement. He had killed himself in the same place as his father.

Vollant clears her throat: “It did me in. As if I lost my brother twice.”

Wabush’s death, on Feb. 11, was the first in the recent cluster of suicides in Uashat and Maliotenam.

Four months later, in June, Wabush’s mother, Marie-Marthe Grégoire, hanged herself from those basement rafters. That same day, a teenager killed herself in a wooded path by the water.

Then, on Aug. 13, another suicide: 30-year-old Céline Michel-Rock.

Nadeige Guanish died less than three months later.

Every suicide reopens a collective wound in the community, Vollant says. “Makes no difference whether it’s someone close or not. It gets you. It hits hard and it turns you around and sets you back.

“You say, ‘Oh no, not again, not another.’ And you feel powerless.”

Although there are no systematic studies comparing aboriginal suicide rates to those of other Canadians, government records suggest a significant imbalance. Aboriginal youth, for instance, commit suicide at six times the rate of non-Aboriginal youth, according to Health Canada.

And since most provinces don’t keep specific data on aboriginal suicide, it’s difficult to understand the scale of the problem.

Ontario lost 42 indigenous people to suicide in 2012 — more than any other year on record. This was not an anomaly; the province’s aboriginal suicide rates have risen steadily over the last decade.

Territories in Nunavut, Manitoba and Quebec are also struggling. The latest to declare a state of emergency is Cross Lake reservation north of Winnipeg, which has had six suicides and another 140 attempts since December.

But it would be wrong to assume the high rates of aboriginal suicide is evidence of a national epidemic, says University of Victoria psychologist Christopher Lalonde, whose field of expertise is First Nations suicides.

Eight years ago, he and another researcher collected data from B.C.’s 200 band councils, and they noticed that most of those First Nations communities were unaffected by suicide.

Their study, which spans a 13-year period, suggests that 90 per cent of aboriginal suicides occur in less than 10 per cent of communities.

“We went looking for what explains the difference,” Lalonde said. “Why did some communities have no youth suicide for 10 or 12 years running, while others have rates that are 10 times higher than the provincial average?”

The answer, Lalonde says, is complicated.

At least 10 men from Uashat and Maliotenam committed suicide in the mid-1990s.

That cluster affected two families in particular: Vollant’s, including two uncles and two cousins in addition to her brother Charles. It also claimed several members of Sylvie Jourdain’s family, including her brother.

Jourdain and Vollant, whose families are linked by marriage as well as suicide, worry that the worst might not be over. Their children are now talking about wanting to die.

Is it a family curse? Jourdain wonders. “Does it run in families like a disease? Like diabetes?”

A few years ago, her eldest son, then 21 and living in Montreal, tried to kill himself after losing a job. She got in her truck, drove to the city and brought him back to Uashat. “I kept him with me for six months,” she says, touching a medicine bag she wears like an amulet. “I told him, ‘I will always be here for you.’”

Two weeks after Nadeige killed herself, Jourdain was in Montreal — at a suicide prevention conference — when she got a text message from her daughter.

“I love you.”

Those words might have made other mothers smile, but they terrified Jourdain. She stepped out of the lecture hall and called her daughter, who told her, “I am tired, I’m fed up, I want to die.”

She said she already had a rope ready.

After frantically signalling to a friend to call the police in Uashat, Jourdain kept her daughter on the phone.

“While we were speaking, I heard her make a choking sound and I felt my heart skip a beat. I thought, ‘I’m witnessing my own daughter’s suicide.’ ”

But police made it to the house on time.

“They went to her room. And they saw the rope, hanging from the ceiling,” Jourdain says. “They gave it to my son who was there. And they took her to the hospital.”

Everyone worries that Nadeige’s suicide won’t be the last.

Every time he hears an ambulance siren, Jean-Claude Therrien Pinette says he can feel his heart tighten.

“You don’t want to panic but you wonder if we’ve just lost another kid,” says Therrien Pinette, who is the director of Uashat’s land protection office. “That’s how nervous we’ve become, that’s how terrifying this is.”

For front line workers in this small community, the tragedy is professional and personal.

“The suicide attempts, some of the conjugal violence, it brings you in contact with people you know,” says chief of police Raynald Malec. “Maybe it’s your cousin; maybe it’s your brother-in-law. Maybe it’s your own sister. It happens a lot.

“We don’t roll up with five cars to nab someone in a crisis and move onto the next call. It doesn’t work that way. We’re close to our people.”

Malec, 41, knows what it’s like to grapple with the aftermath of suicide. It was once his job to answer the frantic calls for help. They tended to come across the airwaves at night, when he was on patrol. He says they had a disturbing similarity.

“It was always: ‘Come quickly, he hanged himself,’ and then they would hang up,” says Malec, who’s been a cop in Uashat for nearly 20 years. “They give the address but they’re panicking. The details, you’re not getting too many. So you turn your sirens on and you roll.”

Getting out of his patrol car, Malec would think of his own brother, who killed himself in a Quebec City jail cell.

“When you walk into that basement and you cut a body loose, it doesn’t end there. There’s a family there, they get to the scene and you have to prevent them, to physically restrain them, from going to see the body. You imagine being in their place — and I know what that’s like — it tears you apart.

“People wonder why. I’m 41, it’s been almost 25 years that my brother died, and I still wonder why.”

There were other tough assignments as well, Malec says. He often found himself having to restrain or arrest someone he knew, a person under the influence of drugs or alcohol who suddenly became violent.

“It’s really sad. These were good people who just, all of a sudden, went sideways,” he says. “A few days later you’d see the person sober and they’d say, ‘I’m sorry.’ ‘It’s okay, let’s move on.’ ”

Malec says the communities were once much more violent.

In the late ’90s, Malec saw tough situations with children “that put a lump in my throat.”

Malec and his partner sometimes returned to the station from a call with five or six toddlers in tow. They’d change diapers while waiting for child protection services.

As a parent, Malec says he’s gripped by the same desire to help all of Uashat’s children. “Every time I get up and go to work I do it for one reason, I do it for the kids, for the future.”

“Intergenerational trauma” is a psychological term coined in the 1980s to define what happens when an ethnic group is traumatized over an extended period of time.

Psychologist Normand D’Aragon, co-founder of the First Nations and Inuit Suicide Prevention Association of Quebec, lists such trauma: First colonialism; then, residential schools separated First Nations children from their communities. Families are still feeling the effects today, some grappling with disappearances of their loved ones and are unable to grieve or move on, says D’Aragon.

People are carrying a world of hurt inside, he says, losses they could not heal, and some cope by turning to substance abuse, violence and suicide.

This reaction is not exclusive to First Nations, he cautions. Any group under similar “attack from the outside” would respond by internalizing the violence, he says.

Part of the healing process, he says, is searching a family tree for where its aboriginal roots were severed.

“Often, families touched by suicide are carrying a piece of something we need to remember and that we need to go back to,” D’Aragon says. “Maybe some are carrying more than their share.

“It takes courage to open up about the sex abuse in the residential schools.”

“Sometimes, it’s a suicide (or an attempt) that will bring the family to a healing,” he says. “But you cannot force healing in a family that’s been adapting to unresolved trauma for generations — it’s become a powerful process in itself.”

Among the best of antidotes for such deep wounds is storytelling, or intergenerational transmission of knowledge, he added.

Lalonde, the psychologist who specialized in First Nations suicides, agrees. Elders sharing their stories, activities and traditions with youth can be a powerful anti-suicide tool, he says, even among communities affected by typical disadvantages including poverty, high dropout rates and overcrowding.

“Some communities are better able to resist colonization, and those that can, fare better in terms of youth health and suicide,” Lalonde says.

“If you want to intervene, you don’t need a suicide prevention program parachuted in from Ottawa.”

One way forward is to turn to cultural practices. Vollant and Jourdain, for example, are part of a grassroots group tasked with reviving traditional ways of healing old wounds and restoring self-esteem. Sharing circles, sweat tents, drumming, shamanism and other practices that the Catholic Church once forbade are becoming sources of pride and healing.

Treatments such as Alcoholics Anonymous-type support groups have not helped, Jourdain says.

“What really healed me was the sweat lodge. It’s like your soul is sick and you’re in so much pain you want to die. I scream in the sweat. Sometimes, it feels like I can cry all the tears in my body, all the pain and that’s when I really started to heal.”

Jourdain also participates in grief therapy created seven years ago specifically for Uashat families. It’s been immeasurably helpful, she says, but the very first session proved revelatory about the extent of the pain, much of it buried. Even the instructor was stunned at how many said they wanted to kill themselves, she recalls, and how people cried.

“It was like opening a faucet.”

Vollant built a sweat lodge in her back yard. In her bleakest moments, she evokes her beloved grandmother, walking among the pine trees with her songs and prayers.

“It helps immensely,” Vollant says. “But it’s hard. The truth of it is that it is very hard anyway. We may feel better but there are some wounds that will never be erased.”

PART 2: A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE

On the morning of Nadeige Guanish’s funeral, Sylvie Jourdain waited outside the church in her pickup truck.

She couldn’t bring herself to walk inside and stand over the 18-year-old’s casket. Nadeige was just four years older than Jourdain’s daughter Shanet.

Many girls in the Innu territory say they looked up to Nadeige. She had piercing brown eyes and a warm smile. They say her face stood out in a crowd. She was generous, funny and resilient. And now she was gone.

When Shanet heard the news, she cried for three days.

By the time Nadeige’s funeral came around, Jourdain felt weak, sick even, but she made the effort for her daughter. It was important for Jourdain to let Shanet grieve.

So she warmed up her truck, drove to the entrance of the chapel in Maliotenam and let her daughter out. It was the fifth time in nine months the community was holding a memorial service for someone who had committed suicide.

But there was another reason that November morning was so hard for Jourdain: The weight of the past was unbearable.

As Jourdain waited for her daughter in the church parking lot, she thought of her own family’s painful history.

Jourdain, 47, lost her brother to suicide in 1995.

“The church was crowded that day, too. When he died, the church was full of young men. There was no room. You know where the priest stands? There were people standing there, about 30 of them. They all had a rose in their hand.”

Her brother’s name was Guy, but people in town knew him as “Ti-Guy-Doo.” Guy had overcome a slight speech impediment he’d developed after a childhood accident, and was jokingly referred to among Jourdain’s family as the favourite child.

When he died, Guy’s friends carried his casket from his grandmother’s house to the chapel. Jourdain says her brother had been going through a rough patch with his partner and he had spent nights sleeping on her couch, away from his only child. He was 25 years old.

The family’s malaise goes back at least one generation.

As a toddler, Jourdain’s mother contracted tuberculosis and spent two years in quarantine in a hospital near Rimouski. Then she was forced to attend a Catholic residential school in Sept-Îles.

By the time the system was finished with Jourdain’s mother, she could scarcely speak the Innu language. The words that once connected a child to her ancestors sounded foreign.

She was barely 14 when she gave birth to her daughter. By then, she’d started drinking. Child-protection services put the child up for adoption in a Quebec City orphanage.

It would be years before Jourdain was reunited with her brothers, in the care of her grandmother. When Jourdain had children and a home of her own, she took in her brothers. Guy was only two years her junior, but she became like a mother to him.

When he died, she spent days in bed, wanting to die.

“I fell,” she says. “It shattered me.” Her children had to care for themselves.

In Uashat and Maliotenam, from 1952 to 1967, every school-age child was sent to residential school.

These government-run schools were designed to “kill the Indian in the child” by separating them from their culture, language and their families. The children were also subjected to systematic abuse.

An estimated 150,000 First Nation, Métis and Inuit youth were forced to attend these institutions between 1870 and 1996, when the last residential school closed.

Local spiritual leader Jacques “Tapi” McKenzie still rages at the memory of a priest grabbing him by the scruff of his neck to shave his head. McKenzie says he remembers his classmates wetting their beds at night. He did, too. They were afraid to walk into the bathrooms at the edge of their dormitory. Sometimes, he says, priests lurked in the stalls.

Students were called savages, stripped of the survival skills that had sustained them for millennia and returned to their homes with a creeping sense of self-loathing.

Few of them knew what it meant to be loved. But they all understood a great deal about violence.

Some parents resisted the residential school system — at great cost, though.

Uashat resident Lise Jourdain (no relation to Sylvie) says the RCMP arrested and jailed her mother because she tried to hide her son rather than surrender him to the Catholic Church.

“She knew what went on in those dormitories,” Lise Jourdain said. “She tried to protect her child and they put her in a jail cell. Think about that for a minute.”

Thanks to residential schools, many of Canada’s 1.4 million aboriginal people — whether they live in urban centres or remote communities, whatever language they speak or traditions they cherish — share a common history of violence.

Yet, most aboriginal communities don’t experience suicide clusters.

Christopher Lalonde, a psychology professor at the University of Victoria, has a theory about why suicide rates are higher in some aboriginal communities than others.

He and his colleagues studied 200 aboriginal communities in British Columbia in the mid-2000s to try to determine whether this colonial violence has had an effect on the number of youth suicides. And they found a pattern.

“Some communities have been better able to resist the forces of colonialism than others, and the ones that have done that are faring better … in terms of youth suicide,” Lalonde said. “So, what we were looking for were indicators over the amount of control the communities have over their own cultural and political destiny.

“Things like, ‘Does the community control the education of the young people in the community? Do they control police and fire services in their community? What about controlling the provision of health services? Is there widespread retention of an indigenous language? Do they assume control of child-welfare services?’ ”

The more times a community could answer “yes” to one of these questions, the lower its suicide rate. The correlation was almost perfect, Lalonde said, and it suggests a strong link between colonialism and health.

But the situation in Uashat and Maliotenam doesn’t fit neatly into Lalonde’s findings. The band council oversees education, police and health services on the reserve. Some elders complain that the Innu youth are corrupting their indigenous language by adding elements of French to it, but most young people can still speak Innu.

An unusually high percentage of the territory’s children wind up in the provincially run child welfare system, but the government works closely with Uashat’s social services department on this file.

Psychologist Normand d’Aragon gives suicide prevention workshops in Uashat and other Innu communities. He sees history as an important factor in Uashat’s cycle of violence.

“Suicide is very much about not knowing where you come from,” he says. “You end up carrying something that happened in previous generations. It could not be healed, then it starts travelling from one generation to another with guilt and shame but very often with inequity of power.

“The power of the transmission of trauma, even when it’s secret — with no words — that recipe of loss without healing, is part of many suicides.”

Seen from above, Maliotenam seems less like a village than a colony carved into the dense forest.

Two roads branch off from the Esso station on Route 138 and form a series of loops that lead to the centre of town. Rows of perfectly spaced houses line each street. They converge on a chapel with a red roof and grey aluminum siding.

The words “Mani Utenam” hang to the right of a stained glass crucifix. It means “Mary’s City” in the Innu language, a tribute to the Virgin Mary. Catholicism may have been forced upon this place, but many have since found comfort in the message of love and forgiveness preached by Christ.

Just a few hundred metres beyond the church, the Moisie River gushes its icy contents into the Gulf of St-Lawrence. It’s called Mishtashipu (“Great River”), and it sustained life on the territory long before the first European settlers arrived in North America.

Even as the Indian Act was forcibly settling nomadic peoples across Canada at the turn of the 20th century, many Innu maintained a degree of independence — fishing in the summer, trapping beaver in the fall and tracking caribou during the long winter months. The Moisie was crucial to that way of life.

Maliotenam is where the Great River meets the sea, where North Atlantic salmon come to spawn in the summer and where generations of Innu children learned to spearfish. But it is also a gateway to the interior.

The Moisie slithers through canyons and into mountain ranges before settling on the Labrador highlands nearly 500 kilometres north. It’s an exhausting climb that cuts across blackfly-infested forests for days.

But eventually, the pines grow sparse, and forests dominated by wolves and black bear give way to grasslands. The caribou herds roam here. It is where a people once spent most of the year tracking, hunting and harvesting the animal.

Even in its modern incarnation — with railways and iron mines bisecting much of the landscape — southern Labrador is an area of unimaginable beauty. Surviving here requires a profound connection to the land.

That connection was severed when the federal government created Maliotenam in 1949.

By the late 1940s, as a postwar economic boom inflated the price of construction materials, Sept-Îles’ iron ore deposits had attracted prospectors from across Canada. To make way for railroads, ports and mining shafts, which would soon cut into the territory, the federal government hatched a plan to displace the Innu (but keep Sept-Îles non-aboriginal residents in place).

The government enlisted the church to strong-arm families into leaving Sept-Îles for Maliotenam — a village created 20 kilometres to the east. To convince people to move, elders say, priests suddenly refused to baptize children or bury the dead in Sept-Îles. Others were threatened with excommunication if they didn’t agree to be expropriated.

And while many did move, dozens of Innu families stood firm and held on to their homes at the centre of Sept-Îles. Evidence of their resistance lives on in the city’s checkerboard geography — some neighbourhoods belong to the Uashat First Nation while others are part of Sept-Îles.

The creation of Maliotenam displaced Innu families from Labrador and northern Quebec, where the Iron Ore Company of Canada built railroads, ports and dug shafts into the ground.

The company also recruited Innu from Uashat to act as guides in the wilderness, and those men settled in communities hundreds of kilometres from their families.

For thousands of years, the Innu thrived on the land, moving with the seasons and adapting. Now, in the space of a few years, they were boxed into 14 communities in Quebec and Labrador.

“It was like an experiment,” said Colin Samson, a University of Essex sociology professor who has written two books on the Innu. “There’s no template for doing what the Canadian government did. What they did was take a group of people who were living a relatively successful life as migratory hunters in one of the most demanding terrains on the planet and require them to live in shacks in villages.

“There are links between these acts of dispossession and the suicides, the alcohol, the abuse.”

Local folksinger Florent Vollant says being in Maliotenam is like living a form of exile.

“My home is in Labrador,” said Vollant, a Juno Award-winning songwriter. “Our home, it’s inland. From the moment we were torn from the land, they tore our pride from us, our dignity, our liberty, our humanity, our spirituality. They moved us, my family and I, so that some people could make some money.”

“My grandmother, she could survive in the elements, in the extreme cold,” he continued. “If there was a hole in the family (teepee), she knew how to fix it. She knew exactly what to do. But when she moved into a house and the wallpaper would start to come apart, she was lost; she had tears in her eyes.”

In Germaine McKenzie’s living room, a picture of her grandmother hangs above the couch. It’s printed on grainy film stock and some of the sepia tones have faded, but it is a striking image. She’s sitting in the middle of a field, wearing a plaid dress and a shawl, looking beyond the camera.

McKenzie says she draws strength from that photo.

“(My grandmother) was what you might call a midwife. She helped women give birth out in the wilderness … She used to make snowshoes out of caribou rawhide. She was incredibly strong,” says McKenzie, a 61-year-old social worker who lives in Uashat. “With each suicide, I always ask my grandmother, ‘You who have lived 90 years, give me the strength to continue, the courage, and the joie de vivre, too.’ I dream of her often.”

Coercing the Innu to settle on reserves and in cities also subjected them to incredible acts of racism.

Raynald Malec says his grandfather had to eat at a different table than the non-aboriginal sailors when he worked on a cargo ship during the 1960s.

“They even had a different set of dishes for him on the ship,” says Malec, now the chief of police in Uashat. “There was no mixing of the races.”

“When we got to Sept-Îles, my dad tried to rent an apartment and it was always, ‘No. The place just got rented.’’

Things have improved between Sept-Îles’ population and its indigenous residents, but certain tensions remain. When Uashat’s band council announced plans in 2010 to build a new neighbourhood within Sept-Îles, non-indigenous residents complained that living next to Innu families would drive down their property values.

Rosalie Jérome lost track of time after her daughter died in 2013.

“I didn’t live anymore,” says Jérome, sitting by the window in her office. “I don’t remember anything from that year. I don’t remember what happened, what I told people after I lost (Anne-Pier).”

Jérome’s husband killed himself in a jail cell about 20 years ago. She had called 911 after he beat her.

“A lot of people put that on me,” says Jérome. “They said, ‘It’s your fault he killed himself.’ Sometimes I thought, ‘Maybe they’re right.’ ”

In the days after her husband died, no one came by to visit Jérome. Her children were left in the care of friends and Jérome spent her days alone.

This was before the community learned how to talk about suicide, when it was still taboo to speak openly about feelings and grief.

When Jérome’s brother committed suicide years later, elders in the community told her not to cry, that she needed to be strong for her family.

“That’s what I did,” she says. She comforted her sister-in-law, who would kill herself on Valentine’s Day the next year, in the closet of her bedroom. Her 14-year-old son found the body two days later.

In her grief, Jérome could always turn to Anne-Pier. She was the kind of daughter who’d bring over soup when Jérome had a cold, or wait with her in the hospital when she fell ill.

But Anne-Pier had her own demons; she had been sexually assaulted as a teenager.

“It was hard for me to help her, to believe her, because I also lived through a lot of abuse as a child,” Jérome says. “I come from an alcoholic family. They drank a lot at home. Her pain brought me back to my own pain, and I wasn’t able to support her.”

In the final days of her life, Anne-Pier made the three-hour trip upriver to Pessamit in hopes of reconciling with her boyfriend. Though she’d struggled with addiction for years, Anne-Pier had been sober for months.

But the couple argued, which drove Anne-Pier back to drinking and drugs. By the time she started hitchhiking back to Uashat, Anne-Pier had been taking speed, and likely hadn’t slept in days.

At some point on her way home, Anne-Pier veered off course, wandered into the woods along Route 138, tied a rope to a low-hanging branch and strangled herself.

Police would later tell Jérome there was no sign of a struggle, that she was so tired and numb, it was as though she fell asleep in the noose. She was 24 years old.

After years of sobriety, Jérome relapsed four times in nine months, when the latest rash of suicides overtook Uashat and Maliotenam.

And when Nadeige Guanish died, Jérôme decided she could no longer go on.

“It was like my daughter killed herself again,” she said. “When I look at Nadeige, I see Anne-Pier.”

So, the week after Nadeige’s funeral, Jérome put together her own suicide plan. She would use a rope, and head into the forest, to a place where no one could stop her.

Just as she was ready to go through with it, Jérome thought about her 10-year-old grandson.

“I thought, ‘If I kill myself, he’ll say, ‘My aunt committed suicide. Granny committed suicide.’ That idea will burrow itself into his head and later maybe he’ll do it, too,’’ she says. “That’s what brought me back. I picked up the phone and called 1–866-APPELLE, and I asked for help.”

Jérome is back in therapy. She has reached out to her sons and she’s starting to feel like a mother again.

“It’s a rare kind of pain to lose your child,” she says. “It’s like dying … You learn to live with that pain; you accept that it will always be there. I pray, I talk about it and when it gets bad, I cry. I don’t suppress it anymore.”

PART 3: A NEW PATH

Annie Vollant doesn’t recall who took the first candle up the hill from the beach.

One, two, then three flickering flames in the dusk, and suddenly everyone was on their feet — women, men, children and elders — wordlessly leaving the water’s edge at the western part of Sept-Îles and climbing the knoll overlooking a crackling bonfire in a sand pit by the sea.

They lifted their candles to the darkening sky. The drums beat. Then, a woman’s voice broke the silence with a refrain of a well-known song.

She sang, Ce n’est qu’un au revoir (until we see each other again), a French version of Auld Lang Syne. Lulled by the familiar cadence, the crowd chanted along.

Vollant gazed over her at people, united in a spiritual ceremony on the spot where the Innu once camped after the winter hunt before they were displaced to the reserves of Uashat and Maliotenam, and it warmed her heart.

“All you could see were the candles. It was full beautiful,” Vollant recounted. The singing was a tribute to Canada’s murdered and disappeared indigenous women and girls.

Then, the sun dropped into the sea, closing the four-day Inniun Festival, held in early October in memory of all of those who had taken their lives on the reserve — including several of Vollant’s relatives.

It was Vollant — broken by grief after her nephew, and later his mother, hanged themselves in the basement of their home — who recruited priests, community leaders and neighbours to take part in an all-faith commemoration in an attempt to kindle some hope.

More than one in five First Nations peoples are likely to have suicidal thoughts, according to a Statistics Canada report made public in January.

But being born aboriginal is not a risk factor in itself, experts say; there are no genetic or cultural elements that predispose someone to suicide. Still, in some indigenous communities — most recently in rural Manitoba — the act of dying by one’s own hand has grown like a contagion. Each death reopens a wound, and for those left behind, the act can begin to loom ever larger as an option amid the suffering.

Vollant suggested the idea of a festival to frontline workers in her community who were looking for ways to help young people hooked on speed. A plan began to form, and she contacted women’s shelters, a family centre and local groups working against violence.

She pictured it like a drug-free Woodstock, but tailored to her community with tents, sharing circles, rituals and communal meals.

“We’d have a sacred fire lit for four days, and invite everyone,” Vollant says. “I wanted to show youth that we can find a way out through prayers. … That there’s other ways of healing.”

Vollant got her wish. So many got on board that people still talk about the festival as a triumph.

At dawn on the last day of the festival, Vollant noticed a timid young man standing apart. It was obvious he had been up all night.

He was the best friend of her nephew, Charles, the first of five in the community to commit suicide last year.

He moved closer to Vollant, cautioned that he had been drinking, and asked her to listen anyway.

He was suffering, he said, and a gathering like this one was something he had needed for a long time. “To be able to speak to you like this, I had to have a drink,” he told Vollant. “I had to talk to you. (Charles) was my best friend. I’m happy you’re doing all this. I miss him.”

He was on the verge of tears: “I miss him a lot. What you’re doing, maybe, perhaps one day, it will help.’”

Vollant took the young man in her arms. “I cried. It’s as if my nephew was speaking to me directly,” she says.

The moment was especially meaningful for Vollant because it is these young men the community is trying to reach.

“I told him, we’re doing these activities all the time, and (that) he’s more than welcome to join us whenever he wishes. Even if he’s using.”

Vollant, 42, hardly looks the part of a trailblazer, with her lank brown hair parted in the middle, dressed in a turquoise sweatshirt over stretchy jeans with a pair of Crocs on her feet. But the mother of four — who has a long history of addiction — is now among those leading the ceasefire on suicide.

“I feel privileged to be alive — to have come so far,” Vollant says.

But it was a hard slog for years. She relapsed so many times that her own family didn’t trust her sobriety — until they saw real changes. Her progress swayed them to try traditional sharing circles and sweat lodges, which are increasingly popular in the sister communities of Uashat and Maliotenam. At least one man has credited the sweat ceremonies for saving his marriage.

To the young people of Uashat, who feel trapped in the throes of addiction, she says: “I know it’s not easy. I searched and searched, and then at a certain moment, I fell into the right therapy. And I climbed out.”

They call Vollant’s street “The Bronx” of Sept-Îles.

It is a quiet, winding road flanked by bungalows and gravel driveways. It bears no resemblance to the New York City borough. But people gave Massen St. that nickname decades ago because of its illicit drug market, and it stuck.

Things still get rough on Massen St. at night. Teens crack open beers and sell speed on street corners and parking lots.

The Bronx is where Raynald Malec had a gun pulled on him one night during his time as a patrol officer. He walked into a woman’s house, responding to claims that she’d ripped off a cab driver.

There were no lights on, and before Malec could get a good look around, she emerged from the shadows with a rifle drawn.

“I thought, ‘Is this it? Is this how it ends? ’ ” said Malec, now Uashat’s chief of police. “I really thought I was going to die.” He managed to take cover behind his patrol car, but the memory haunts him.

“The Bronx” is also where six have people killed themselves since the mid-1990s.

In the midst of last year’s suicide crisis, a grassroots group began to focus on Massen St., the symbolic epicentre of pain.

It started with a street fair in September. Streamers ran from rooftops to telephone polls to a stage set up by the park on Massen St.

Cellphone videos taken that day captured the festive atmosphere: a girl in full powwow regalia steps and twirls to the sound of drum music, a teenager strums his acoustic guitar as his neighbours stomp their feet, and women compete in a tug-of-war that leaves them all covered in mud.

Annie Vollant is in some of the footage. She’s dressed in white cowboy boots, line-dancing with half a dozen of her friends. The women toe-step and clap in unison to Shania Twain’s Feel Like a Woman. Children try joining in, moving half a step behind the grown-ups.

The party went into the night, with families lighting paper lanterns and watching them disappear into the sky.

Perhaps the best part of that day was what people on the block did for Annie Vollant’s niece Carolyne — whose brother and mother killed themselves last year in the family home. The house is now an abandoned eyesore on Massen St., its windows barricaded with sheets of plywood.

Carolyne, who couldn’t bear to live in the place her family died, moved into an apartment last year. She’s asked the band council for permission to destroy her old home.

The street party raised $2,500 for Carolyne so she could buy furniture. It was a surprise gift from her neighbours at the end of the day.

But Massen St. residents didn’t stop their work after the street party. At Christmas, the group decorated a tree that towered over a sliver of a park in the middle of the street. On New Year’s Eve, they gathered people around the park and lit fireworks at midnight.

Rosalie Jérome — who just a few months earlier had been on the verge of suicide — brought her grandchildren to ring in the New Year. Photos from that night show Jérome flashing a huge smile, helping the kids into their bulky snowsuits.

There’s a growing consensus among academics that the best way to prevent death by suicide is to focus on life, with activities that improve well-being. This is what researcher Gerald McKinley calls a strength-based suicide intervention.

“If you can enhance protective factors, the things that make kids want to stay alive, you can have success,” says McKinley, who’s working on a suicide prevention strategy with the Union of Ontario Indians.

“At least, that’s what the evidence tells us. … Getting community buy-in is easier if you go in and say, ‘We’re going to work on your strengths,’ rather than, ‘We’re going to tell you what’s wrong with you.’”

The people of Uashat and Maliotenam seem to already be on this path.

A short, muscular young man dances around a punching bag, stopping only to snap his shinbone into the thing. With every kick he delivers, the sound of flesh slapping into leather rips across the basement gym.

André-Charles Ishpatao follows up with a few quick punches, rattling the chains that suspend the bag.

Over in the boxing ring, a tall, goofy-looking kid shadowboxes. He struggles not to smile as he throws flurries of looping hooks and uppercuts. Andy Shecanapish controls his long limbs with finesse. He bounces on his toes, lithe like a dancer.

They have both lost friends to suicide; they’ve seen their peers consumed by addiction and depression. And after a year marred by violence and death, both admit it’s difficult to keep the sadness from seeping into their lives.

But none of that is topmost in the gym.

“When we’re here, we’re happy. We’re not angry. If you’re angry here, you’ll be swinging at nothing, missing your target every time,” says Ishpatao, a 21-year-old from Massen St. “But if you want to be angry, you can be angry in a safe place. If you’re sad, you can be sad in a safe place.”

Both young men dropped out of high school after Grade 9, convinced the outside world didn’t want them to succeed.

Boxing is their way out.

A poster of a snarling bear, crowned with the words Nordik Fight Club, points toward the Uashat community centre’s basement. From the top of the stairs, it’s noisy with hip-hop music and ripe with perspiration. On a bustling Tuesday evening, there are trainers on punching bags, boxers duking it out in the ring, and two-dozen people, most of them women, in a fitness class practising self-defence moves on the mats.

The Fight Club was born three years ago, when Ishpatao and Shecanapish started sparring on the concrete floor of a vacant room in the community centre.

A former social worker who had cared for Shecanapish since he was a child saw the boys’ passion and solicited recurring funds from the community to establish a proper boxing gym.

Young locals with difficulties go to the club to turn their lives around. For those who pledge to stop drinking, smoking pot and using speed, the entrance fee is waived.

The Fight Club’s appeal has also put members of Sept-Îles’s non-indigenous community in touch with their aboriginal neighbours, erasing some of the prejudices on both sides.

And the club has become the showcase for Innu talent.

Last year, Shecanapish won the Silver Gloves amateur tournament in Quebec City, and he has recently signed a contract with a boxing gym in Trois-Rivières. As part of the deal, he’ll be housed and trained in the city as long as he enrols in night school to earn his high-school diploma. If he drinks alcohol or smokes, he voids the contract.

At 21 years old, he’s a bit of a late bloomer in the sport, but Shecanapish aches to be a champion. He plans to fight his way onto the Canadian Olympic team.

The seventh of 10 children, Shecanapish was placed in foster care at birth because his parents drank. He says it left him feeling abandoned.

His father, a residential-school survivor from Naskapi — a reserve near the Quebec-Labrador border — met his mother when she was 18. They had a baby almost every year. His three younger siblings were adopted.

He wipes the sweat from his eyes with the back of a sleeve, and says he’s been in more foster homes than he can remember. He’d go to his parents’ house for two or three weeks at a time, but youth protection “would come and get me.”

Some foster homes were not good, he says. “I could have been better protected.

“I was a good boy, but not happy. I was hurt that my mother left me,” he says. It’s a hurt that grew along his 6-foot-6 frame into a persistent fear of abandonment. It once affected his training. He avoided the club for two months last year after breaking up with his sweetheart. Feeling lost, he drank to forget.

But the self-abuse is over, he says, flashing a shy grin. “Today, I understand. I don’t blame my mother. She had a hard life.”

Shecanapish loves the structure and discipline of the club. He has specific goals: become a role model for young men like him, “a model of sorts for the next generation.” He’ll teach boxing. But first, he’s going to be a champion.

“I know I can do better. I know I have a future. I can be someone.”

EPILOGUE

The wind hurled ice pellets at Jean-Sébastien Vollant’s face as he stacked another log onto the bonfire.

Sporting a thin wool suit jacket and a baseball cap, Vollant seemed unfazed by the cold as he toiled away in a backyard on the Maliotenam reserve. He picked up a pitchfork and poked at the burning wood, craning his neck to check on the stones that lay beneath the fire.

The stones had started cooking just before dusk and now, hours after darkness blanketed the northern sky, Vollant could see they were glowing red. Soon, they’d be ready for the sweat lodge.

In a few moments, Vollant would shovel them from the fire, carry them into a nearby shack and rest them at the centre of a blanket tent.

But first, he greeted the 12 participants with a bear hug as they walked past the sacred fire toward the plywood cabin. The sweat lodge — known as metashan in the Innu language — is a place to give thanks to ancestors, to cry, to ask for forgiveness and take strength from the spirit world.

Vollant, who lost a brother to suicide, credits the ceremonies for helping him get sober. The pin on his lapel commemorates that milestone.

A scent of fresh pine filled the shack, decorated with soft boughs, eagle feathers, buffalo skulls and medicine bags. Participants aren’t allowed to talk about the details revealed in a meteshan. It is a private purification ceremony.

Once the flap of the tent closed, people would take turns sprinkling tobacco and sage on the stones, and searing steam would rise over traditional prayers and songs. And deep, guttural screams.

It was in the safety the pitch darkness and excruciating heat that people would let go and unburden their souls. More than one person would begin confiding timidly only to end up sobbing like a child.

Then came the counselling experience of the elders. They would take turns speaking in Innu, recounting myths of animals and spirits, and true stories of survival and strength.

This is the story of aboriginal healing, says Jacques (Tapi) McKenzie, a respected Maliotenam elder, and a residential-school survivor.

McKenzie, a recovering alcoholic, says his people suffered untold damage at the schools. “That’s what happens when you rip a child from the bosom of its family, take away all love and tenderness.”

The struggle continues, but no one is waiting to be saved, he said. Many overcame their addictions and have never looked back. They go forward one ceremony at a time.

For every indigenous person who kills themselves, there are hundreds and thousands who do not. Resilience is written in our bones, McKenzie said.

“We don’t want charity. We want the truth.”

Suicide affects many people; there is no need to feel alone. If you feel distressed, please reach out. Someone is waiting to help you.

Suicide Action hotline: Across Quebec: 1–866-APPELLE (1–866–277–3553); in Montreal: 514–723–4000

For 24-hour suicide prevention crisis centres across the country, go to the Canadian Association for Suicide Prevention.