All Our Relations: Finding the Path Forward

Winner, 2024 Blue Metropolis First Peoples Prize, for the whole of her work
Finalist, 2018 Nayef Al-Rodhan Prize for Global Cultural Understanding
Finalist, 2018 Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction

Tanya Talaga, the bestselling author of Seven Fallen Feathers, calls attention to an urgent global humanitarian crisis among Indigenous Peoples — youth suicide.

“Talaga’s research is meticulous and her journalistic style is crisp and uncompromising. She brings each story to life, skillfully weaving the stories of the youths’ lives, deaths, and families together with sharp analysis… The book is heartbreaking and infuriating, both an important testament to the need for change and a call to action.” — Publishers Weekly *Starred Review*

“Talaga has crafted an urgent and unshakable portrait of the horrors faced by Indigenous teens going to school in Thunder Bay, Ontario… Talaga’s incisive research and breathtaking storytelling could bring this community one step closer to the healing it deserves.” — Booklist *Starred Review*

In this urgent and incisive work, bestselling and award-winning author Tanya Talaga explores the alarming rise of youth suicide in Indigenous communities in Canada and beyond. From Northern Ontario to Nunavut, Norway, Brazil, Australia, and the United States, the Indigenous experience in colonized nations is startlingly similar and deeply disturbing. It is an experience marked by the violent separation of Peoples from the land, the separation of families, and the separation of individuals from traditional ways of life — all of which has culminated in a spiritual separation that has had an enduring impact on generations of Indigenous children. As a result of this colonial legacy, too many communities today lack access to the basic determinants of health — income, employment, education, a safe environment, health services — leading to a mental health and youth suicide crisis on a global scale. But, Talaga reminds us, First Peoples also share a history of resistance, resilience, and civil rights activism.

Based on her Atkinson Fellowship in Public Policy series, All Our Relations is a powerful call for action, justice, and a better, more equitable world for all Indigenous Peoples.

Chapter Outline

Chapter 1: Wapekeka
In January 2017, two twelve-year-old girls from the community of Wapekeka First Nation (population 400) committed suicide. A third would take her life five months later. All three had been part of a suicide pact that included other girls. Talaga examines the historical impact of convicted pedophile Ralph Rowe, a former Anglican minister and Boy Scout leader. Rowe, who would fly into remote First Nations, including Wapekeka, in the 1970s and ’80s, was convicted many years later of more than three dozen counts of indecent assault on young boys. His legacy can be traced directly to the high rates of suicides in some First Nations. This chapter is about the history and after-effects of colonization.

Lecture 2: Why Some Indigenous Communities Are Prone to High Suicide Rates, While Others Are Not
Not all Indigenous communities are plagued by a series of suicides. In Canada, the suicide rates vary wildly in different regions, communities, and reserves. Some communities in northern British Columbia have sky-high suicide rates, yet those in the south do not. There is no national suicide database in Canada. Using coroners’ information from each province and territory, Talaga will look at the numbers to identify the trends.

Lecture 3: The Crisis in Mental Healthcare
In Canada, the communities in the North are woefully underfunded. Communities are without clean, drinkable water, or nurses and doctors. Help in a time of crisis is hours away by charter aircraft. The small town of Sioux Lookout in Northwestern Ontario shoulders the consequences of a lack of a healthcare system in Indigenous communities. Sioux Lookout may have a brand new hospital and airport, but there are no psychiatrists, let along pediatric psychiatrists, to handle the onslaught of daily flights coming in from the North carrying suicidal teens. This chapter is about how the health system is failing Indigenous youth.

Lecture 4: A Global Humanitarian Crisis
This chapter looks at other Indigenous communities in the world with high suicide rates, such as Greenland, which has one of the highest suicide rates in the world, and Australia, where suicide was the second leading cause of death for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island kids under the age of fourteen in 2014.

Lecture 5: Early Warning Signs, Prevention Strategies, and the Call for Self-Determination
This chapter looks at gains made in suicide prevention, from the example of the Nunavut government building community programs with the help of the Embrace Life Council and the RCMP; to an Indigenous-led suicide prevention program in the Sto:lo community of Seabird Island, returning kids to their traditional ways of hunting and fishing; to the work being developed by global social media platforms such as Facebook’s global safety department’s development of artificial intelligence software to actively link those in crisis with mental health providers.

But those are short-term solutions. Now, First Nations leadership in Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and Northern Ontario are pushing Ottawa to fix the long-standing inequality of healthcare services and for a change in how healthcare funding is transferred to their communities. This would involve Indigenous communities hiring their own doctors and mental health professionals and creating their own national suicide prevention strategy — not having one created for them. Paramount is a return to land-based therapy, cultural practices lost during the residential school era, and telling truths of the pain inside communities that must be rectified in order for healing to begin.