Ever since she was a little girl, Shirley Haynes has wanted to be a teacher, but when she graduated from high school, her financial situation put attending university to pursue her dream out of her reach.

A dozen years later, Haynes finally got a chance to begin her post-secondary education, but she said if she’d known back  then what she knows now, she could have begun her studies straight out of high school.

There are six Aboriginal students enrolled in the Northern Medical Program (NMP) offered at the University of Northern British Columbia (UNBC), and while those numbers are far from staggering, they do put the program ahead of many other medical programs in the country when it comes to Aboriginal representation within the student population.

The University of Winnipeg (U of W) is helping to open the door to post-secondary education for inner city children and youth through its newly launched Opportunity Fund.

The goal of the Opportunity Fund is to make attending the U of W an achievable goal for   young Aboriginal students and young people from war-affected nations and refugee populations.

I was born in Farmington Hills, Michigan. My mother and grandparents were born in Canada. I have status with the Delaware First Nation at Moraviantown in Ontario. My wife Dora M. Johns, crane clan of the Ojibwa (Anishinabe), was born in Detroit and has status at the Walpole Island First Nation, Ontario. Her mother and grandfather were also born in Canada. Her grandmother was born in the United States, a member of the Saginaw Chippewa.

Your drive to the local grocery store may or may not include views of snow-capped peaks and expansive valleys dotted with the stunted pines one sees in northern climates just south of the tree line. But then again, your drive to the grocery store probably doesn’t take six hours each way.

Josée Guest, the staff Ombudsman for Indian and Northern Affairs Canada (INAC), first started raising alerts about the way the department deals with employee disability issues in her second annual report in 2003.

As the person designated to help employees struggling with disabling injuries or illnesses—as well as other matters—Guest hears from many INAC employees. As with any large employer, there are many points of friction between management and staff.

A footnote at the bottom of page 15 of Canada’s 16-page follow-up submission to the United Nations (UN) Human Rights Committee, dated Aug. 14, 2006, contains a startling admission.

Suicide amongst Aboriginal youth in Canada has been called an epidemic. The rates vary among First Nations, Métis, and Inuit communities but no matter which community you look at, the rates are higher than those in non-Aboriginal populations.

The loss of young people is devastating to many smaller communities, which sometimes experience suicide “clusters” where one youth commits suicide and then others copy them. Many community leaders are now taking action to try and prevent suicide rates from increasing.

Epidemic of suicides plagues First Nation community; a First Nation community in crisis; Aboriginal youth issues need to be addressed—these are just some of the headlines that have been making the news in the last three months.

While the rest of the world appears just to be waking up, once again, to the high suicide rates within Aboriginal communities, the communities themselves are working to find solutions to the problem.

White River First Nation’s Chief David Johnny and council are getting awfully tired of waiting for some kind of answer from the Yukon regional office of Indian and Northern Affairs Canada (INAC).