It forced them to leave during the darkest months of year, when the sun barely reaches the horizon and people retreat into their homes. Resigning for women who curled was not an option because the team depended upon them.
“They know they need to get out,” Ms. Mair said. “When they stay home, they are unwell.”
The communities of the Northwest Territories, with a population descended from Indigenous and white settler families, stand out for their struggles with mental health, which are in many cases connected to Canada’s damaging colonial history.
This is Ms. Lennie’s familiar story. She is the daughter of an Inuvialuit woman and a white woman who immigrated to the Far North to work as a nurse. At the age of 7, Ms. Lennie’s father was sent to a residential school with the aim of “westernizing” him, taught by priests and nuns who punished him for using his native language, she said.
He learned silence there and it stayed with me as an adult.
“You didn’t talk, you didn’t cry, you didn’t have emotion,” she said. “You grew up in a system that taught that out of you.”
She can’t remember anyone talking about mental health when she was growing up, not even after her uncle, and then her cousin, died by suicide. She said that the history of mental health has gotten out of control and is now being passed on to a third generation. Children growing up with violence and addiction are paying for what happened their parents. She carries images of the dog tags that her uncle and grandmother were given, the “Eskimo IDs.”
Still, when Ms. Lennie tried living in the south, she couldn’t wait to return. She hated traffic and pollution. She was used to living near water bodies. Her husband, who is from Tuktoyaktuk, on the Arctic Ocean, didn’t belong in the city.
Source: NY Times
