Teachers observed that no issue had ever engaged the community’s young people like this—some even noticed a decline in depression and drug use. That’s a very big deal in a place that not long ago suffered from a youth suicide epidemic, the legacy of scarring colonial policies, including generations of children—the great-grandparents, grandparents, and sometimes the parents of today’s teens and young adults—being taken from their families and placed in church-run residential schools where abuse was rampant.
