It takes a Nation: Cree Health Board and Mikw Chiyâm arts program team up on suicide prevention campaign
It takes a village to raise a child, according to the old adage, but a recent project saw an entire nation come together to promote hope, community and life with five spectacular posters for an anti-suicide campaign.
The campaign is the brainchild of Pauline Bobbish of the Cree Health Board Mental Health Department which created the regional suicide-prevention committee, called Maanuuhiikuu. She gathered Cree from all nine communities, including Elders, members of the Cree School Board, Eeyou Eenou Police Force, the CWEIA and Cree youth.
“We had been talking about doing an awareness campaign in Eeyou Istchee,” explained Bobbish. “My coordinator, Julianne Matoush, and I had been talking about how we were going to approach it because we didn’t want to ‘fight suicide’ – we wanted to approach it in a respectful way.”
Eventually, several individuals emerged from the group who interacted well with students on these issues, including William Saganash, who works in crime prevention regionally for the Eeyou Eenou Police Force, and screen printer Chris Robertson, the artist in residency in Chisasibi – where this project was launched.
Cree School Board high school students in the Mikw Chiyâm arts program provided the artwork for these pieces.
Mikw Chiyâm Program Director Katie Green said students were initially hesitant to participate, but once they signed on, they became more enthusiastic about the project.
“What we found was that a lot of mental health talk comes out with the students and we didn’t want to delve into that realm of trauma without being trained professionals in that domain,” Green observed. “I wanted to design preventative programs so that youth could find strength and community for support.”
What interested Green was that many students felt safe to delve into these subjects because they were with their peers. “But then there was a lot of trauma with the teacher and the artist and so it became a question of how do we navigate these questions,” she noted.
Two of the posters came out of the original pilot project in Chisasibi, while the other three were produced in Mistissini when the project was carried out there.
“What was really beautiful was the crossing over of so many different entities with this project. Having Cree Justice, the Cree School Board and the CBHSSJB all involved while also crossing intergenerationally really showed how the prevention of suicide needed to be addressed on such a holistic level. Just to see the pride on the faces of those students at the thought of their artwork being used for more than just done in class, this was meaningful,” said Green.
According to Bobbish, once all five pieces were selected for the project, they needed to write appropriate messages for them that were in line with Cree values. Bobbish approached Lucy Salt, a Cree language specialist at the Cree School Board, to discuss how they wanted to convey the message of hope and the sacredness of life.
“She took her time and came up with some very powerful messages in Cree, reflecting our culture and our language. The first thing that you see is the syllabics and then the same message in roman text and then in English. With that we added some contact information,” Bobbish recounted.
Of the five posters, all of which have been shipped out to the communities, two of them are in English with messages that came from the students. The other three are written in inland dialect for the inland communities and coastal dialect for the coastal communities, with the same messages also written out in roman text and finally in English.
“A big part of this project has been about showing that suicide is something that we all have to work on together, that it is not just up to the Cree Health Board but the whole community and everyone in it,” Bobbish concluded.