Dene High School Shooting in La Loche

There has been a shooting at Dene High School in La Louche in Saskatchewan, Canada. 

The Shooting

Four people were killed and an alleged shooter was arrested Friday, January 22, 2016, after gunfire erupted at a school in a small town in northern Saskatchewan, Chief Superintendent Maureen Levy of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police said Friday night.

Levy said authorities received a call about 1 p.m. Friday saying a weapon had been discharged at La Loche Community School in La Loche. Officers went to the school and at 1:47 p.m. arrested a suspect and seized his weapon.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau earlier addressed the nation, saying, "Obviously this is every parent's worst nightmare" and calling it "a terrible, tragic day."

Clearwater River Dene Nation Chief Teddy Clark described the shooting as devastating in an interview with The Star Phoenix.

"Both Clearwater and La Loche, a lot of people are in shock. This is something that you only see on TV most of the time," The Star Phoenix.

The Victims

Teacher Marie Janvier, 23, was confirmed as one of the victims. Her father, Kevin, is the mayor of La Loche.

“He shot two of his brothers at his home and made his way to the school,” said her father Kevin Janvier, adding that Marie was his only child. “I’m just so sad.”

Janvier’s family said they could not believe that Marie had been killed.

“Her smile will light up the room on the darkest day,” said Sandie Janvier in a Facebook message, calling her the “sweetest caring person … We lost a loving sister today.”

Four people were killed by an alleged teenaged shooter Friday in La Loche: (Clockwise from top left): Teacher's assistant Marie Janvier, 21; Teacher Adam Wood, 35; brothers Drayden Fontaine, 13 and Dayne Fontaine, 17. (Source: Facebook)

School shootings are a form of murder-suicides

In my book, The Copycat Effect, I examine the background we see in school shootings in a subsection entitled “Murders as Suicides, Suicides as Murders."

Sigmund Freud conceptualized suicide as the “murder of one’s self.”

Karl Menninger, author of Man Against Himself (1938), wrote, “Is it hard for the reader to believe that suicides are sometimes committed to forestall the committing of murder? There is no doubt of it. Nor is there any doubt of it. Nor is there any doubt that murder is sometimes committed to avert suicide."

La Loche Background

The school provides a prekindergarten to 12th grade education and houses about 900 students in two buildings, the school's Facebook page says. The town has about 2,600 people.

La Loche is a northern village in northwest Saskatchewan. It is located at the end of Highway 155 on the eastern shore of Lac La Loche [literally, lake of the lake] in Canada's boreal forest. La Loche had a population of 2,611 in 2011 and is within the Northern Saskatchewan Administration District. The Dene High School hockey team are the Lakers.

Also known as the Athapaskan peoples, the Dene Nation is a political organization that covers a large geographical area — from present day Alaska to the southern-most tip of North America. The Dene Nation has existed for over 30,000 years, with one language and many dialects: Gwich’in; Sahtu; Deh Cho; Tlicho; and, Akaitcho. 

Chipewyan ethnonym Dënesųłiné, is the language spoken by the Chipewyan people of northwestern Canada. It is categorized as part of the Northern Athabaskan language family. Dënesųłiné has nearly 12,000 speakers in Canada, mostly in Saskatchewan, Alberta, Manitoba and the Northwest Territories, but only has official status in the Northwest Territories alongside 8 other aboriginal languages: Cree, Dogrib, Gwich’in, Inuktitut, Inuinnaqtun, Inuvialuktun, North Slavey and South Slavey.

Most Chipewyan people now use Dene and Dënesųłiné to refer to themselves and their language, respectively. The Saskatchewan communities of Fond-du-Lac, Black Lake, Wollaston Lake and La Loche are a few.

The students at the school are bilingual, speaking English and Denesuline.

A Town With A Bleak History

The annual suicide rate in the Keewatin Yatthe Regional Health Authority is the highest of any health authority in Saskatchewan. The area, which includes La Loche, Buffalo Narrows, Ile a la Crosse and other communities in the province’s northwest, averaged 43.4 suicide deaths per 100,000 people between 2008 and 2012. That’s more than triple the average annual provincial rate of 12.7 suicide deaths per 100,000. The average annual suicide rates in the Saskatoon and Regina Qu’Appelle health authorities were 10.2 and 11.5 per 100,000 people respectively for the same time frame.

La Loche is more than seven hours northwest of the nearest major city, Saskatoon. It is a community with high levels of unemployment and addiction to drugs and alcohol and a reputation as a tough town. In 2011, two Mounties were forced to barricade themselves into the local health clinic when a mob attacked them after incorrectly assuming that the officers had beaten a man who had been injured in an all-terrain vehicle accident. A police truck was also burned, and an ambulance badly damaged. When La Loche appears in the provincial news media, it is usually in connection with violence or drug arrests.

But looming over the town, whose residents are predominately Dene Indians, are sporadic waves of suicides, including one last year. Eighteen people, most of them young, killed themselves from August 2005 to January 2010 in La Loche, which has a population of about 2,600....

Laurence Thompson, a sociologist in Saskatoon who has worked with the native friendship council in La Loche for several years, said that while the town’s lakeside setting in the boreal forest was spectacular, its poverty was immediately apparent. Despite being the hub for nearby communities with a combined population of about 4,000 people, La Loche has no sit-down restaurants, no banks, no movie theaters, not even a coffee shop. The nearest Tim Hortons restaurant, a Canadian staple, is about 60 miles away. ~
"La Loche, the Canadian Town Where 4 Were Killed, Has a Bleak History," New York Times

Other Indian, Native, and First Nations shootings

The Red Lake shootings (see #8 here) involved two incidents on March 21, 2005 that occurred in two places on the Red Lake Indian Reservation in Red Lake, Minnesota. Jeffrey James Weise was born to an unmarried Ojibwe couple from the Red Lake Indian Reservation in Red Lake, Minnesota. Weise killed his his grandfather and his grandfather's companion before going to the reservation high school, where he murdered seven more people and wounded five others. He then died by suicide.

A school shooting took place at Marysville-Pilchuck High School (MPHS) - 30 miles north of Seattle - on October 24, 2014. Four students were killed, and the shooter, another student, died by suicide. Jaylen Fryberg, 15, the killer, was a member of the Tulalip Tribes.

Hammer Attack: Bridge Name Game Again

On Wednesday, October 14, 2015, before 8:30 a.m., a man with a hammer attacked at least 10 individuals in the offices of the Bridge River Indian Band, near Lillooet, British Columbia. One man is reported dead and as many as 10 people are hurt, some with life-threatening injuries.

When the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) arrived they found the suspect already restrained.

"RCMP members arrested the male but were unable to transport him as he became unconscious and unresponsive," the release said.

The officers started CPR, but resuscitation efforts were unsuccessful and the man was pronounced dead at the scene, police said.

Coroner Barb McLintock confirmed one man had died in the incident but couldn't provide further details. The B.C. Coroners Service was sending a team to investigate, she added.

An emergency worker who didn't want to be named said the man apparently attacked one person with the hammer, and when others in the office went to help they were also beaten.

Because the man died while in police custody, the Independent Investigations Office has stepped in to the case to investigate.

Bridge River is a tiny aboriginal town located about nine kilometres northwest of Lillooet, in B.C.'s Interior.

The Bridge River Indian Band offices where the attack occurred.

The Bridge River Indian Band also known as the Nxwísten First Nation, the Xwisten First Nation, and the Bridge River Band, is a First Nations government located in the Central Interior-Fraser Canyon region of the Canadian province of British Columbia. It is a member of the Lillooet Tribal Council (also known as the St'at'imc Nation), which is the largest grouping of band governments of the St'at'imc people (a/k/a the Lillooet people).

The Bridge River Indian Band's offices are located on BC Highway 40 in the lower Bridge River valley, a few miles outside of Lillooet, British Columbia, which is about 150 miles northeast of Vancouver, British Columbia, on the northern end of the town of Lillooet. Its residential areas are scattered through its reserve, one of the largest in British Columbia, with a newer residential subdivision adjacent to Highway 40 near the band offices, about 15 kilometres from Lillooet. It is one of the three main band communities of "metropolitan Lillooet", the others being the Cayoose Creek Indian Band (Sekwelwas First Nation) and the T'it'kt First Nation Lillooet Band), all of which border on the District of Lillooet.

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More hammer-relaated mayhem in Quebec complete with river-related place name:
Trois-Rivieres, Quebec.

--Johnny Walsh 

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Some other "Bridges" to consider...

Bridgewater Triangle Fire

Hockomock Name Game (Native/First Nations links here too)

Another Bridgewater, Another Day of Violence

Bridgewater Plaza's WDBJ Shootings: Copycats & Cartoons

Synchrocinematic Tonto

We should always consider, through respect and heritage, the legacies that live on through synchromystic media and cinema in the blood of our own and others. The opening of The Lone Ranger is no exception.

My maternal grandmother Nellie Gray's father, John Gray, was a full-bloodied Eastern Band Cherokee. First Nations people's flows through the genes of many Americans.

Synchrocinematic Tonto

Tonto is going to be the major focus of the new Lone Ranger film because of the actor - Johnny Depp - who is playing that role. 

Tonto, of course, is a fictional character, the American Indian companion of The Lone Ranger, another one of the popular American Western characters for the Lone Ranger series, created by George W. Trendle and Fran Striker. It is a character that can have pathos, humor, strength, and irony.

In 2013, Tonto does take "center stage," as so many media reviews have noted, in this new version of The Lone Ranger. Some have said a Native (Western First Nations) American should have played the role. But, of course, in a brave new colorblind world, everyone would do best to play any fictional roles they can do well, no matter the ethnicity and racial overtones. While I may have issues with the continued bad choice of "Redskins" for a professional football team, the notion of an AfricanAmerican playing a Caucasian role (in whatever movie) or a basically Caucasian actor playing a Native (in The Lone Ranger) makes some sense to me.

The [original Lone Ranger] radio series identified Tonto as a chief's son in the Potawatomi nation. His name translates as "wild one" in his own language. For the most part, the Potawatomi did not live in the Southwestern states, and their regalia is different from that worn by Tonto. The choice to make Tonto a Potawatomi seems to come from station owner George Trendle's youth in Mullett Lake, Michigan. Located in the northern part of the Midwest, Michigan is the traditional territory of the Potawatomi, and many local institutions use Potawatomi names. Other sources indicate that Camp Kee Mo Sah Bee belonged to the father-in-law of the show's director, James Jewell. According to author David Rothel, who interviewed Jewell a few months before his death Kee Mo Sah Bee and Tonto were the only two words that Jewell remembered from those days. Tonto's name may have been inspired by the name of Tonto Basin, Arizona.
"Tonto" is also a common Spanish and Italian word meaning "stupid." Interestingly, "Kee Mo Sabe" comes pretty close to "que no sabe," roughly Spanish for "clueless one" (i.e. "tonto"). Source.

For those that understand that the differences between a Mohawk and an Apache may be as great as that between a white actor who is part Creek and a Dini, you get it. After all, the character of Tonto was portrayed most famously on television by Jay Silverheels, a Canadian Mohawk First Nations actor - not a Southwestern Amerindian.

Johnny Depp, who plays Tonto in the new film, was born in Owensboro, Kentucky, and raised in Florida, as the youngest of four children of Betty Sue Palmer (née Wells), a waitress, and John Christopher Depp, a civil engineer. Nick Barratt, a researcher for the BBC genealogical TV program Who Do You Think You Are?, stated in 2011 he had traced Depp's family name, Deppes, to 14th-century French Huguenots living in England. Depp has surmised that he is part Native American, saying in 2011, "I guess I have some Native American [in me] somewhere down the line. My great-grandmother was quite a bit of Native American, she grew up Cherokee or maybe Creek Indian. Makes sense in terms of coming from Kentucky, which is rife with Cherokee and Creek." Source.

I’d actually seen a painting by an artist named Kirby Sattler, and looked at the face of this warrior and thought: ‘That’s it’. The stripes down the face and across the eyes… it seemed to me like you could almost see the separate sections of the individual, if you know what I mean. There’s this very wise quarter, a very tortured and hurt section, an angry and rageful section, and a very understanding and unique side. I saw these parts, almost like dissecting a brain, these silvers of the individual. That makeup inspired me. ~ Johnny Depp

Depp's statements sound like the introspective transfiguration comments of Bob Dylan, detailed by Andrew Griffin and myself, recently. Maybe Bob Dylan should have played Tonto, but he didn't. He already played Alias in Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, and it seems to be Depp's time in history to play Tonto.

Let us see how this opening night at the movies unfolds!