Stephanie Wesley

Two Kashechewan First Nation members took it upon themselves to host a Suicide Workshop in their community to help spread awareness of the issue of suicide.
Jenesse Martin and Julie Wesley organized the three-day workshop, which was open to the public including surrounding communities.
The workshop itself was something Martin had wanted to do “for two to three years now.”

The first animal Kaaren Dannenmann ever trapped was a martin.
“I wasn’t very happy,” Dannenmann laughed when asked about the experience. “It’s not a pleasant thing, to kill an animal. That’s why we say this animal is our relation and you only do it because you need to do it.”
Dannenmann learned how to trap growing up with her family and extended family members.
“It wasn’t always full-time trapping, but it was part of the daily life to trap,” Dannenmann
said.

Christi Belcourt’s Walking With Our Sisters (WWOS) commemorative art installation for missing and murdered Indigenous women of Canada will be in Thunder Bay this September at the Thunder Bay Art Gallery.


WWOS is a collaborative art piece that involved 1,372 people who created and donated 1,725 pairs of moccasin tops. Each moccasin top, also known as “vamps,” represents a missing or murdered Indigenous woman. The vamps are intentionally not sewn into moccasins and left incomplete to signify the unfinished lives of those missing or murdered women.

North Spirit Lake member and resident Donna Rae and her family have been suffering from a bedbug infestation for the last four years, and the mother of six wants help dealing with the intruders.
“I am tired of being itchy every night,” Rae said. She explained that she and her daughter, as well as her newborn son, have been getting bitten the most.
“My daughter has sensitive skin,” Rae said. “She has a really bad reaction to the bites. She was put on Benadryl maybe three times already.”

Moose Cree’s Stan Wesley said his experience of hosting his third and final role as the master of ceremonies for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) Alberta National Event was “extremely emotional.”
This year’s National Event took place in Edmonton and saw roughly 30,000 people pass through its doors from March 27-30.
“I think I overheard a TRC commissioner saying there were around 3,000 registered survivors,” Wesley said. Wesley said that the amount of people who attended the event over the course of four days “exceeded expectations.”