The photo was a sea of First Nations faces lit by candles, growing blurrier the further they got from the camera, but something jumped out at Marci Ien. One of the children in the forgiveness circle was wearing a Toronto Raptors hat. She knew Raptors president Masai Ujiri a little; she sent him an email. The subject line read, simply, “School Shooting.”

Within seconds, her phone rang. It was Ujiri. How could he help?

Greg Hatch only answered the phone call because he happened to be passing by the school secretary’s desk. After the school shootings in La Loche in January of last year, media descended on the north Saskatchewan town, and the town was tired of media. But Marci from CTV was calling for the principal again, and he was the acting principal. Fine.

“Best phone call I took,” says Hatch now.

Hatch was the acting principal because on Jan. 22 last year, a 17-year-old shot two younger cousins at home, and then came to school and killed a teacher and a teacher’s aide. In the aftermath the school administration went on leave; Hatch, a longtime fixture at the school, returned. The tiny town at the end of the highway was the centre of things for a few days, with politicians flying in and out. Then it stopped, and just the damage was left.

“We felt that we’ve been left on our own, and we’ve been abandoned,” says Hatch, who has been in La Loche since coming there from Dryden, Ont., as a teacher in 1976, and who coached the town’s still-legendary 1983 basketball team that won the provincial title. “Not by individuals, but by the systems, the big systems. People came, and they left.

“Yeah, we’re hurting. We had people that went through a very traumatic event. And I think, just trying to understand what trauma is, what trauma actually is. Our community has been through a lot of trauma, and it wasn’t just January 22nd. And it continued after January 22nd. I think it’s the whole trauma. Generations of trauma.”

He heard real caring in Ien’s voice — she was anchoring on CTV when the news broke, and couldn’t sleep that night — and told her, look, we have a hot breakfast program here, and funds are running low. We want to start a hot lunch program, too, because in the winter kids can’t get home for lunch. There are real needs. But if you and Ujiri want to help, come here and see what it is.

They agreed. On Nov. 28 a tiny plane descended out of a white zero-visibility sky, and Hatch was waiting at the airport. When they landed he told himself, this is real. This is real.

When Masai Ujiri came to America he played at Bismarck State College, and one of his teammates, along with his best friend Godwin Owinje, was a kid named Jesse McLaughlin from the Sioux Standing Rock Tribe, about an hour away. There were more aboriginal kids on the team, but they fell off as school started, and Jesse was the only one left. He, Masai and Godwin became buddies.

“I think it’s because being in Bismarck and being minorities, we all stuck together,” says McLaughlin, who is now a vice-chairman of the tribe, which became a national story during the recent Dakota Access Pipeline protests. “I never took as much time with other teammates. I never had that same close bond.”

Jesse would take Masai and Godwin to the rez, and his aunts would make them food: pheasant, or Indian tacos, tacos made with frybread. The elder ladies liked Masai; he could speak a lot of languages, and would remember their names. Jesse didn’t bring a lot of other teammates home — “a lot of guys didn’t like coming down, and travelling … but when I did take them around, they didn’t absorb what was around like those guys.”

“I didn’t separate white from black from natives,” says Ujiri. “All I know is those were my friends, and we were in their homes. You know what I mean?”

Ujiri would accompany his coach Buster Gilliss on his many recruiting trips to the reservations; Gilliss tried to recruit native kids every year.

“The success of some of my kids can be defined different depending on where they come from,” says Gilliss, who is back coaching at Bismarck due to budget cuts. “Sometimes it’s just getting out and getting exposed to different cultures and other kids, and learning to deal with people from other cultures and having respect for each other. Sometimes that’s the stuff that gets lost in the wins and losses of the game of basketball.”

“For them, basketball was their way out,” says McLaughlin, who would text Ujiri words that Masai taught him from Masai’s native tongue, and is coaching a junior high team in his spare time. “And for me, it was my way out.”

Hatch took Ujiri and Ien and a photographer around town, and to the school. Ujiri went from class to class; a few kids knew him, but most didn’t. He tapped kids on the shoulder in the library. He gave out Raptors hats and T-shirts that read LA LOCHE DREAMS BIG, based on his Giants of Africa foundation. He spoke at an assembly, and the kids were chatting among themselves to start, but he grabbed them. Ujiri’s seen a lot of rooms in a lot of places. He asked for a volunteer. A boy came up, whose name has been changed to protect his privacy.

“He asked him his name, and he said it,” said Ien. “Masai said, ‘We’re going to try this again. My name is Masai Ujiri, and I’m from Nigeria.’ So James says, ‘My name is James Smith, and I’m from La Loche.’

“And Masai said, ‘Listen. When you tell people where you’re from, you always have to be proud. So your shoulders need to be back, and you need to look me in the eye, so you need to try that again.’ And the kid goes, ‘MY NAME IS JAMES SMITH, AND I’M FROM LA LOCHE!’ And everyone starts clapping. And Greg said later he hadn’t seen his staff and students smile for a year, not like that.”

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In his speech, you can hear Ujiri’s voice catch. He saw some things on the visit that got to him, and that’s where you hear it. It’s towards the last couple sentences of the part where he says, “You must dream bigger than here. There’s tragedy that happens everywhere in this world. Don’t cry about it. Live, and help others. Every single one of us is chosen. And every single one of us is special. OK? You have to find it. You have to look at yourself every day and find it.”

The group flew out that night; the pilots stuck around because they figured they wouldn’t be able to get them out later if they had to fly back through the weather from Fort McMurray. There was an eight-hour wait, so Ujiri and Ien and the photographer slept in airport chairs, watched the Raptors game in the Earls at the airport, and flew a red-eye home.

“I tell you, those places, it breaks your heart,” says Ujiri. “Because I’ve been to poor places all over the world, whether it’s where Bruno (Caboclo) is from in Brazil, or the slums in Kenya, Kayole or Kibera, or some of the tougher places in Africa.

“But the one thing they have, the places I’ve been, there’s a passion for life. You can be as poor as anything but you go to these places and there’s an incredible passion for life. And that includes hope, right? Here, you look at the faces, and you wish you can create — you wish you can help them create that passion for life. Because you can see it lacking there, a little bit. And I hate to say it like that.”

When he got back, Ujiri did some reading on how Canada has treated its First Nations population, and our national shame. He thought about doing a basketball camp there. He thought about donations. He said, we’ll bring five kids to a game. No, eight. No, 10. The school chose the kids; Ujiri wanted kids who hadn’t left town.

They landed Thursday morning, accompanied by Hatch and his administrative assistant Martha Morin. They visited Ryerson University, where Imogen Coe, the dean of science, prepared tours through the old Maple Leaf Gardens, through the science labs; the teacher who was shot was from Coe’s hometown of Uxbridge.

Then they went to the Raptors practice facility, where the prime minister was waiting. Ien had emailed Justin Trudeau’s chief of staff, Katie Telford, a shot in the dark. The PMO said yes. He met privately with the students for half an hour, before their basketball drills that included Raptors coach Dwane Casey.

Afterwards, one Grade 12 kid named Jeremiah Janvier-Mercredi asked to speak to the PM, and they talked. Janvier-Mercredi wants to go into film; he is a big, funny, sharp kid. Trudeau asked him what he wanted people to know about La Loche.

“He said, we’re loud and we’re proud, but we’re dreaming big and we don’t want to disappear,” said Trudeau. “We don’t want to be forgotten.”

Long after the photo op was over, Janvier-Mercredi snuck over to see Ujiri; he asked, could I get a basketball? His little brother, who witnessed one of the shootings, was a big Kyle Lowry fan. Could he get it autographed? Ujiri fist-bumped him. “We’ll get it done,” he said. “And DeMar DeRozan?” asked Janvier-Mercredi, a big smile on his face? “We’ll get it done.” Janvier-Mercredi bounded away, then shouted back, a little abashed, still smiling, “I mean, DeRozan, that’s more for me.”

“It’s exactly what Masai says: dream big,” says Hatch. “Could we have ever dreamed this was going to happen?

Friday the kids from La Loche went to a game, and got to stand next to the anthem singer. They get to go to the game Sunday, as well. Sunday night, they will fly home. Ujiri has no illusions that he is a politician, or that he knows how to solve all the problems. Trudeau’s government made significant campaign promises regarding First Nations, especially regarding education, culture and infrastructure; some are being kept, and some are not, not yet. First Nations issues have always been politically difficult, but Trudeau says he wants to make things better.

“Well, it’s the right thing to do,” says Trudeau. “We as a country are very proud of what we’ve accomplished in showcasing the way we are, the way diversity can be a tremendous source of strength, that we are open and engaged at a time when around the world people are closing in and pointing fingers.

“Except that even as we say that, all Canadians know that we have not lived up to our image of ourselves, in regard to our relationship with indigenous peoples.”

As for Ujiri, he could lend his celebrity to almost anything if he wanted, but for some reason, it’s kids that tug at his heart.

“You know, the best way to answer it is, I really don’t know why we are chosen,” says Ujiri. “I don’t know. I don’t know how we’re pinpointed or chosen to be in these places, or have the experience that we have. But I know one thing: I know that everybody is built with something special in them. And some people find it, and some people don’t find it. And all I’m trying to get to those kids is there’s something special in them. And I hope they find it. Maybe there is one that you help, or two that you help find it. And they’ll help somebody else: they’ll help their sister or their brother.

“I have to use this voice and this platform some kind of way. La Loche is a start for me. That’s a start for me, and my hope is to visit other reserves.”

Every human path comes from other places, but starts somewhere. Maybe some will start here.

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