They couldn’t bear to watch their child suffer. Now they will have to bear her death.

A preventable death, quite possibly, with an up to 75 per cent survival rate, cancer specialists had said, if 11-year-old Makayla Sault had not discontinued chemotherapy last year.

If the First Nation parents, Ken and Sonya Sault, had not succumbed to the pleas of their daughter — a minor — to abandon the invasive treatment for acute lymphoblastic leukemia that had made her so wretchedly ill, as the drip-drip-drip of cytarabine and other cancer-killing drugs invariably does.

If they had not put their faith in traditional aboriginal medicine — its properties and therapeutic regimen never revealed, never scientifically reviewed.

If they had not, out of desperation and good intentions, taken the child instead to a “health” institute in Florida that promotes preposterous cancer-cures, emphasizing positive attitudes and a raw-plant-based organic diet — the exploitive deceitfulness that continues to separate parents in anguish from their money.

And still the Saults seem to suffer no remorse from their dooming decision, even now, after Makayla’s death from a purported stroke on Sunday, blaming the aborted chemo — nearly three months of it undergone — for this sad outcome.

“She is now safely in the arms of Jesus,” the family said, in a statement released to the Two Row Times, an Onkwehonwe paper that professes to bring a “native perspective” to the news.

“Makayla was on her way to wellness, bravely fighting toward holistic well-being after the harsh side effects that 12 weeks of chemotherapy inflicted on her body,” the statement continues. “Chemotherapy did irreversible damage to her heart and major organs.

“This was the cause of the stroke.”

So the fault in the stars was not theirs for removing Makayla from the only medical treatment known to have remarkable impact destroying the cancer cells that had taken hold in the young child’s blood and bone marrow.

I do not wish to cause these parents more sorrow. But they seem to have effectively suppressed any guilt over their daughter’s potentially avertable death.

Of course, there’s plenty blame to go around, starting with the regrettable decision by the Children’s Aid Society in Brant, Ont., that Makayla wasn’t in need of protection. In this case — as in similar dilemmas with other children whose parents refuse life-sustaining intervention, such as blood transfusions among Jehovah’s Witnesses — that would have meant taking Makayla into care, compelling her to continue chemo treatment at McMaster Children’s Hospital. Doctors there had warned the girl could relapse and possibly die if treatment was halted.

But why listen to oncologists, especially when your indigenous community is cheering in the background, making their own political bones — aboriginal cultural sovereignty — over a youngster’s failing health, to the point that one academic warned that forcing chemotherapy on Makayla would incite the wrath of First Nations across Canada.

Wrath should be directed at them now. Yet Missassaugas of the New Credit First Nation Chief Bryan LaForme sounded boastful rather than chastened when he told the Hamilton Spectator: “She was a trailblazer. She sent out a strong message that you as an individual can make your own choices.”

For the love of God, 11 years old, never to see 12.

The executive director of the Brant CAS said back in May, after closing the case: “This is a loving family. We felt their choice to use traditional medicines was within their right. We also felt that if Makayla was apprehended, the stress and other effects on that child would be terrible. For a child that is ill, they don’t need that. She needs to be with her family.”

No, she needed to be in a modern hospital, undergoing the admittedly sickening treatment of chemo intercession, with her parents at her side, nursing the girl through the ravaging side-effects. First Nation traditions and cultural imperatives cannot be allowed to trump the possibility, the likelihood, of a life restored.

Makayla was quoted by her mother saying: “Mom, it’s not the leukemia but it is the chemo that is going to kill me.”

An 11-year-old girl, permitted to set the parameters of her own treatment, with all the dubious wisdom that accrues to a person of that age. A child raised between the twin pillars of her family’s aboriginal identity and their evangelical Christian faith — her father a pastor at New Credit Fellowship.

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Little wonder Makayla claimed to have had a vision of Jesus while in hospital. “I asked him, ‘can you heal me?’ and he said I was already healed,” the girl recounted in a YouTube video. “God, the Creator, has the final say over my life.”

She was a pawn, poor thing, and her parents — their love undisputed — were parties to the whole debacle.

There’s nothing to be done for Makayla anymore. Nobody will be held to account, including those execrable purveyors of false hope at the Hippocrates Health Institute in West Palm Beach.

But there are other aboriginal children in similar dire straits who can still be saved from the harmful obtuseness of adults who surround them. That fog of cultural imperative extends right to the courtroom bench of Ontario Court Justice Gethin Edward, whose precedent-setting ruling in November established the right of another 11-year-old aboriginal child to refuse life-saving treatment in favour of traditional healing.

Edward, who was earlier instrumental in creating a special court for aboriginals in Brantford and hung a large Six Nations flag in the anteroom to the judges’ chambers when switching offices in 2011, declined to compel that girl to undergo chemotherapy for her acute lymphoblastic leukemia, despite testimony from McMaster Children’s Hospital — which had filed an emergency motion seeking apprehension of the child — that the treatment would give her a 90 to 95 per cent chance of surviving.

Edward concluded it was the mother’s “decision to pursue traditional medicine for her daughter is her aboriginal right” under Section 35 of the Constitution. “Further, such a right cannot be qualified as a right only if it is proven to work by employing the western medical paradigm. To do so would be to leave open the opportunity to perpetually erode aboriginal rights.”

That child, who can’t be identified, also was dragged off to the Hippocrates Health Institute for a three-week “Lifestyle Transformation Program.” Recently, a family friend emailed the Star claiming the girl was declared cancer-free following tests at Sick Kids, an assertion that can’t be validated because of hospital privacy protocols.

It is not unusual for chemo patients to go into remission, though the cancer will inevitably recur if treatment is discontinued.

One child has already been sacrificed on the altar of collective aboriginal rights.

That’s one child too many.

No more.