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Lafond-Barr, 55, has lived the heartache while working as an addictions and family counsellor for others struggling to do the same. She and people such as Assembly of First Nations Chief Perry Bellegarde say Canada is failing its indigenous communities by seeing men as mere perpetrators while not considering how a colonial legacy and systemic racism make them just as vulnerable to violence as indigenous women.

For many, the violence caused and experienced by indigenous men is a taboo subject.

“Communities have to start talking about the abuses: physical, mental, emotional, spiritual,” Bellegarde said in a recent phone interview. “Those are learned behaviours and intergenerational effects of the residential schools. The whole system of being a healthy family has broken down. People have been guilted and shamed. People don’t want to talk about it.”

Said Lafond-Barr, “We still make it tough for men to feel something or admit they feel something.

“They’ve had abuse in their life, too, but big boys don’t cry, eh? My 95-year-old dad still hasn’t put his arms around me and said, ‘I love you, Grace.’ ” Indigenous people in Canada are three times as likely to be victims of crime compared to non-indigenous people and the homicide rate for indigenous people is seven times that of non-aboriginal people – 8.8 compared to 1.3 victims per 100,000 people, according to Statistics Canada.

We still make it tough for men to feel something or admit they feel something

RCMP say 1,017 indigenous women were murdered between 1980 and 2012; a recently published article in Aboriginal Policy Studies suggested the number of murdered indigenous men in that period could be more than 2,000.