I was fishing off a bridge just outside Wabasca, Alta. in the summer of 1985 (the area is known for its terrific walleye fishing).

At one point, an ambulance went screaming by me. It was heading out of town towards Slave Lake, about 120-plus kilometres to the southwest.

I wondered out loud what that was about.

"Oh, that was Joe," said a boy in a strangely matter-of-fact voice. "He shot himself in the head this morning."

It's always haunted me that some children grow up in environments where suicide is almost normal.

Two years later, I'm working as a reporter in Fort McMurray, Alta., where I did the crime-and-courts beat. A nice, middle-aged Indian lady named Evelyn was the native courtworker (she introduced me to one of her friends on the Gregoire Lake reserve who made me a great pair of moosehide mukluks, which I still have). Evelyn told me that as a little girl, she was taught to stand in a corner with her head down whenever a white person came into the room.

It's shocking now that a certain generation Indian children were taught that they were inferior to white people.

While in Fort McMurray, I did a story on Janvier, which was a troubled little reserve about 120 km southeast. The community had a gravel road built one year earlier, giving it year-round ground access to the outside world.

This brought some solutions and caused new problems, with people going to McMurray every night to play bingo, as one example. "We're bush Indians," former chief Archie Janvier* told me, adding they had troubles coping with the outside world.

* The chief at the time, Walter Janvier, made news one time when a colleague of mine at Fort McMurray Today did a story on how one woman in Janvier wanted a bunker-style shelter built to protect woman and children trying to flee domestic abuse. Walter thought that would be a bad idea, because it would just make the men more frustrated (?!?!).

There were lots of other problems. The main groups were the Nokohoots and the Janviers, and there seemed to be a permanent Hatfield-McCoy situation there.

The community centre had its windows punched out by thrown rocks.

Every visible sign pointed to a community in distress.

I call things as I see them, so the story reflected those observations.

Evelyn the courtworker wasn't crazy about the story, but she thought it was accurate.

One RCMP officer told me he copied it and sent it to his friends and relatives in his home town, because to him, it reflected the reality of Janvier as he had to deal with it as a police officer.

When I ran into him a few weeks later in the Peter Pond mall, Archie gave me the most succinct criticisms of all time for one of my works of reportage.

"Did you see the story?" I asked him. He grunted yes.

"Did you like it?" He shook his head no.

"What was wrong with it?"

"It was fucked," he said.

I burst out laughing. He looked at me, involuntarily chuckled, and we went on about our respective days.

It's worth noting that in 1975, then-Alberta Premier Peter Lougheed personally visited Janvier because it as in crisis at that time. If you hunt around on the Internet today, you can find that problems still persist.

Finally, I worked in the deep, deep bush near a place called Haig Lake in the winter of 1983-84 (it's about 130 kilometres east of Manning, Alta., if you care to look it up on a map). There were a lot of Indian guys working there from the Lubicon Cree band (embroiled in a high-profile land claim at the time -- and incredibly, still is), and some of us white guys.

The two sides didn't intermingle much. And trust me, it was a small place.

In 1992, I was in Regina and active with the Canadian Association of Journalists. We had a native affairs reporting seminar, and we held it on a reserve in the Qu'Appelle River valley.

I mentioned the two solitudes from that logging camp, and asked the Indians there if they thought that camp had a race problem.

The Indians uncomfortably looked at each other with something of a "should we tell him?" expression.

Finally, one spoke.

"Sometimes, we just like to hang out together and tell each other crazy Indian stories," offered the guy.

I always had to laugh at that.

Guilty white liberal Bill worried that his native brothers felt shunned, while the native guys were probably thinking: "White people: If you have to work them, that's one thing, but hang out with them afterwards? Ewww." :)