Sometimes the news we hear isn’t just news — it’s another wound opened in the spirit of our people.
When I read about young Samuel Bird, 14 years old, found outside Edmonton after months of being missing, I didn’t just see another headline. I saw a name — a family — a mother who now carries a grief no mother should ever know.
His journey ended too soon, and in a way that no child of this land should ever have to face.
We don’t just lose our youth to violence — we lose the songs they never got to sing, the laughter that would have echoed through the years, the stories that will now live only in memory.
To his mother, Alanna Bird, and all those who loved him —
we walk with you.
In our teachings, we say that when a child’s spirit leaves too soon, the ancestors meet them halfway, guiding them gently toward the light. May those old ones take his hand now. May his spirit find rest along the star road.
But we also must speak to the living — to those of us left behind.
When will this stop?
How many more of our children have to disappear before the systems meant to protect them start listening, start caring in a way that means something?
We cannot stay silent in the face of such loss. We must demand justice — not only for Samuel, but for every child whose life has been taken, forgotten, or ignored.
And yet, through the grief, we remember who we are — a people of resilience, of love, of sacred responsibility.
So tonight, when you light your fire or lift your pipe or whisper your prayers to the sky, say his name:
Samuel Bird.
May his memory be a teaching.
May his light guide us toward a world where no more children are lost to violence or indifference.
êkosi
—Kanipawit Maskwa
