First Nations Solutions

"[She was] bravely fighting toward holistic well-being after the harsh side effects that 12 weeks of chemotherapy inflicted on her body. Chemotherapy did irreversible damage to her heart and major organs."
"This was the cause of the stroke."
Makayla Sault's Ojibwe Christian evangelical pastor parents, New Credit Reserve

Surrounded by family, including her mother Sonya, Makayla Sault, 11, spoke at an event in Ohsweken on May 18, 2014.  Photograph by: Barry Gray/The Canadian Press/The Hamilton Spectator , Postmedia News

"It had absolutely nothing to do with the chemo. It probably has everything to do with the leukemia coming back and causing her death, which is what it does when you don't treat it. It results in sludging of the blood."
"I'm very saddened for this girl, and very saddened for her family. ... It's tragic and it was probably preventable."
Anonymous pediatric oncologist

The cancer specialist who preferred to remain unnamed made mention of one drug that might have been administered to the child by oncologists treating her for acute lymphoblastic leukemia at McMaster Children's Hospital in Hamilton that could have caused a stroke, but only within a week or two of having first received chemotherapy. Certainly not months after the fact. And it has been months since Makayla Sault, a eleven-year-old aboriginal girl was taken off chemotherapy.

Oncologists at McMaster tried to have the Brant Children and Family Services agency take the child into custody to enable conventional treatment to be continued, to save her life, since that treatment is 80% to 90% effective. But Makayla felt the effects of chemotherapy were making her too ill, and wanted to be removed from the program, and her parents upheld her decision. That is, if a child of eleven came to that conclusion on her own, and not through coaching from her parents.

She and they preferred to opt for traditional native healing. And their firm belief in the intervention of Jesus Christ, to save the little girl's life.  Makayla's parents took her to a licensed "massage therapy" institution in Florida's West Palm Beach naming itself the Hippocrates Health Institute, along with the use of traditional native medicine. The Hippocrates Health Institute which should rename itself the Hypocrisy Illness Institute, had made their sales pitch directly to the reserve. Her cancer, which had been in brief remission thanks to the chemotherapy she had undergone, returned.

Makayla wrote movingly of the effect the chemotherapy regimen she had undergone had on her. She desperately wanted to remove herself from the hospital, from the therapy. Opting to believe that Christ had visited her in hospital to assure her that he had cured her and she had no further need to undergo chemotherapy. That, and her conviction that traditional aboriginal medicine would cure her leukemia, led her to defy medical authority with the aid of her mother and a sympathetic judge of native ancestry.

And so, the child died, when the cancer returned with a raging vengeance. Cancer cells accumulating in an untreated child's blood make the blood thicker, more likely to cause clots conceivably leading to stroke. Ontario First Nations leaders sent their "deepest sympathies" to the Sault family, praising in the process the child's decision-making. "She was full of spirit and a young warrior who fought her disease on her own terms to the very end", according to Stan Beardy, Ontario regional chief.

Clearly, that 'fight' was hugely preferable to the white man's solution of scientific medical processes prolonging life.

The little girl's parents brought her back to the hospital after her stroke on Sunday. Once she had been examined by doctors they took her back home, where she died a day later. The manner in which she wished to be treated, through traditional aboriginal medicine, according to Bryan LaForme, chief of the first nation the family is part of, was admirable. The chief spoke admiringly of Makayla's determination. It would be well remembered.

"I think she will be remembered partly as a trailblazer," he said. "She set the course for a court action that worked in the favour of First Nations across the country."  Another victory for aboriginal rights, don't you know!

"This whole case suggests there is a different standard, that we're not to care for aboriginal children the way we care for other children."
"People are simply shocked that a child died who could have lived. ... The trail she blazed was to her own death."
Juliet Guichon, bioethicist and lawyer, University of Calgary