By Julie Gordon and Rod Nickel
VANCOUVER/WINNIPEG (Reuters) - The remote, northern Canadian community where a shooter killed four people and injured several others on Friday has long struggled under the weight of poverty, high suicide rates and disadvantages that most of the country can hardly imagine.
The isolated town of La Loche, in the province of Saskatchewan, and its neighbouring Clearwater River Dene Indian reserve, six hours away from the nearest commercial airport, has neither restaurants nor recreation centres and scant jobs.
Unemployment stands above 20 percent in the community, suicide and addiction rates are high, homes are overcrowded and family violence is above the provincial average in the community which is mostly Metis, a culture with French and Aboriginal roots.
"If you know about this deadly mix of hopelessness and abuse and violence, and drugs and alcohol abuse, and racism and poverty, really it's a perfect recipe for something like this to happen," said Mark Totten, who spent five years working with Aboriginal youth in Saskatchewan, and is now a criminal justice professor at Humber College in Toronto.
La Loche embodies the dire prospects for Canada's Aboriginals, also known as First Nations, where politicians have struggled to make a difference.
Canada?s new Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in December promised a ?renewed, nation-to-nation relationship with First Nations peoples? and an inquiry into the high rates of missing and murdered Aboriginal women.
Trudeau, 44, was speaking after a report found the forcible separation of Aboriginal children from their families amounted to cultural genocide.
The community, set beside a lake and boreal forest at the end of a highway from southern Saskatchewan, one of Canada's wealthiest provinces due to its reserves of crude oil, potash and uranium, has a checker history of violence.
In 2010, a man was shot dead in broad daylight across the street from the local police detachment. A year later, a mob torched a police truck and attacked two police officers, forcing them to barricade themselves in the local hospital.
Mass shootings are rare, however, even in Canada's most desperate corners.
Police arrested a male suspect on Friday and have not commented on circumstances leading up to the shootings or identified the gunman or the victims.
A family friend and the town?s acting mayor said the gunman shot and killed his two brothers at home before killing a teacher and assistant at the school, and wounding several others.
A news conference is planned for 4 p.m. ET in the provincial capital, Regina.
"There's ... no new problems that could lead to this type of thing, except that it?s an isolated town," said Raymond Dauvin, a long-time La Loche resident. "You have to leave town to work. And it?s difficult, because if you leave town you're in an environment of other people who don't speak Dene. In a way, it's your nation up here."
In La Loche, which has a population of 2,600, 18 people committed suicide over a four-and-a-half year span to January 2010, the StarPhoenix newspaper said last year. The annual suicide rate in the Keewatin Yatthe Regional Health Authority is the highest of any health district in Saskatchewan, the newspaper said.
Residents are caught between traditional and modern worlds, giving rise to "unimaginable" social problems that are symptoms of the loss of identity, said Ken Coates, director of the International Centre for Northern Governance and Development at University of Saskatchewan.
Elders who provide the last link to traditional Aboriginal life are dying, while television channels are easily available, offering a teasing window into an affluent southern world, he said.
"You?re stuck in this halfway place, which creates this odd (question) of, 'Am I a northern person? Yes. But am I a Canadian in a full sense?'" Coates said.
(Editing by Amran Abocar, Diane Craft)
