Seventeen-year-old Jacoby Macdonald wants to smash the stigma of young Indigenous women being seen as victims, an image often created by disheartening statistics around high school drop-out rates, teenage pregnancies and low employment.

“Me, statistically, the odds are kind of against me. But you are not a number, you are not a statistic, you are more than that — you are a person,” insists Macdonald, a Grade 12 student at Gladstone Secondary in East Vancouver.

“We are not a stigma. We can do anything we set our minds to.”