Gerald Muswagon — the ‘Friendly Giant’ Who Won $10 Million

Gerald Muswagon, born at Norway House in northern Manitoba in 1963 and a member of the Norway House Cree Nation, won a $10 million Super 7 jackpot in 1998 on a single $2 ticket — one of the largest wins recorded by an Indigenous person in Canada at the time. Remembered as warm and generous, he spent the fortune within a handful of years on expensive vehicles, a large house turned party venue, electronics, and open-handed gifts to a wide circle of family and friends, alongside lavish parties fuelled by drugs and alcohol. He poured some of the money into a logging business that failed, and invested little that lasted. When the windfall ran out — within only a few years — he was forced back to minimum-wage manual labour to support a girlfriend and six children, and he struggled with addiction and depression. He acquired a criminal record in the aftermath, and in 2005 he died by suicide at age 42, about seven years after the win. His story became Canada’s most-cited counterpart to the American “lottery curse” cases — a reminder that the pattern is not a quirk of one country’s lottery system or culture, and a sober illustration of how sudden wealth, landing on a person already carrying vulnerabilities and without structure or support to absorb it, can accelerate a tragic decline. Reported respectfully, his case is also a window onto the specific pressures that fall on a windfall winner with deep community ties, where need is real and refusal is costly.