Last month, Pimicikamak Cree Nation in Manitoba also declared a state of emergency over attempted youth suicides, according to Assembly of First Nations National Chief Perry Bellegarde.
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“One, it puts the model out there, so people who are already in distress are saying that’s very thinkable now, and if thinkable, maybe doable”, he said of the notion of suicide.
While Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was absent from the debate, several of his cabinet ministers delivered impassioned speeches on the situation, citing commitments made by their government to address Indigenous issues, including $8.4 billion in the latest budget to improve education, as well as health and social services on reserves.
The crisis spotlights the often bleak conditions for Canada’s indigenous peoples.
Canada’s parliament called an emergency session over a series of group suicide attempts by aboriginal teenagers in the remote, poverty-stricken Attawapiskat First Nation in Ontario.
Another article in that same paper said that the emergency facing the First Nation has been generations in the making. “The greatest tragedy is the image of these helpless communities, and these lost children”. This should be our tipping point as a people, as a nation and as a country.
Since December, Attawapiskat has seen a rash of prescription drug overdoses sending youth to the hospital in “a fairly new phenomenon”, said Deborah Hill, vice president of patient care at Weeneebayko Area Health Authority, whose region includes the community.
We are providing additional assistance to the community following the province’s Emergency Medical Assistance Team’s (EMAT) assessment.
“Our government wants to assure First Nations that we are personally and directly engaged in the recent states of emergencies that have been declared”, reads a statement by Health Minister Jane Philpott.
The organization’s first goal, Achneepineskum said, is to ask the federal and provincial governments to help bring in more healthcare workers both now and for the long-term.
Beneath the surface many struggle with the legacy of residential schools where indigenous children were taken to forcibly integrate into Canadian society: men in the community are survivors or the children of survivors in a system described by a truth commission past year as a tool of “cultural genocide”.
Sadly, these are not isolated incidents within Canadian First Nation communities. Officials said there will be a review of how youth are assessed, diagnosed and discharged in light of those concerns. “If someone sees their relative or, say, their good friend and they seemingly have solved the problem, it perhaps incites in them the idea, hence the contagion element”.
Leaders’ pleas for help have too often been met with silence, leaving them with little choice but to resort to declaring a state of emergency to obtain the resources they desperately need.
Day pointed to a community plan for Attawapiskat in 2011 that earmarked $2.7 million for repairs of delapidated housing, but said the same plan also identified the cost of a complete overhaul as closer to $60 million.
The problem increased after a 13-year-old girl died of suicide last fall.
“There is certainly a feeling on the ground that there’s been good progress this week and excitement about the idea of a youth drop-in centre, the idea there’d be a youth council that would be involved in the choices and the priorities”, she said outside the House of Commons.
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“But you don’t want suicide to be the way that people do that”, he said.
