For two days Stephanie Hookimaw drove frantically down the dirt roads that line Canada’s Attawapiskat First Nation, looking for her 13-year-old daughter. She called in at 16 homes in the remote community, hoping to find some trace of her child.

“I was just crying while I was driving around looking for her, praying at the same time, asking God to protect her.”

Her search ended at a police cordon. “She took her own life,” Hookimaw said, her voice shaking as her eyes welled with tears. “I was shocked. She was never suicidal.”

Her daughter, Sheridan, had been suffering. She was bullied at school and had a number of health problems, including arthritis and asthma. She had longed for her family to have their own home ever since sewage contamination had forced them to live with 15 others in a three-bedroom home

Still, she seemed happy enough. “I would always talk to my baby, asking her, ‘Are you OK?’ She would say, ‘Mommy, I’m OK.’”

State of emergency

Sheridan’s problems were closely tied to those of this aboriginal community in northern Ontario. In 2011, a severe housing shortage forced families to live in tents and unheated trailers, some without access to running water or electricity.

Two years later, substandard infrastructure was blamed for flooding and sewage overflows.

In September, Sheridan’s cousin was one of five teenagers who tried to overdose on drugs and had to be medically evacuated. The incident — coupled with Sheridan’s death in October — set off a disastrous chain of events in the community, triggering a crisis that last week made headlines around the world. Since autumn there have been more than 100 suicide attempts in Attawapiskat, which has a population of just 2,000. The community’s four health workers have struggled to keep up, their efforts beset by a lack of training in mental health issues. The youngest to attempt suicide was 11; the oldest was 71. After 11 people tried to take their own lives on Saturday, April 9, leaders declared a state of emergency. Two days later, as health officials scrambled to send crisis counsellors to the community, 20 people — including a nine-year-old — were taken to hospital after being overheard making a suicide pact.

“We’re crying out for help,” said Attawapiskat chief Bruce Shisheesh. “Just about every night there is a suicide attempt.”

The crisis has turned a spotlight on an issue too often ignored in Canada. Across the country, suicides and self-inflicted injuries are the leading cause of death for First Nations people under 44.

For the young, the statistics are more bleak: suicide rates for indigenous males are 10 times higher than for non-indigenous males. For young First Nations women, the suicide rate climbs to 21 times that of their non-indigenous counterparts.

There is no single reason for the toll. In Attawapiskat, Shisheesh pointed to overcrowded houses riddled with mould, drug abuse and the lack of a recreation centre to give the young something to do.

But mostly, he said, children have fallen victim to the deeply rooted issues facing Canada’s First Nations. Chief among those is the lingering impact of the residential school system, into which over decades more than 150,000 aboriginal children were carted off in an attempt to forcibly assimilate them into Canadian society.

“You can’t attempt cultural genocide for 140 years, for seven generations — the last of these schools closing their doors in 1996 — and not expect some very real fallout,” author Joseph Boyden wrote last week in the magazine Maclean’s. “Attawapiskat is a brutal example.”

Rife with abuse, the schools aimed to “kill the Indian in the child”, as documented by a recent truth commission.

Thousands of children died at these schools, in many cases of tuberculosis, with hundreds of them hastily buried in unmarked graves next to the schools. In nearly a third of deaths, the government and schools did not record the names of students. The legacy of the schools lurks under the surface of First Nations life, often combining with deplorable living conditions to produce deadly results.

Housing shortage

Last month, after six suicides in three months and more than 140 attempts in a two-week span, another remote community — the Pimicikamak Cree Nation in Manitoba — also declared a state of emergency.

Like Attawapiskat, a housing shortage in Pimicikamak has forced residents to crowd more than a dozen people into dilapidated homes to brave temperatures that drop as low as -40C in winter. In a country that is home to 20 per cent of the world’s fresh water, about 86 First Nations are advised to boil drinking water, including one northern Ontario community that has been waiting for more than 20 years for drinkable water to flow from their taps.

The recent series of crises has provoked some in Canada to revive the debate as to whether First Nations people in remote communities should be encouraged to move to urban areas.

Jean Chretien, Canada’s former prime minister, bluntly stated last week that when faced with a lack of economic opportunities, “people have to move sometimes”.

Boyden, who once lived in the area around Attawapiskat and continues to visit regularly, bristled at the idea.

“It’s the most absurd, simplistic and colonial attitude,” he said. “You don’t take a person away from the last thing they have to make them better somehow.”

Attawapiskat is even home to a diamond mine.

“These people in Attawapiskat are watching the resources of their community, of their territory, of their traditional land, ... being taken away by corporations,” said Boyden. “They watch this happen as they live in third-world conditions.”

Gabor Mate, a retired doctor who specialises in addiction and childhood development, said: “There’s an official narrative of this country as democratic and one of the best places in the world to live. That would be severely challenged if we actually talked about the conditions of natives in their communities.”

The crisis in Attawapiskat came to light amid an ongoing campaign to abolish the Indian Act, a statute that marked 140 years of existence last week and which puts the government in control of most aspects of First Nations life.

“The suicide crisis in Attawapiskat — and far too many other ongoing crises across the country — are rooted in the poverty and despair that was created by the Indian Act,” said Ontario regional chief Isadore Day, one of the many who are calling for the act to be replaced with indigenous self-government. “Our peoples signed treaties with the intent to share the lands and resources equally with the new Canadians. We did not expect to be exiled to reserves.”

Indigenous people — despite numbering about 4 per cent of the population — make up more than half of the children in the welfare system, nearly a quarter of inmates in federal prisons and a disproportionately high number of women who are missing or murdered. Shisheesh wondered what would happen to his community once the attention had faded. “What’s going to take place after 30 days?” he asked. “Our future is dying,” he said. “I don’t want to lose our future.

source : gulfnews