Canadian Emergency Over Attawapiskat Suicides. . .

[Sprocket.]

The Canadian indigenous community of First Nation Attawapiskat Community have declared a state of emergency following a spate of Suicides and attempted suicides recently.
Reasons for the spate have been cited as poverty and loss of community and culture.
The Canadian premier has promised to aid the people affected.

Emergency teams deployed to Attawapiskat after 11 suicide attempts in 1 night

The BBC have reported on the awful situation this morning.

Canadian Attawapiskat First Nation suicide emergency - BBC News

 

[Yuwipi Woman]

Sadly, this is nothing new. This is from a year ago:

SACATON, ARIZ. The tamarisk tree down the dirt road from Tyler Owens’s house is the one where the teenage girl who lived across the road hanged herself. Don’t climb it, don’t touch it, admonished Owens’s grandmother when Tyler, now 18, was younger.

There are other taboo markers around the Gila River Indian reservation — eight young people committed suicide here over the course of a single year.

“We’re not really open to conversation about suicide,” Owens said. “It’s kind of like a private matter, a sensitive topic. If a suicide happens, you’re there for the family. Then after that, it’s kind of just, like, left alone.”

But the silence that has shrouded suicide in Indian country is being pierced by growing alarm at the sheer number of young Native Americans taking their own lives — more than three times the national average, and up to 10 times on some reservations.

A toxic collection of pathologies — poverty, unemployment, domestic violence, sexual assault, alcoholism and drug addiction — has seeped into the lives of young people among the nation’s 566 tribes. Reversing their crushing hopelessness, Indian experts say, is one of the biggest challenges for these communities.

The hard lives — and high suicide rate — of Native American children on reservations

 

[Sprocket.]

It is truly heart breaking.
Yet still there appears to be no help or support from respective governments.

 

[JimW]

Read this just, harrowing. Destroy your way of life then leave you to rot.

 

[Yuwipi Woman]

On of the factors that isn't discussed is the absolute mindfuck it is to have to travel between cultures in your head. I know kids who have gotten scholarships to good schools, who dropped out because of the complete lack of anything familiar at school. That transition is difficult for most kids, for native kids, there's there an additional cultural dissonance.

 

[FNG]

Theres also whole legacy of Residential School Syndrome, the forcible removal of indigenous kids from their communities forbidden to express their cultural identities either through languague,clothing or song,
Wab Kinew on the legacy of residential schools
on a more positive note information on the circle of life gathering
Losing lives worth living

 

[Idris2002]

I just looked up Attawpiskat on the map, and it's up the coast of James Bay, north of Moose Factory where I used to live.

And looking at Moose Factory, it seems to have really expanded since I was there, when it was just a small village clustered around the local hospital. But MF also now appears to have a major problem with heroin (or some sort of needle drug) and crack.

This isn't much of a post, I know.

 

[Yuwipi Woman]

I just looked up Attawpiskat on the map, and it's up the coast of James Bay, north of Moose Factory where I used to live.

And looking at Moose Factory, it seems to have really expanded since I was there, when it was just a small village clustered around the local hospital. But MF also now appears to have a major problem with heroin (or some sort of needle drug) and crack.

This isn't much of a post, I know.

I think its a useful post. There's a heroin epidemic in most of North America, especially rural areas. Some of the decline in average lifespans in some populations has already been linked to it.

More persons died from drug overdoses in the United States in 2014 than during any previous year on record. From 2000 to 2014 nearly half a million persons in the United States have died from drug overdoses. In 2014, there were approximately one and a half times more drug overdose deaths in the United States than deaths from motor vehicle crashes (4). Opioids, primarily prescription pain relievers and heroin, are the main drugs associated with overdose deaths. In 2014, opioids were involved in 28,647 deaths, or 61% of all drug overdose deaths; the rate of opioid overdoses has tripled since 2000. The 2014 data demonstrate that the United States' opioid overdose epidemic includes two distinct but interrelated trends: a 15-year increase in overdose deaths involving prescription opioid pain relievers and a recent surge in illicit opioid overdose deaths, driven largely by heroin.

Increases in Drug and Opioid Overdose Deaths — United States, 2000–2014

Just from looking around, I can see there's more drug use. Its not a rare event to find used needles in the alley behind my house or to find someone wandering around so high they have no clue where they are.

 

[spring-peeper]

Read this just, harrowing. Destroy your way of life then leave you to rot.

How was their way of life been destroyed? What is stopping them from feeding themselves by hunting and fishing? No-one is stopping them from living in their traditional housing?

 

[Vintage Paw]

How was their way of life been destroyed? What is stopping them from feeding themselves by hunting and fishing? No-one is stopping them from living in their traditional housing?

Have a word with yourself.

 

[Idris2002]

How was their way of life been destroyed? What is stopping them from feeding themselves by hunting and fishing? No-one is stopping them from living in their traditional housing?

Christ almighty.

 

[Idris2002]

First Nations people do have enhanced fishing and hunting rights it appears:

Fish and Wildlife - Natural Resource Operations - Province of British Columbia

Could you raise enough from those activities to not only feed yourself, but to sustain an entire community, and build a working mental-health infrastructure?

 

[Supine]

There have been outbreaks in the uk. I remember it happened somewhere in south wales. Statistical anomoly i think was the reason given.

 

[Pickman's model]

First Nations people do have enhanced fishing and hunting rights it appears:

Fish and Wildlife - Natural Resource Operations - Province of British Columbia

Could you raise enough from those activities to not only feed yourself, but to sustain an entire community, and build a working mental-health infrastructure?

i'd need a bit of help, other people would need to come hunting and fishing with me to catch enough

 

[FNG]

yes and lets not forget that traditional field skills such as tracking and skinning wer actively discouraged by the Residential and trade schools and a stigma attached to those who tried to persue them

Canadian Indian residential school system - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

In 1909, Dr. Peter Bryce, general medical superintendent for the Department of Indian Affairs (DIA), reported to the department that between 1894 and 1908, mortality rates at some residential schools in Western Canada ranged from 30% to 60% over five years (that is, five years after entry, 30% to 60% of students had died, or 6–12% per annum). These statistics did not become public until 1922, when Bryce, who was no longer working for the government, published The Story of a National Crime: Being a Record of the Health Conditions of the Indians of Canada from 1904 to 1921. In particular, he alleged that the high mortality rates could have been avoided if healthy children had not been exposed to children with tuberculosis.[43] At the time, no antibiotic had been identified to treat the disease.

In 1920 and 1922, Dr. A. Corbett was commissioned to visit the schools in the west of the country, and found similar results to Bryce. At the Ermineskin school in Hobbema, Alberta, he found 50% of the children had tuberculosis.[29] At Sarcee Boarding School near Calgary, all 33 students were "much below even a passable standard of health" and "[a]ll but four were infected with tuberculosis." In one classroom, he found 16 ill children, many near death, who were being made to sit through lessons.[29]

In May 2015, research by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission revealed that at least 6,000 students had died, mostly from disease.[6]

Many students were fluent in their Aboriginal languages when they first entered residential schools.[48] Despite the fact that many of them had little or even no understanding of English or French, teachers made no exception for beginners and strictly prohibited the use of Aboriginal languages.[48] Many survivors recalled being strapped for speaking Aboriginal languages, some students were even forced to eat soap because native languages were viewed as dirty and evil.[48]

Although encouragement was given by some schools to keep the languages alive, many students could no longer speak their languages when they left schools due to years of forbiddance.[48] Traditional activities and spiritual practices, such as the Sun Dance were also banned from participation.[48] Aboriginal values and beliefs were disrespected and humiliated, some survivors even felt ashamed for being Aboriginal as their identities were considered as ugly and dirty.[48]

The residential school system had a lasting and adverse effect on the transmission of Aboriginal culture from one generation to the next.

 

[Treacle Toes]

Smashed it!

MP Niki Ashton denounces former PM's views as 'assimilationist'

 

[Idris2002]

Here's a project which might have useful lessons for other places:

'We built it most by hand': popular mountain bike trail fuels pride for First Nation teens

Basically First Nations youth in Yukon have constructed a mountain biking trail, on old hunting routes.

Key paragraph:

"Drugs and alcohol took 16-year-old Jade McLoud's brother away from him a couple of years ago. He says the trail gives him purpose in life."