A STATE OF PERPETUAL MOURNING
SUICIDE CLUSTERS PLAGUE YOUNG ABORIGINALS
On Christmas Day, 1974, a 17-year-old boy living on a remote First Nation reserve put a .22-calibre rifle to his forehead and pulled the trigger.
He had been distraught over the impending separation of his parents, a review of his death later found.
Seven more young people from the same community killed themselves in the 11 months that followed — a tragedy researchers later described as a “true suicide epidemic.”
But if that “epidemic,” which happened on Manitoulin Island, was one of the earliest documented suicide clusters among young aboriginal people in Ontario, it was far from the last.
An article in the Canadian Medical Association Journal last year reported that 468 aboriginal people killed themselves in Ontario between 1991 and 2013 — most of them concentrated in pockets of the North and almost half among those aged 25 and under.
Most recently, Attawapiskat was forced to declare a state of emergency this week after recording 39 suicide attempts since March.
“The problem has certainly been growing since the ’70s in Ontario,” says Gerald McKinley, an aboriginal health expert at Western University in London, Ont., who compiled the data for the CMAJ.
“I know from my own research that in the northern parts of Ontario both suicide attempts and deaths saw a tenfold increase in about 1985.”
Some communities are more resilient than others and the distribution of suicides is not equal, McKinley says. Where clusters do occur, they are typically triggered by a variety of social stresses: substance use, changes to family structure, inter-generational trauma, violence, food insecurity and low employment.
Carrie Bourassa, an indigenous health studies professor at First Nations University of Canada in Regina, boils it down even further. Young people, she says, just “want programs and services and better schools, things that we often take for granted.”
She describes a Facebook video, which has gone viral, that lists what youth in Attawapiskat believe they need. It was “basic,” she says, “YWCA, swimming pool, hockey rink, new school, more teachers, no alcohol on reserve, parenting classes. They want supports and they want healthy things to do.”
Bourassa is also convinced of something else: suicide was a concept foreign to aboriginals until colonization.
“We don’t even have a word for suicide in our languages,” she says. “Do you know what that tells me? It tells me that it did not exist in our communities before contact.”
Other academics refute that suggestion.
A paper published in the Canadian Journal of Native Studies in 1991 noted anthropological research had shown “within traditional societies, although infrequent, people did take their own lives.” Their apparent motivations included shame, loss of a loved one, adultery, jealousy, wife abuse and revenge.
“Nonetheless,” the paper continued, “(suicide) seems to have been regarded as aberrant behaviour, as the fact that no indigenous word has been identified that could be translated with the term.”
Whatever the origins, concern over suicides in aboriginal communities — and the “contagion” effect they can trigger — began to grow around the time of the Manitoulin Island tragedy.
“These individuals are basically lonely, isolated youth who have never developed a sufficient repertoire of interpersonal skills or of constructive modes of coping with life’s frustrations,” wrote the authors of a 1977 article in the Canadian Psychiatric Association Journal.
Similar themes emerged in a 1991 paper in the Canadian Journal of Native Studies, which noted that suicides in the Cree and Ojibway communities in northwest Ontario were happening with “frightening regularity.”
In 1990 alone, the Sioux Lookout Zone Hospital reported 143 attempted and 10 known suicides, the paper says.
Researchers at the time said native youth were facing a “unique form of double jeopardy” — a growing disconnect with aboriginal culture and difficulties adjusting to the Euro-Canadian culture.
A 1994 article by Laurence Kirmayer, a McGill psychiatry professor, also noted that suicide clusters posed a “special problem for native communities in which many individuals are closely related and share the same predicaments so that the impact of one suicide is deeply felt within the whole community.”
The cluster phenomenon appeared again in the mid-2000s — this time in Pikangikum, a remote northern Ontario community that has been described as being “in a state of perpetual mourning.” From 2006 to 2008, 16 young people between 10 and 19 killed themselves — all by hanging.
The deaths prompted a review by the provincial Office of the Chief Coroner. Its final report in 2011 contained 100 recommendations. At the top of the list was the need to create a national suicideprevention strategy.
The report repeatedly called attention to the need for access to “basic necessities of life” — namely, homes with running water and plumbing — and to finally connect the community to the electrical grid.
To date, no national suicide strategy has been adopted.
And Pikangikum still relies on diesel generators.
YWCA, SWIMMING POOL, HOCKEY RINK ... THEY WANT SUPPORTS AND THEY WANT HEALTHY THINGS TO DO.