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Suicide Attempts Plague Attawapiskat First Nation in Canada

Grand Chief Alvin Fiddler of the Nishnawbe Aski Nation, the regional body for aboriginal groups around James Bay, said there had been no clear pattern to the recent suicide attempts.Credit...Carlos Osorio/Toronto Star, via Getty Images

OTTAWA — She was bullied relentlessly. She suffered from asthma, diabetes and other ailments. Her living conditions were unbearably cramped: 20 relatives taking refuge in a two-bedroom government nursing station for more than a year after a sewage backup made their home uninhabitable.

Still, it came as a shock when Sheridan Hookimaw, a sociable 13-year-old girl, took her own life last October, her great-aunt said.

It was the kind of shock, the aunt said, that has become all too familiar.

Since September, 101 people in the Attawapiskat First Nation, a remote aboriginal community with about 2,000 residents, have attempted suicide. That is about 5 percent of its population.

There were an astonishing 11 suicide attempts on Saturday alone.

“It’s quite scary when you hear the air ambulance at 2 in the morning, 3 in the morning,” said Jackie Hookimaw-Witt, Sheridan’s great-aunt. “That’s the youth being taken out.”

Overwhelmed, the chief and the council of the Attawapiskat community have declared a state of emergency. It was more of a call for help than a legal measure, and once again it has focused Canada’s attention on longstanding problems in the region.

“I hope it gets governments to react,” said Grand Chief Alvin Fiddler of the Nishnawbe Aski Nation, the regional body for aboriginal groups around James Bay. “You see right across the territory a lack of proper housing, a lack of proper health care, the lack of access to clean drinking water.”

“Unfortunately, suicide attempts are quite, quite prevalent in many of our communities,” he added.

It is not the first time that Charlie Angus, the federal member of Parliament for the area, has seen a state of emergency declared after a suicide crisis swept native communities.

“We go through spikes with these crises, and we are definitely in a very, very dire moment,” he said, adding that Attawapiskat had gone through a similar wave of suicide attempts in 2009 and 2010. “I’ve lost count of the states of emergency.”

Attawapiskat is only about 60 miles from an open-pit diamond mine owned by De Beers, yet it has the unenviable distinction of being unusually poor even by the standards of aboriginal communities.

While the diamond mine has provided some employment, most of the community of about 2,000 people survives by hunting moose and caribou in the surrounding bog-like muskeg or by fishing. Its only connections to the outside are ice roads in the winter or by air.

Grand Chief Fiddler said there had been no clear pattern to the recent suicide attempts. Men and women, young and old have tried to kill themselves.

While drugs and alcohol have played a role in some of the attempts, Mrs. Hookimaw-Witt, who has a doctorate in education and who has taught in the community and been involved in academic research on it, said that none had been found in the system of her great-niece.

And while underlying causes can be identified, isolating what precisely has set off the attempts has been elusive. While some attempts among children and teenagers may have been prompted by Ms. Hookimaw’s death, her great-aunt said, “that doesn’t explain the older men.”

Whatever the cause, Mrs. Hookimaw-Witt said that she and others were now hiding and securing knives, ropes and prescription medications.

“It reaches into your house,” she said.

The declaration did spur some action. On Monday, Health Canada, a federal department, said it was sending two mental health counselors to the area and working with a regional health authority. The province of Ontario is flying in a team of mental health nurses and social workers. Its minister of health will travel to Attawapiskat later this week.

The problems facing Attawapiskat and numerous other aboriginal communities have long been known. But the current crisis comes at a time when relations between aboriginal groups and the federal government appear to be transforming.

After 10 years of tense relations with the Conservative government of former Prime Minister Stephen Harper, many aboriginal leaders are buoyed by promises from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to make their issues a priority. His government’s recent budget included an additional 8.4 billion Canadian dollars, spread over five years, to deal with aboriginal issues.

“There are good things happening in our country,” said Grand Chief Fiddler, who met with Mr. Trudeau last Friday. “That openness, that type of dialogue, it filters down to the different departments of the government.”

Cindy Blackstock, the executive director of the First Nations Child and Family Caring Society of Canada, pressed a case that led the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal to rule in January that the government’s underfunding of native youth problems was a form of racial discrimination. She said she was waiting for Mr. Trudeau’s positive words to be turned into concrete action.

She estimated that governments spent 30 to 40 percent more on non-aboriginal children through a variety of programs.

“This is our Confederate flag,” Ms. Blackstock said. “There’s no excuse for a country that is as wealthy as ours for racial discrimination like this.”

Mrs. Hookimaw-Witt said she had seen some positive events in her community’s otherwise bleak crisis. Last week, a group mainly of teenagers from a neighboring aboriginal community walked along ice roads for two days to Attawapiskat to raise awareness of the suicide problem.

After a feast, she said, they lined up to comfort Ms. Hookimaw’s relatives as a drummer played an increasingly loud beat.

“It was very emotional; it was sacred,” Mrs. Hookimaw-Witt said. “These kids made that happen. That gives me hope.”

A correction was made on 
May 11, 2016

A map on April 12 with an article about a rash of suicide attempts in the Attawapiskat aboriginal community on James Bay in Canada gave an incorrect scale. The scale line represented 300 miles, not 50.

How we handle corrections

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 11 of the New York edition with the headline: An Aboriginal Community’s Grim Statistic: 101 Suicide Attempts Since September. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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