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The Attawapiskat First Nation reserve located in Northern Ontario, near the Attawapiskat River and James Bay has a population of roughly 2800 people, who are predominantly Cree. This community has experienced an alarming rise in suicides, specifically among Indigenous youth since 1991. With the recent rise of Indigenous youth suicides in Northern Ontario reservations, it’s been called to question what the government is doing about this problem. As a result of the recent rise of suicides on the small reserve, Attawapiskat has declared a state of emergency, which has gained minimal media attention and support.

State of Emergancy April 2016
On April 9th, 2016 Attawapiskat called a state of emergency, due to rising concerns around the suicide attempts over the past few months in the isolated reserve community. According to the communities band council “There were 100 suicide attempts since last September, and almost 30 in March alone. Seven of those involved people who were under 14, and 43 of the involved people were under 25.”. The fowling day April 10th, 2016 the community was rocked by seven more possible suicide attempts by youth between the ages of 9 and 14 who were brought into the small understaffed and undersupplied Attawapiskat hospital. The seven youth had been brought to the hospital due to possible drug overdoses, like four more teens who had been brought to the hospital the previous day. While not all of the cases were suicide attempts, in 24 hours there 11 possible suicide attempts, with 5 additional attempts later that week.

This represented a significant problem for the small hospital of 15 beds with no full-time doctors. The doctors they had, only flew in for four days a week and three weeks out of the month. There are only two nurses working weekends and evenings, making them the only medical staff at the hospital during the original report on April 10. In addition to the understaffing of doctors and nurses, there hasn’t been a regular mental health worker in 9 months because of housing shortages. This begs the question, if there is an increasing need for mental health and medical support in reserve communities why are they still being underfunded? While there are many cumulative smaller reasons for this, such as budget cuts and the lack of power given to the people in these communities, the central idea behind them can be explained through Goldberg’s concept of the conceptual orders.

The first applicable conceptual order is the idea of the underclass. Goldberg describes the underclass as a group of people who are criminal or chronically poor. This applies to Indigenous people because they are over-represented in our criminal justice system, and Indigenous reserves makes up the poorest postal codes in Canada. . Additionally, there are very little resources available for the people living there, thus allowing little chance of improving their situations. Indigenous reserves are managed by the federal government so it is out of the control of the people living there to change their situation. This means the government is enforcing the level of poverty on the residences of the reserves through the enforced creation of economic and social disadvantage. Also known as Goldberg’s concept of the third world. This concept refers to an environment being traditionally classified as underdeveloped, chaotic and typically a racialized division. That enforces domination, exclusion and subjugation. With the portrayal residents of reserves seen as an underclass, it makes it easier for the government not to address the deficiencies that reserves face. This means that reserves will not have the same level of infrastructure or funding that is given to some of the more ‘white’ areas of Canada.

Issue Behind the problem
The understaffing, lack of mental health and medical resource available in the community of Attawapiskat of is a prime example of the minimal and inadequate resources given to reserve communities. According to Clarke, Frankish and Green researchers who attempted to identify the underlying causes of suicide among Indigenous adolescents and found that “environments of native persons are characterized by remoteness, poverty, cultural displacement, cultural sensitivity in surrounding communities and family disintegration.”. These factors were found to correlate with the lack of resources and underfunding that was mentioned previously. Leading to the conclusion that the increase in suicide rates among Indigenous youth is not a product of their ethnicity, but the systematic segregation of Indigenous people.

This wave of suicide attempts isn’t an isolated incident on this reserve, many neighboring reserves are facing similar crisis with a growing rate of suicides among Indigenous youth. Also with the lack of attention being paid to this issue, it suggests that other reserves are facing this problem and it just isn’t being reported or heard. According to research conducted by R. Dale Walker, who specializes in American Indian psychiatric issues,“Suicide looks very different in Native communities than it does in the general population. Nationally, suicide tends to skew middle-aged (and white); but among Native Americans, 40 percent of those who die by suicide are between the ages of 15 and 24. And among young adults ages 18 to 24, Native American have higher rates of suicide than any other ethnicity.”. Yet, data collection and studies on suicides typically focus on white middle aged men due to results gathered from the general population on suicides. Another occurring problem with studies on Indigenous suicides is the inexact nature of the data being collected. Due to the large amount of individuals who identify as Indigenous, but are not status Indians, therefore a significant amount of Indigenous people may not be listed as such on their death certificate. Resulting in a lower number of reported Indigenous suicides then there actually is. While the rates of youth suicides continues to increase in Indigenous communities, the research on the causes behind them and possible intervention methods remain minimal. A growing area of concern is identifying at risk youth and being able to provide efficient prevention plans with the underfunding that most reserves face.