Articles
“An indigenous community in Canada’s northern region of Ontario has declared a state of emergency after 11 people there attempted suicide on Saturday night.
The Attawapiskat First Nation is a small subarctic community of 2,000 people, located near the Hudson Bay and more than 300 miles from the nearest city. The community’s chief, along with leaders of the Attawapiskat parliament, voted unanimously late Saturday night to declare a state of emergency.
One member of parliament, Charlie Angus, said the Attawapiskat community and the First Nation people lack resources typically available to others in Canada.
When “a young person tries to commit suicide in any suburban school, they send in the resources, they send in the emergency team. There’s a standard protocol for response,” Angus said. “The northern communities are left on their own. We don’t have the mental-health service dollars. We don’t have the resources.””
– Yahoo News, The Suicide Emergency Among Canada’s First Nations.
“Nearly one quarter of First Nations adults reported contemplating suicide at some point in their life, according to a 2008-10 survey by the First Nations Information Governance Centre.
These figures stand in contrast to the just 9.1 per cent of adults from the general Canadian population who had similar thoughts.
But these aren’t the only telling statistics about suicide among Canada’s First Nations people.
In light of the rash of attempts that prompted a state of emergency in the remote northern Ontario First Nation of Attawapiskat, here’s an in-depth look at the rates of suicides among the country’s Indigenous people.
According to a 2000 report from the Canadian Institute of Health, suicides among First Nations youth (aged 15 to 24) was about five to six times higher than non-aboriginal youth in Canada.
In particular, among young First Nations males there was a rate of 126 per 100,000 people. That stands in contrast to the rate of 24 per 100,000 among non-aboriginal males.”
– CTV News, Suicide among Canada’s First Nations: Key numbers.
Download
Download the 18″x24″ poster (.pdf), Indian Country 52 #15 – First Nation Suicides.
Close Ups
Indian Country 52
Indian Country 52 is a weekly project by David Bernie that uses the medium of posters that promote issues and stories in Indian Country.
Creative Commons License
This work by David Bernie is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. You may download, share, and post the images under the condition that the works are attributed to the artist.
