Source: AlJazeera

Toronto, Canada – Donnie McKay keeps his phone close.

A band councillor in Pimicikamak Cree Nation (Cross Lake) in northern Manitoba, McKay never knows when there will be a call to tell him that another person in his community of 8,000 has committed suicide.

“I just got a call last night from the paramedics – again. I’m just looking at my phone to see when it’s going to ring again,” McKay told Al Jazeera in a telephone interview.

Six people have committed suicide in Cross Lake since December 12, and 140 others attempted suicide in two weeks alone, many of them youths, McKay said.

“It’s been a state of shock. There’s been a lot of trauma and everybody is on alert every night, trying to cope with the situation and this crisis, epidemic, pandemic, whatever you want to call it,” McKay said.

The staggering suicide rate pushed Cross Lake to declare a state of emergency early in March. McKay said that local leaders have called on the provincial and federal governments to send at least six certified mental health professionals to the community, including at least one child psychologist, to deal with the immediate crisis.

“It’s been … I don’t know,” he said, as his voice trailed off. “It was like a volcano ready to erupt, and we don’t know how to deal with that lava flowing down.”

‘It’s the future that is dying’

Sylwia Krzyszton, a spokeswoman for Health Canada, told Al Jazeera that the department “is aware of the tragic circumstances in Cross Lake First Nation and wants to express its deepest concern to everyone in the community”.

Krzyszton said Health Canada has reached out to Cross Lake to offer assistance. Extra mental health therapy services were made available in February and additional crisis mental health therapists will go to the community this month, she said.

But McKay said a mental health worker came to the community last week for only eight hours, and two others that arrived on March 10 were only scheduled to stay until March 12. A nursing station serving the community is staffed by only two nurses, he added.

“What we require immediately are specialists and professional experts to come in and work with us on a 24-hour basis because we are working on this 24 hours a day,” he said.

Suicide and self-inflicted injuries are the leading causes of death among First Nations youths and adults under the age of 44.

According to the Centre for Suicide Prevention, the suicide rate among First Nations males aged 15-24 is 126 per 100,000 people, compared with 24 per 100,000 for non-Aboriginal males. For First Nations females, the rate is 35 per 100,000, compared with only 5 per 100,000 for non-Aboriginal females.

“It’s a problem for the whole community, but it’s a problem that it’s the youth that are dying. It’s the future,” said Gerald McKinley, an associate professor at the University of Western Ontario, who specialises in Aboriginal health issues in northern Ontario.

McKinley told Al Jazeera that First Nations communities have experienced sudden increases in suicides before, including in the early 1970s on Ontario’s Manitoulin Island, or in the Sioux Lookout region of northern Ontario in the mid-1980s.

Suicide is associated with poverty, discrimination and ongoing colonisation of First Nations communities in Canada, he said, and having one suicide in a community can trigger other people.

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