Suicides in Shamattawa: No Solution to the Same Deadly Problem
Winnipeg Free Press May 10, 2008
Life in the remote community of Shamattawa is so bleak, kids will try to kill themselves because if they’re unsuccessful they’ll get out, even if only briefly, health care workers from the troubled First Nation say.
In 2007, 74 kids from Shamattawa attempted suicide and another 82 said they were going to do it. That accounts for more than one in four of the 600 kids living in Shamattawa, 1,200 km northeast of Winnipeg.
In the first five months of this year, 37 kids and 10 adults attempted suicide, and 52 others told health care workers or family they plan to kill themselves.
In 2007 there were 1,172 people living in Shamattawa, according to the Kitayan Community The rash of suicide attempts comes six years after the province and Ottawa declared war on the problem when three people killed themselves in just a few days.
Local mental health care worker Nancy Thomas said this week that some children attempt suicide simply because they know they’ll be flown to Winnipeg.
“They are so bored here,” she said. “They just want to get out.”
When a child attempts suicide they are flown to Winnipeg for treatment.
Earlier this month the reserve’s plight got notice when four children attempted suicide within a one-week period. The youngest was nine.
“It’s just really getting out of hand,” community health representative Victoria Redhead said Friday. “They tell me that they’ve got nothing to do, there’s peer pressure. They want to be out of here.”
The situation is so dire Thomas sent her own 16-year-old son to Brandon to keep him safe. “When I close my door to talk to someone there’s someone else knocking. It just never stops,” she said in a telephone interview.
“No one has been recovering from the suicides and the attempted suicides. Things keep piling up and getting worse and worse.”"
Six years ago, government crisis teams were dispatched when it was learned 39 people had tried to kill themselves in six months, and 27 others threatened to do it. The two governments joined forces to fast track a $100,000 suicide prevention program in Shamattawa. They established a new healing centre and promised help for the remote community. At the time, then aboriginal and northern affairs minister Eric Robinson delivered a statement to the Manitoba Legislature about aboriginal suicide and Shamattawa. He noted there were other communities facing similar problems and said his department was meeting to address the problem, including planning to improve culturally appropriate strategies, services and programs.
“Prevention and counselling services need to be better co-ordinated, be more culturally appropriate and accessible for aboriginal Manitobans,” Robinson said. “These services need to be accessible for aboriginal people in isolated and remote communities.”
But the solutions were just band-aids and have long since evaporated. The Fabian Miles Healing Centre was funded for just two years. The number of therapists coming into the community to treat people has dropped.
Now the community sees one therapist a month for two days, the workers said in a detailed letter to the Free Press, which painted a picture of utter desperation and hopelessness. A doctor flies into Shamattawa once a month and stays for three days. Once a year, a pediatrician and an optometrist fly in.
There should be four nurses in the community but there are only three. There are lengthy waiting lists for substance abuse treatment facilities in the North.
There are no recreational facilities in Shamattawa except for a drop-in centre which in 2006 was found to be contaminated due to a fuel leak. A planned arena was never built because of an on-going court dispute. The project has now been at a standstill for eight years.
There are very few employment opportunities. Sexual assaults are not uncommon. Victoria Redhead, who has lived in Shamattawa her whole life, said the community feels forgotten.
“No one seems to understand,” she said. “We’re not bad people. We’re desperate people.” They live in about 160 homes, more than one-quarter of which have no running water or sewer service.
Oscar Lathlin, Manitoba’s minister of Aboriginal and Northern Affairs, was not available for comment Friday.
A spokesperson for Indian and Northern Affairs Canada deflected questions about funding for the healing centre to the First Nations and Inuit Health Branch. INAC doesn’t fund arenas, she said.
There is money in this year’s budget to address the contaminated drop-in centre, said the spokeswoman. And, she said, Ottawa put in money to build a family violence centre in Shamattawa.
Redhead said that while alcoholism and solvent abuse are gripping problems in Shamattawa, the recent trend is for children to attempt suicide with prescription drugs. “They use whatever they can get their hands on,” she said.
lindor.reynolds@freepress.mb.ca mia.rabson@freepress.mb.ca