WARNING: This story contains references to suicide.
Always smiling, always joking, always asking curious questions.
This is how Jenayah Skunk’s family described her at her funeral earlier this month in Mishkeegogamang First Nation.
Jenayah died by suicide late last month, according to her family and community. She was 10 years old.
The Ojibway community in northwestern Ontario has never experienced a suicide of someone so young, said Mishkeegogamang Chief Merle Loon, who is related to Jenayah.
“We’re still in shock,” he said.
Jenayah’s mother, Jamie Skunk, told Loon she doesn’t want any other child to experience this, which is why she consented to him speaking with CBC News about her daughter’s death.
“‘We shouldn’t be losing our kids this way,'” Loon said, quoting Skunk.
Loon spent more than 20 years with the Nishnawbe Aski Police Service (NAPS), the largest First Nations police force in Canada. When he started at NAPS, he didn’t see much suicide in the region’s First Nations, but the numbers keep rising.
The Sioux Lookout First Nations Health Authority (SLFNHA) serves 33 First Nations across northwestern Ontario, including Mishkeegogamang.
The organization has tracked 624 suicides in its communities since the mid-1980s, said Janet Gordon, SLFNHA’s vice-president of community health.
“The high percentage of those are youth,” Gordon said.
The unnatural death rate for SLFNHA communities is more than triple the provincial average. Meanwhile, people aged 15 to 19 made up nearly 40 per cent of hospitalizations for mental health and substance use in those communities between 2011 and 2021, according to its latest Mental Health and Substance Use Report.
We have to address this type of traumatic experience head on.– Chief Merle Loon, Mishkeegogamang First Nation
Since Jenayah’s death, Loon said, several partners have been providing crisis services in the community.
“We have to address this type of traumatic experience head on,” Loon said. “To heal is to address it, and acknowledge it and deal with it in a way that’s hopefully healthy for us moving forward as a community.”
‘Alarming’ rise in cyberbullying
Jenayah’s family said she was experiencing bullying at school and online, Loon said.
Last week, NAPS issued a public safety advisory about a rise in cyberbullying incidents across many of the 34 First Nations it serves.
“This is incredibly alarming, especially because of the known links between cyberbullying and youth suicide,” the service said in its statement.
“Suicide rates are an estimated six times higher for First Nations youth compared to non-Indigenous youth in Canada. In remote and far north communities, these rates are believed to be 11 times higher.”
NAPS encourages parents, teachers and guardians to speak with children about cyberbullying and its impact on well-being.
During a debriefing at the school with crisis support workers, Loon said, other children started opening up about their experiences with bullying and began to talk about it with their families.
“It was like a release,” he said. “It made me realize that these kids, they’re holding this in for whatever reason, and this kind of sparked that, ‘I gotta say something.'”
Addressing systemic issues
About 1,100 people live in Mishkeegogamang, which is about 500 kilometres north of Thunder Bay and is a signatory of Treaty 9. Highway 599 runs through the middle of the First Nation.
The community has mental health and addictions counsellors who come on a rotational basis, said Loon.
However, it can be hard to encourage people to seek these services, he said. Community members are dealing with a number of other stressors, namely overcrowded housing, which means they aren’t always prioritizing their mental health.
Kiiwetinoong MPP Sol Mamakwa, who is from Kingfisher Lake First Nation, attended Jenayah’s funeral. The day CBC News interviewed Mamakwa, he said he’d heard about another suicide in his riding.
He recalled the state of emergency declared in Wapekeka First Nation in 2017 after three 12-year-old girls died after forming a suicide “pact.”
He said it’s problematic when First Nations have to send people outside the community for care.
“It’s like we’re pulling them out of the river … dry them off, talk to them for a bit, and then when we send them back to the community — the same setting — we throw them back into the river,” Mamakwa said.
He’s encouraged by the number of services Mishkeegogamang offers, but said more must be done to address the systemic issues faced by First Nations in the region.
“That’s why we need to be able to address the upstream stuff, to make sure that there’s proper housing, to make sure that there’s clean water, to make sure that there is proper programming.”
Calls for land-based programming
At SLFNHA, Gordon said, there are a number of barriers to delivering services in First Nations, from the recruitment and retention of professionals to ensuring they have proper accommodations.
“Communities want to see more community-based programming, so they really have felt that the land-based programming that they do really makes a difference,” she said. “We need more of that at the community level, but they also need infrastructure.”
Loon is negotiating with the provincial and federal governments for a new health and treatment centre, something he said is long overdue. A key part of the proposal is incorporating more land-based initiatives.
“You heal from within, meaning that you gotta go back to your ways of doing things, back to the land,” said Loon. “That’s where healing happens.”
CBC News received an emailed statement from Jennifer Kozelj, press secretary for federal Minister of Indigenous Services Patty Hajdu. When asked about the centre, she said work is underway to establish a funders table, which would determine contributions from the First Nation and provincial and federal partners, “to assist the community in achieving their vision for community well-being.”
CBC News also reached out to Ontario’s Ministry of Health and received an emailed statement from spokesperson W.D. Lighthall, referring to the government’s Roadmap to Wellness for the province’s mental health and addictions system. Lighthall did not specifically reference services within Mishkeegogamang or its proposal for a new health and treatment centre.
‘We’re resilient people’
Kozelj expressed condolences for Jenayah’s death to Mishkeegogamang on behalf of Hajdu.
“We are in contact with Chief Loon to see if any additional supports are needed to support community members during this difficult time. This includes on-the-ground supports and additional wellness services as needed.”
She also pointed to the Nishnawbe Aski Nation Choose Life program, which is offered in the community and aims to support youth at risk of suicide.
“There is more work to do, but we will be there to support communities to ensure youth have a safe place and safe people to turn to,” said Kozelj.
Despite the hardships, Loon said, his people are holding their heads up high.
“There is always hope, and we’re a resilient nation — we’re resilient people,” Loon said. “Our core values are there. Our teachings are there. Our ways of doing things are still there.”
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