SUICIDE

Our community of Moose Factory, Ontario has been facing what has been called an epidemic of suicides. This has affected many of our families. Especially our youth. The entire community has been affected by such great loss. This was written for anyone who has ever contemplated their life.

Please don’t Don’t give up.

The pain might feel so heavy like a thick fog and so hard to see past.

The emptiness might be eating you up inside.

You might feel alone but you’re not. You are NOT alone.

Whatever happened, you can and will find happier days.

Or if it has been piling up to the point where you feel too weak to fight, let someone else help you carry the load. REACH out. Tell someone what’s going on. Anyone you think might listen. Call someone. Email someone. Yell if you have to. Even if you have to walk into the hospital. There is help. They won’t put you away thinking you’ve lost it. You will be protected until it passes.

Don’t lose yourself in drugs & alcohol if it has crossed your mind. It won’t help the situation. You’ll feel worse in the morning, and you might even lose your life...not really meaning to. Don’t take that risk because you’re gambling with your whole life and the people in it.

Think of your family. Think of your friends. You might feel like you don’t mean much but you do! It would cause so much pain and grief to lose you because you are LOVED beyond measure.

People never completely heal from that kind of loss. It’s a precious life cut short at the wrong time. It’s just not the way. It just brings on more hurt and havoc.

You have to think of the aftermath of it all.

If you have children or children in your life, let them be your light. Teach them, laugh with them, guide and love them so they might have a chance at happiness in this world.

Surround yourself with GOOD THINGS and GOOD PEOPLE in your life.

If there is something in your life that is a source of stress, change it for the better.

If you don’t like the path your on, step into another direction. You never know the places you’ll go and the people you’ll meet as you make your life. Your future wife or husband, your future children, true friends… its your life just waiting on you.

Picture everything good that you would want in your life and go that way.

You WILL find your way in this life… no matter how lost you might feel right now.

Pray for STRENGTH. Just call out. Because it doesn’t matter who you are. Your prayers are HEARD. You can stand and pray. Kneel to pray.

Pray loudly. Pray silently. Say a short prayer or pray as long and hard as you can. We each have our own way… even if you never thought to try it before. Remember that if you ask from within you will be carried through. You can pray about anything that’s on your heart. And if you keep praying you will find a complete PEACE and its a real and powerful thing.

Hold on to each other and don’t let go.

-Faith Turner 2009

We are a healing nation, so it is very heart breaking to see someone take their own life especially a young First Nations person who lost hope and felt like they no longer can take another step in their journey. The whole Aboriginal community is affected by such catastrophe because they look to the young people knowing we are the future and the elders look to us for strength. What does this do to our nation in healing? A lot of our youth are confused about who we are or who we should be as aboriginal people. We need to understand that it’s OK to worship the creator in our traditional way. I think we need to regain our traditional culture in order to reduce this suicide epedemic. We are a great people because we are able to forgive the churches and government when we shared our land.

-Kyra Kaminawaish
SEVEN Youth Advisory Committee member

A disturbing trend that young people are losing hope and more of them are turning to suicide as a possible end to the ills they face in life is not lost on the leaders of the Mushkegowuk territory.

The leaders convened an emergency meeting over two days in early May with their community members in order to address the issue.

More than 200 people representing all aspects of mushkegowuk communities, including educators, health professionals, mental health workers, frontline workers, parents, grandparents and youth attended the two-day summit to provide their input. At the conclusion of the meeting, leaders emerged and declared a state of emergency on suicide. As part of the declaration, representatives from all sectors in their communities have committed to working with affected First Nation communities to do everything in their power to stem the tide and to heal their communities so this situation will be reversed.

“In my community alone, I’ve lost seven young people over a 3.5 year period and the biggest question I ask myself every day is: What if these young people who have passed on could speak to me? What would they say?” asked Kashechewan Chief Jonathon Solomon after the meeting. 

He said the commitment by the communities now is for action.

“We are doing everything possible in my community to get our young people to talk,” he said. “We are focusing on what we can do as a community to change things.”

Mushkegowuk communities are taking a multi-pronged approach to dealing with suicide.

Community members and leaders are doing this by hosting a variety of suicide-themed discussions in different venues and with different age groups and sectors throughout their communities where the goal is to arrive at a series of achievable results.  They are also hosting a series of activities and camps aimed at empowering the youth by returning them to the Cree way.

“Fortunately, these are things communities can do by themselves with minimal resources,” said Mushkegowuk Council Grand Chief Stan Louttit, adding there is a massive push to host community meetings, visits at schools to talk about suicide and the hosting of public awareness drives. He also said the people are taking a thorough inventory of resources that exist so they can be accessed and used to assist their campaign. 

“We also know we will need assistance from other parties from time to time to be able to address some of the bigger picture, larger items as we move forward on this issue,” Louttit said, adding that while the communities are busy working directly with the youth, the Mushkegowuk leadership has kicked into high gear with proposal-making, lobbying and designing of action plans and have called upon the provincial and federal governments to assist the Mushkegowuk when required. He also said the two levels of government have responded through different departments at the federal and provincial levels and are working with them on various items.

One of the items involves a proposal requesting resourcing that will establish a commission to host a public inquiry. The inquiry will travel to communities and hear testimonies as part of a goal to get a full picture of the factors contributing to the current trends with suicide and to arrive at a series of recommendations to adequately address the problems identified by the inquiry.

“We don’t want band-aid solutions anymore because they just don’t work,” Solomon said.

The Ontario Ministry of Public Safety is facilitating the proposal-related discussions with the governments and their departments on behalf of Mushkegowuk Council. The other item Mushkegowuk’s leadership is working on with the provincial and federal governments is the issue of burnt out front line workers.

“Their lack of capacity and lack of numbers during an emergency is wearing us thin,” Louttit said, adding Mushkegowuk has called upon technical staff at Weeneebayko General hospital to design a mobile crisis unit concept that will respond when there are rashes of suicide attempts that overwhelm front line workers in communities. The idea behind the mobile crisis unit, Louttit said, is it will be a support to community crisis workers so the burnout issue is resolved.

“We also are in discussions with the various levels of government because even our office is really stretched thin dealing with these kinds of health issues,” Louttit said. “We really do need a health director for the organization to assist us. We want to make things happen. We want to do things, but at the same time, we expect that families will pick up the slack and do what they need to do as parents, grandparents and to be able to deal with issues in the home. It would be wrong to expect people to come and help them all the time.”

Special Message to the Youth from Grand Chief Louttit

“We invited a young lady that to our summit who is about 37 years old. She is dying of cancer. She has gone for chemotherapy in Kingston for her cancer treatment and we asked her speak about life, and she said ‘You know what? Here I am. I am fighting for my life. I want to see my parents. I want to see my kids. I want to see my community. I want to see my kids grow big. I want to see my relatives realize their dreams and do things in the future. I want to see Moose Factory get healthy and I don’t want to die. I want to be part of that.’
Just talking about what she said makes me emotional. And the message she had is: ‘Why are you doing this? Life is so precious. There is so much hope out there in our little community and in our region and we can be part of that solution and taking your life is not the answer.

You are running away from the problem and when I see people needlessly dying by taking their lives, I get mad, I get angry and ask why are they doing that?’

There is hope, said Louttit.  We have to open our eyes and minds and look out there and see what’s going on in our community and say I want to be a part of that solution. And we as leaders need to support our young people and say we hear you, and so I ask: How can we support you and help you?