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Indigenous leaders have demanded an inquiry into the escalating number of deaths of Indigenous children placed in group homes, following the recent deaths of two First Nations girls in Ontario, Canada.
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Thirteen-year-old Amy Owen of Poplar Hill First Nation was plucked from her community in Manitoba and flown to a group home in eastern Ontario. On April 17, she committed suicide.
“I don’t know why the parents have to go through this. I always thought they would bury me first. I always prayed for her, hoped she wouldn’t do anything like this,” her father, Jeffrey Owen, told the Toronto Star.
“She would secretly call us. At the agency she was at, they forbade her to talk to us and they always delayed and delayed visits,” he said.
Sixteen-year-old Fort Albany First Nation's Courtney Scott died four days later in a fire at her group home in Orleans, Ontario. She was also living away from her community, having been removed at a young age along with her siblings.
“To me, I haven’t seen my granddaughter for so many years, she was so small the last time I saw her. She was maybe 12. She was happy when she saw her mom,” her grandmother, Madeline Koostachin, told the Toronto Star.
Months earlier, in October of last year, another Poplar Hill First Nations teen, 15-year-old Kanina Sue Turtle, was taken into federal care and died on Oct. 29, 2016. Her family still doesn’t know the cause of her death.
Owen, Scott and Turtle were all a part of Nishnawbe Aski Nation’s 49 northern Ontario First Nation communities.
While the Nation has jurisdiction over the well-being of its members, provincial legislation and how services are delivered prevent the Nation from adequately exercising its right.
“It is very obvious the services, the resources and the policies governing those resources need to be fixed. Why should a child have to travel so far away to get basic services?” the Nation’s deputy grand chief Anna Betty Achneepineskum asked, referring mainly to mental health services.
“We want an inquiry.”
She added that although there is no comprehensive database recording the number of deaths of Nishnawbe Aski youth in state-sanctioned care, “the loss of two young lives in a matter of weeks must be examined.”
The lack of access to mental health services in many First Nations communities throughout Canada is the crux of the issue.
Amy Owen had no access to the services and counseling she needed close to her home, explained Achneepineksum, which completely cut her off from her Anishinaabe culture, language and from everything she knew.
The young girl was under one-on-one supervision in the group home because she was at high-risk for suicide, making her death all that more perplexing for her father.
“I don’t know how she could have done this when she was supposed to have all this support. Why was she left in a room for so long? By the time they checked on her it was too late,” he said.
“If they were closer to home, we could visit. Amy wasn’t into hurting herself when she was with us. She was smart, outgoing, she liked to have fun. She loved her family, especially her little sister. She even looks like her,” he added.
Responding to the recent deaths, Irwin Elman, Ontario’s Provincial Advocate for Children and Youth, said, “Frankly, children should survive our attempts to protect them. That is a pretty low bar in terms of outcome but ... we need to do something now.”
“Immediately they should create a roster of clinicians, in my opinion, mental health professionals and trained child and youth workers who can be quickly deployed to homes in crisis to support young people and stabilize the homes,” he told the Toronto Star.
“And then the ministry should determine the numbers and situations of First Nations children living in group homes in southern Ontario. And then they should immediate reach out to those kids through culturally appropriate means to see how they are.”
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Attawapiskat Protest: First Nations Suicide Crisis Is Genocide
Last year, Idle no More organized protests calling attention to the suicides of Indigenous youth in Attawapiskat, occupying offices of Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada.
The remote northern First Nation community of Attawapiskat declared a state of emergency after 11 people attempted suicide in one night in 2016. Hundreds of people had attempted to take their own lives over the course of the year in the community of 2,000 people.
Attawapiskat is also just one example of a broader national tragedy of exceptionally high suicide rate in Indigenous communities, both on and off reserve, across Canada. The foundations of the crisis are deeply rooted in Canada’s ongoing colonialism and racist policies towards First Nations, which date back centuries.
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