It's Not a Crisis of Public Health; It's a Crisis of Indigenous Health

Abstract

On January 8th, 2017, in the small Northern Ontario community of the Wapekeka First Nation, twelveyear-old Jocelyn Winter took her own life. Two days later, another twelve-year-old, Chantel Fox, followed suit, and four other children were fown out of the remote community for emergency medical treatment. This is Canada in the 21st century, where suicide rates are fve to seven times higher for First Nations youth than for non-Aboriginal youth, and where suicide rates among Inuit youth in Canada's north are among the highest in the world, at 11 times the national average . This is Canada in the 21st century, where federal funding cycles are failing to budget for the preservation of Indigenous Life. According to CBC News Thunder Bay, Health Canada, the department of the government of Canada with responsibility for national public health, received but was unable to fund a proposal from the Wapekeka First Nation to hire and train four mental health workers to help establish counseling sessions for young people identifed in a suicide pact . Citing an infexible system, Keith Conn, the regional executive for Ontario with the First Nation and Inuit Health Branch of Health Canada intimated that the proposal had come at an "awkward time" by which point all available funds had already been allocated. But for a people dispossessed of both their own sacred chronology and that of the state's fscal calendar, when is the right time? Lisa Guenther would see this as a prime example of social death, whereby in a biopolitical sphere marginalized and multiply-marginalized populations are arranged to be deprived of moral purchase . The perniciously fscal twist lies in the violent colonial mathematics that subvert Indigenous people into fgures in an economic system that are subject solely to a state of fscal time. As Billy-Ray Belcourt states in his essay, Meditations on reserve life, biosociality, and the taste of non-sovereignty, health is the "measure of a subject's ability to adjust to structural pressures endemic to the afective life of setter colonialism ".' While Indigenous bodies are confned to reservations and in that sense "budgeted" out of a chance to build future worlds, the suicide crisis extends far beyond the Wapekeka First Nation into the public discourse around Indigenous health and survivance. This is not simply a public health crisis, and we have seen that coding it as such has done little for the communities, anyway. Worse even than the epistemic violence of misinterpreting and misrepresenting the experiences of Indigenous peoples within our Western discourse, we now invite them to the table to the speak and commit a further ontological violence upon them (to take Spivak's term to a conclusion amenable to the peri-colonial state in which we live) where the government interferes with the individual's ontological and historical vocation to be more fully human. Therefore it shouldn't be considered a stretch to say that in our present social conception Indigeneity is inextricably linked to a state of being "unwell" insofar as this radicalized crisis is at the convergence of two distinct geographies of reservation and statehood. We need to recognize this as a crisis of Indigenous health, and to treat it as such through a lens that centers cultural safety and wellness. We need more than a framework, as our present solutions do not identify the necessary jurisdictional mandates or resources, responsibilities are not defned in a clear way, and there are no defnitive timelines. Simply put, a framework does not have the sheer weight or power of an ofcial strategy, but we need a more discursive politic if we are ever to address the social and colonial traumas as the heart of Canada's Indigenous suicide crisis and to rectify the dispossession. Amber Dean's Remembering Vancouver's Disappeared Women: Settler Colonialism and the Difculty of Inheritance, notes on page 20, that "critique is not equivalent to rejection or denunciation… the call to rethink something is not inherently treasonous but can actually be a way of caring for and even renewing the object in question." Within the past two decades, community capacity building It's Not a Crisis of Public Health; It's a Crisis of Indigenous Health Eva L. Grant EXPERIENCE 48 SJ PH and community empowerment have emerged from a critical space as key strategies for reducing health disparities and promoting public health. The solution I would propose is threefold, comprising: a) delivering culturally appropriate wellness programs b) fostering greater collaboration between organizations to deliver services. c) engaging scholars Diverse Indigenous scholars theorize material dispossession by the Canadian state, by capital, and by non-Indigenous peoples; deconstruct dehumanizing ideologies in popular Canadian media and academic writing; and describe and analyze Indigenous resilience (survival), resistance (decolonization), and resurgence (existential self-determination). Indigenous Mental Health is a thing. Research into "evidenced-based, culturally relevant health practices that emerge from a constructionist framework rooted in Indigenous psychologies" is more needed than ever. Such practices would address the major themes of identity/self, historical trauma, cultural-specifc mental health and well-being practices, cultural mistrust, empowerment, and political action. I propose therefore the SACRED method, which addresses issues of colonial oppression, considers the wishes and safety of community, and advances their own visions of self-determination and self-governance.