In another world, the death of 11-year-old Elaina Cecilia Nancy Beardy would have shaken Canada’s smug belief that this country offers all its children a good and safe start. Her death would have been the lead story on newscasts and in newspapers, inspiring governments and all of society to move mountains to ensure this never happens again.
Instead, Elaina’s death by suicide on Oct. 28 scarcely received any public mention or attention outside of her family’s northern Ontario communities of Kingfisher Lake First Nation and the neighbouring Sachigo Lake First Nation, situated about 350 km and 450 km north of Sioux Lookout, respectively.
Princess Elaina, as her family called her, wore glasses, had dark hair and a beautiful smile. She was laid to rest in snowy Kingfisher on Nov. 11. It took a couple of weeks for her to return there because her body had to be flown all the way to Toronto to be examined by Ontario’s coroner’s office, because of a lack of services in Thunder Bay – adding injury to an already traumatized family.
Fear now permeates Elaina’s community as parents and family members in the fly-in Oji-Cree community worry that other children will follow in her wake – that her death was part of a pact. Tragically, the North has seen this before: Six years ago, seven girls who knew each other from group homes and care facilities in the South and kept in touch on social media died by suicide. They were Alayna Moose, 12; Kanina Sue Turtle, 15; Jolynn Winter, 12; Chantell Fox, 12; Jeannie Grace Brown, 13; and Amy Owen, 13.
In 2018, I delivered the CBC Massey Lectures on the alarming rise of youth suicide in Indigenous communities. Since then, suicide in northern First Nations communities has just become normalized – even though nothing about these deaths is normal. There have been at least 599 reported deaths by suicide in 30 Northwestern Ontario First Nations between 1986 and June, 2023 – a staggering number that is already out of date as I write this. What does it say about our society that it continues to turn a blind eye to children, teens, youth and adults who would prefer to die than live?
In Kingfisher, there have been three deaths by suicides in the past year, deputy chief Lott Sainnawap told me earlier this week. Some of the kids no longer want to go to school, said Mr. Sainnawap, who was Elaina’s great-uncle. They are struggling with cyberbullying – something nearly impossible to police. Addictions to drugs and alcohol are prevalent. Families are scared.
“My daughter is three months older than Elaina. Her name is Breanna,” he said, softly.
There is a brand-new school that accommodates children all the way to Grade 10 – a small triumph for a Northern community that previously had to send its children south to cities in order to go to high school. Of the 550 on-reserve residents in Kingfisher, 135 are school-age children.
When I asked him how they spoke to their daughter about suicide, he said, plainly: “We don’t try and beat around the bush. We talk about the facts. I don’t know how the other families talk to their kids. But we speak from experience as well, with what we experienced as teenagers.”
Kingfisher experienced many deaths by suicide in the 1980s and 1990s, he recalled. The community was affected by the fly-in Anglican priest Ralph Rowe, a convicted pedophile who is believed to have had more than 500 victims, all of them boys. The terms of a $13-million class action lawsuit was approved by the courts late last month.
Mental-health counsellors rotate into the community every two weeks, two at a time. “No one can last the whole month,” Mr. Sainnawap said. “It is different up here. You can see patients all day and all night. You interact with your patients even after hours. There is no 9-to-5.”
What continues to overshadow this and other similar communities is the lack of wraparound mental health and well-being care. Flying counsellors in from elsewhere is a patchwork solution born from emergency. Children and their families need to be cared for and treated together, traditionally, out on the land and with Western medical support where needed. Our children and families need hope, a sense of belonging and pride in who they are, and our communities need to be in control of our own health care – not reliant on faraway governments and programs to kick-start healing.
We need health care transformation. Only then can communities be given a chance to heal, so that we can live in a world where tragedies like Elaina’s death can be shocking again.
Tanya Talaga