STAR INVESTIGATION
Northern Ontario children dying for attention
December 18, 2009
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Tanya Talaga
QUEEN'S PARK BUREAU
MOOSONEE, Ont.–Sabrina Vincent found her boyfriend, Johnny Kioke, 18, hanging from a tree during a summer baseball tournament.
Nellie Trapper returned from her night shift counselling children at a group home early one Saturday morning in January to find her 17-year-old son, Thomas, hanging in his bedroom.
Thirteen teens in the remote communities dotting the James Bay basin and throughout the isolated north have committed suicide since the beginning of the year – all by hanging. At last count, another 80 have tried to take their own lives.
Yet the one lifeline for northeastern Ontario's tormented kids, the Payukotayno children's aid society, is under constant threat of closing. The Moosonee-based agency is broke. The costs of protecting children in the north are prohibitive – in an emergency it is not unusual for them to shell out $400 a minute to charter a plane to pull a child from a fly-in-only reserve.
The agency is struggling to exist under an epidemic of teen suicides and constant arguments with Queen's Park politicians who balance child protection with fiscal sustainability, and who measure protective actions against the province's $24.7 billion deficit.
The effects of a massive economic meltdown on Wall Street, thousands of kilometres to the south, hit home in Moosonee. Greed, fat bankers' bonuses and easy-come mortgages have left Ontario grappling with the impact of the worst recession it has seen in 80 years. The province is even considering selling off assets such as the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corp. to raise money.
Payukotayno has received a one-time, $2.3 million bailout from the government so it can keep the lights on and pay salaries. But for Ontario's vulnerable northern children, the economic downturn has meant fewer child-protection visits, a near-empty youth centre because there is no money to run programs, and a sky-high unemployment rate on the local Moose Cree reserve.
"We are nowhere near to what we should be doing for the kids," says Ernest Beck, executive director of Payukotayno.
He believes fewer children would die if the agency were better funded.
"There is no doubt in my mind, this crisis of suicide could have been averted , to some extent," says Beck, a soft-spoken former Mushkegowuk grand chief. "We are very limited in terms of what we can do in terms of providing help to the community."
Beck is standing in the agency foyer beside a white, artificial Christmas tree, while his board meets behind closed doors metres away.
Inside, Indian deputy chiefs and representatives from some of the province's poorest communities – Attawapiskat, Kashechewan, Moose Factory Island, Fort Albany – sit around a giant, circular table, underneath a dream catcher with the circumference of a bass drum.
They have gathered for an urgent meeting on two seemingly insurmountable challenges – how to stop their kids from dying and how they'll come up with enough money to pay the bills.
"It is incredible, trying to switch gears like this, dealing with so many suicides while the ministry (of children and youth services) slices my throat," Beck says quietly.
His words are almost inaudible, but they echo like a scream.
When a teen is found dead in Moosonee, or across the river on Moose Factory Island, everyone feels it.
Agency staff have resigned. Others take stress leave.
Some try to provide crisis intervention while coping with their own grief.
Payukotayno board members preside over funerals, agency workers sing in the church choir as the children are buried, and, unimaginably, some staff whose life's work is to help troubled teens have lost their own to suicide.
Nellie Trapper is a child intervention worker at Payukotayno. But, for all her training, she was powerless to save her son.
She came home early in the morning on Saturday, Jan. 24, to find Thomas, her baby boy, hanging in his bedroom.
"I don't have answers as to why he did it," says Trapper. "I wish I knew."
Since his death, she has searched her mind for answers she understands she'll never have.
She knows Thomas faced peer pressure with alcohol and drugs and bullying, and was in and out of school.
When she left for work that Friday evening, she thought Thomas was fine. "I told him I would see him in the morning. He looked okay."
"There were a lot of things I went through, by myself, after he committed suicide. I am a single parent. I used to phone him. Check up on him to see if he was okay, a mother thing. That one night, I did not call. I didn't call. How come I didn't call that night and I called other times before?"
Trapper is a survivor of Bishop Horden Hall, the Anglican residential school on Moose Factory Island that was one of the last to be shut down in Ontario in 1969. Beck also attended Bishop Horden, and many in Moosonee are inextricably connected to the school.
Trapper knows her experience – being taken from her family at age 6 and sent away to an English school – had an impact on her son."I was messed up from residential school, not knowing what actually love is, unconditional love," says Trapper.
But she vowed to teach her son differently. She raised him with love, taught him the value of kindness, of right from wrong, and the importance of being Cree.
"I made an effort to tell my child every day I loved him. `I love you, my boy,' and, I would hug him," she says. "My relationship with my son, I am so grateful for that.
Trapper has had to work through grief and anger.
"I got angry with him," for committing suicide, she says. "But I know what I must do now, I must forgive him. I must forgive my son for what he did."
Trapper has begun to talk about her experience. She has even started a suicide support group called SOS.
They met for the first time in July, a group of about 30, and they meet every two weeks.
"Love, kindness, respect. We need to show more of that to our children, us adults," she says. Sabrina Vincent, 26, a child protection worker, feels her partner Johnny Kioke's death two years ago in August was the start of the suicide epidemic in Moosonee.
"I have dealt with it, but it has taken a lot," says the mother of two. "He was living with us for a year. So, it was very difficult."
The 18-year-old's death occurred at a baseball tournament. "We had gone out because I play every year," she says. "He hanged himself on a tree."
She will never forget the shock of having to identify his body.
"They did not cut him down," she says. "I have that mental image. I have to carry it around with me. If you are the one to find them, that mental image is there every time you close your eyes."
When one suicide happens, others follow.
"There were a lot of attempts after that," she says. "It seemed to start around that time. One affects many."
In isolated Moosonee, bitterly cold in the winter and cut off from the world save for the train and small aircraft flights, there is nothing for the youth, she says.
"It has become a norm to see people walk down the streets, drunk. Watching that every day, it is normal and it shouldn't be," she says. "They are hurting. They are just bored, they have nothing to do."
After the baseball tournament, she didn't want to come back.
"A lot of people put a lot of blame on me. It was very difficult to go through. I started having anxiety."
She sought treatment at the local health clinic, but the waiting list was long. "One night I was crying out in pain. The doctors put me on a referral and that was it, I never heard back."
Toronto Star