| Summary: | 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 ...
|
|---|