It was 1:45 a.m. when Melanie Phelps was awakened by a phone call. It was a supervisor at the Attawapiskat Hospital. The nurses were overwhelmed, the voice said, and Phelps had to come in.

As she made the quick walk from the nurses’ compound to the hospital, she remembers thinking, “Oh my god, here we go again.”

The Brockville, Ont., native is 55 and has spent almost 35 years working on the small Ontario First Nation about 700 kilometres north of Sudbury. As the hospital’s patient care co-ordinator, she’s used to making do with scarce resources.

According to the local health authority, Attawapiskat’s 15-bed hospital has no full-time doctors — they fly in four days a week, three weeks out of the month — and on weekends and evenings only two nurses are on duty. There hasn’t been a regular mental health worker on the reserve for nine months because of a shortage of housing.

Attawapiskat has a population of about 2,000 people. Phelps estimates the hospital can address about a quarter of their health needs.

But in the early hours of Sunday, April 10, the hospital staff was in even greater need of reinforcements than usual, Phelps said. Seven children had been brought in at once with possible drug overdoses from suspected suicide attempts.

“It was chaotic,” she recalled of the scene she walked in on. The hospital was crowded with kids — whom she said ranged from 9 to 14 years old — their relatives, and all four of the reserve’s police officers.

According to Phelps, the nurses determined that not all seven children had ingested pills. (Young people who authorities fear may have attempted suicide may be brought to the hospital as a precaution, making it difficult to determine the nature of incidents reported as “attempts.”)

Two who did take pills were medevaced out of Attawapiskat for treatment in a hospital further south, Phelps said, while two more were kept for observation.

As overwhelming as the admittance of seven children was, they were not the only ones brought in that day who were considered at risk for suicide. Attawapiskat Chief Bruce Shisheesh reported there were 11 suspected attempts in 24 hours that day. Another five children attempted suicide on Friday night.

The police and local health authority could not confirm those numbers.

Attawapiskat called a state of emergency on April 9, when the reserve’s band council declared that resources had been exhausted by an epidemic of suicide attempts on the reserve. The decision has made the plight of the First Nation a national issue, and refocused attention on the poor living conditions and lack of basic services in many indigenous Canadian communities.

Initial media reports stated that the 11 suspected attempts in one day are what triggered the declaration, but according to Shisheesh, the band council was unaware of that alarming figure when they made the declaration.

He said that he had been concerned about mounting suicide attempts for months; the reserve had seen 100 attempts since last September, he said, and almost 30 in March alone. Seven of those involved people under 14, and 43 of them involved people under 25.

Shisheesh said he called an urgent council meeting on April 9 with the intent of filing the emergency declaration with Ontario’s emergency management office. The meeting at the health services building began just after 7 p.m., he said, and at 9:24 p.m. Shisheesh signed the declaration. He and the eight band councillors present didn’t know that around the same time the hospital was being overwhelmed with patients.

“We had no idea,” he said. “But we did hear an ambulance go by the building.”

Only after the meeting broke up after 11 p.m. did he drive by the hospital and see two police cars parked outside. Concerned, he went inside, and was astonished by what he saw — the hospital was crowded with kids being assessed for possibly taking overdoses.

“I couldn’t believe my eyes,” Shisheesh said. “I was worried. I was shocked.”

The children “were getting out of control” and “acting up” because they were upset that they had been brought to the hospital by the police, the chief said. He decided to hire five local men to act as security in the ward.

Jack Linklater, Jr., a 16-year-old Attawapiskat resident who has led “healing marches” in the area to draw attention to the problems of local youth, said he knew four of the young people who were hospitalized on the day the emergency was declared.

“It really bothered me. I broke down,” said Linklater, who spoke to the Star with the permission of his father. “All I want to do is give them advice and help them.”

At around midnight, one mother said she got a phone call from the hospital, alerting her that her young daughter had tried to take her own life. The mother, who the Star is not naming to protect the identity and privacy of her child, arrived at the hospital to find the girl lying in bed hooked up to an IV.

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“She said she took some (pills). A handful,” her mother told the Star in a phone interview. The girl said her friends had given her the pills, but her mother wasn’t sure what kind they were.

The hospital kept the girl overnight and released her on Saturday, but on Monday she tried to overdose on vitamin pills, her mother said, and she was hospitalized again. The woman is worried about her daughter and is trying to get her into treatment in a facility in southern Ontario.

The mother said she is struggling with an alcohol addiction herself, and wants to get sober. “I’m going to seek help for that, too,” she vowed.

The emergency declaration in Attawapiskat has had an almost immediate effect, and elicited promises of long-term support from both the provincial and federal governments. Already, the province has pledged $2 million in short-term aid and dispatched a 13-member emergency assistance team that includes mental health workers, nurses and security personnel to help provide the reserve with round-the-clock health care.

A spokesperson for Health Canada said the ministry had also partnered with local agencies to deploy a six-person team that included youth support workers, counsellors, and a psychologist to the reserve, while the local health authority dispatched five additional mental health counsellors.

The assistance has been welcomed in a community that lacks the basic resources most Canadians take for granted, but for some it has come too late.

When Stephanie Hookimaw, 39, heard about the state of emergency, she said she could only wonder why it didn’t happen sooner.

Hookimaw’s 13-year-old daughter, Sheridan Hookimaw, killed herself last October. The family told the Star that she hanged herself. She is the one fatality to date from the rash of suicide attempts in Attawapiskat that began in September.

While Stephanie said she hoped the support that has flooded into the reserve as a result of the emergency will benefit local youth, she’s left with the painful knowledge that it didn’t come in time to save her own child.

“They should have called a state of emergency on September,” when the crisis began, she said. “Then I wouldn’t lose my daughter.”

But Sheridan’s great aunt, Jackie Hookimaw-Witt, said the emergency has also helped the family deal with Sheridan’s death. She said that for months the girl’s relatives have felt “imprisoned” by grief.

“We needed to talk about Sheridan because (her suicide) was so traumatic and it felt like nobody cared. She was forgotten, and it was so unjust, so unfair,” said Hookimaw-Witt, 50.

Ontario Health Minister Dr. Eric Hoskins said he learned about the declaration from his chief of staff late on the morning of Sunday, April 10. “We immediately began to mobilize the ministry to see what our immediate response would be,” he said.

By last Monday, an advance emergency medical assistance team had arrived in Attawapiskat, and Hoskins himself made the trip on Wednesday with Children and Youth Services Minister Tracy MacCharles. He said the situation was “absolutely tragic” but he was struck by the “courage” of the local youth.

Emergency declarations are commonplace for many of Canada’s First Nations, and there have been five in Attawapiskat alone since 2006. But Hoskins said the release last year of the final report by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which revealed the extent of historic government mistreatment of indigenous people, and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s promise to “rebuild” the relationship with aboriginal groups have created “a new environment” that make it more likely Canadians will heed Attawapiskat’s distress call.

“I think that perhaps we’ve become better listeners,” he said.

With files from The Canadian Press.

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