EGGERTSON READING

The Bridge

Key Ideas/Concepts and Definitions:

FAST= First Nations Action and Support Team which focuses primarily on prevention and “postvention.”

Thesis:

Hagwilget Canyon Bridge, which is located in the British Columbia territory, it is a single lane structure that is suspended above the Bulkley River. The Bridge is attracted by a number of youth who wants to end their life.

Major Arguments:

July of 2009, 18-year-old Shaun Webber was on the bridge, he was amongst hundreds of suicide attempts that RCMP, doctors, nurses and mental health counsellors in the area of B.C. have responded too. One of the horrifying spectators that was present that day was Roy Guerra Mella who was the new mental health counsellor in the community, he believed he could have saved Webber. Roy Guerra Mella stated “I wasn’t allowed to intervene. I was told by the police that no one was allowed to speak to the boy, because they had their own team coming.” It was too late for Webber who jumped off the bridge and died.
When the RCMP got the call about a suicidal person on the bridge, they responded according to their protocol. They blocked the bridge from either side to prevent anyone from inadvertently escalating the situation. The officers then called crisis negotiators in Terrace, B.C., almost two hours away, and talked to Webber while waiting for them to arrive.
The suicide data was startling enough to garner national media attention and expressions of concern from the province, but no inflow of new provincial or federal dollars to pay for prevention efforts.
After the tragic incident that took Webber’s life, community members came together to fight for the services that were clearly in need for the youth in Gitanmaax.
This devastation is familiar to other First Nations communities across Canada, as well as the country’s Inuit regions. Suicide has become so commonplace it is almost normalized. Aboriginal youth take their own lives five to six times more often than non-Aboriginal youth, although precise statistics are hard to come by. Among Inuit youth, the suicide rates are even higher — roughly 11 times that of non-Aboriginal youth. Young Inuit men ages 15 to 19 are particularly at risk.

Conclusion:

Mounties called a community meeting where individuals in the community came to express their needs towards the community members. At the end of the night two suicide-prevention activities and two critically important teams were born.
FAST was one of the teams that were born that day. Their prevention activities include cultural rediscovery camps and mentoring workshops where older youth teach younger children their roles in their culture and society. The team focuses on nurturing wellness, pride, identity and resilience in the face of the trauma inflicted by the residential school legacy and colonization. FAST also supports families after a crisis has occurred, because they may be at increased risk of suicide themselves.
The second group was a crisis response team that Guerra Mella headed. For the next three years, Guerra Mella, Gloria Stevens and other mental health and addictions counsellors were always on call, whether the phone rang during regular work hours or not. Any time anyone in crisis called a hotline, it connected to Guerra Mella’s BlackBerry. He then alerted the team member closest to the person in danger and headed for the scene himself.

Reference:

Eggertson, L. (2015). The bridge. The United Church Observer. Retrieved from http://www.ucobserver.org/justice/2015/10/bridge/