Last week, a Manitoba first nation declared a state of emergency due to their suicide rates. While many of us were enjoying the warm weather here in Michigan or even warmer weather down south without a care in the world, our neighbors to the north were facing a serious crisis. A crisis they have been facing silently for too long now.

CTV News, a Canadian news channel, reported last Wednesday that there have been six suicides in the last two months. There were 140 attempts in the last two weeks. This is horrifying. This should terrify you. It’s not just this one instance. And it’s not just Canada.

Both the U.S. and Canada have deplorable conditions on Native American reservations. Unemployment is significantly higher than in the rest of the nation. Alcoholism is more prevalent. Suicide rates are obviously incredibly high. Reservations are a miserable place to grow up and live for too many.

If anyone deserves to live in this country, it is the people who were here first. Yet repeatedly, Americans of European descent have forced indigenous peoples into appalling conditions. It is hard not to acknowledge that with the coming of Europeans to America came the genocide of Native Americans.

Sometimes in history class, there is a brief mention of the Trail of Tears, where thousands of Native Americans died. But beyond that, we often refuse to recognize the history and present reality of torture and misery that has been brought upon natives by European immigrants, and then the U.S. government.

Nobody hears about it.

We do not hear about half of Native American children being torn away from their families to go to ‘boarding schools’ at the turn of the 20th Century, where half of them did not make it out alive.

We hear about the poisoning of the water in Flint, Michigan, as we should, but we rarely hear that some Native Americans don’t even have consistent access to any running water. In fact, some people have to travel miles to come near to drinking water. There is no uproar over the conditions for natives. We are not demanding the resignation or arrest of any political officials when it is natives who are suffering.

We hear about shootings and suicides, but not about a suicide pact on the Cheyenne River Reservation where 10 boys drew numbers and committed suicide one at a time.

The genocide of indigenous people did not end with colonization 300 years ago. From the arrival of Christopher Columbus, to the Indian Removal Act, to such deplorable conditions that suicide has become an epidemic within Native American communities, the reality is that genocide never stopped.

Their voices are silenced. The tragedies we bring to the native peoples of our land face often go unnoticed and uncared about. How far will it have to go before we realize enough is enough? How do we let it get so bad that a state of emergency has to be declared over suicide rates?

It is shameful that our countries have allowed the indigenous peoples’ situations to become so wretched. Let this serve as a wakeup call that has been a long time coming.

To watch “The Canary Effect,” a documentary on the horrors Native Americans in the U.S. have faced and continue to face, which informed much of this article, go to www.topdocumentaryfilms.com/canary-effect.