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From 1969 to 1996, the Indigenous teenage girls of the Sioux Lookout Zone of Northern Ontario grew up surrounded by poverty and rapid societal change. Substance abuse, vandalism, and suicide rates were rising, and families and health care providers were worried about the health of adolescents in their communities.1-3 This paper examines the instances teenage girls were mentioned in the collection of documents about the Sioux Lookout Zone Hospital at the University of Toronto Archives in order to analyze the challenges that these girls faced in gender role negotiations, substance abuse, and teen motherhood.

From 1969-1996, in the Sioux Lookout Zone of Northwestern Ontario, there were no local high schools, and teenagers travelled to boarding schools in larger communities further south. During these years, the University of Toronto coordinated medical services in the Sioux Lookout Zone, and many documents in the University of Toronto Archives capture the challenges faced by adolescents from the Zone while pursuing a high school education. In this paper, I use Indigenous voices in the records of the Sioux Lookout Zone Hospital to study the experience of going to high school from the perspective of the Social Determinants of Health. I argue that the poor quality of on-reserve elementary schools and the isolation of leaving home for high school combined with less time to learn traditional skills to set students up for failure in their academic studies.

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