A National Tragedy

WE ALL COME FROM SOMEPLACE – NOT JUST PHYSICALLY, but emotionally and psychologically. For many, such origins involve pain, sadness, even trauma. Some of them take the inner turmoil and turn it outward, inflicting pain on others as a way of dealing with their own. But others pull that pain inward and become prisoners in their own world.The latter point is important if we wish to begin to comprehend the recent slate of youth suicides in our aboriginal, metis, and First Nations communities. We watch in horror upon hearing of the suicide pact reach recently in the Attawapiskat First Nation community and confess our utter inability to either comprehend or provide solace in such a situation. Recently in an interview with the Huffington Post, Dr. Rod McCormick, an indigenous mental health expert, spoke directly to this issue of inner trauma:“There’s a lot of unresolved trauma and unresolved grief and loss. A lot of people in the community are containing their pain and emotions through drugs and alcohol, through disassociating, and sometimes all it takes is one trigger when people are vulnerable.  It could relate to childhood trauma; there’s abuse that occurs, be it physical or sexual.”For young people especially, that sense of a lack of belonging, of alienation, of being misunderstood can be an awful thing to overcome. And so, in their pain, they attempt to take their own lives – a national tragedy.This is all just another way of saying that where these troubled individuals and communities come from very much determines how they might see the world. For example, they all, to greater degree or less, have lived under the shadow of Canada’s Indian Act. Enacted in 1876, this Act was to determine how the rest of the country interacted with the indigenous communities, if at all. Here are just a few examples of what it contained according to the Working Effectively With Indigenous Peoples blog:

• Reserves were instituted and residential schools introduced
• Given new European names to replace their historic ones
• Any part of indigenous reserves could be used for anything the government saw fit, such as roads, railroads, waterway diversion, etc.
• Informed indigenous peoples that they couldn't form political bodies
• Forbade communities from speaking their own language
• Denied women status and forbade any indigenous person from voting

Some of these clauses were amended in the ensuing years, but this is where our original people came from and it has defined them for generations. Any of us brought up under such limitations and outright prejudicial racism would likely have turned inward as well and felt cut off from all that we might value. In such a world, suicide can become a cultural phenomenon, and that just what has transpired in places like Attawapiskat.When asked his thoughts on systemic racism, Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel said tersely: “No human race is superior; no religious faith is inferior. All collective judgments are wrong. Only racists make them”Tough words, but historically accurate. It’s one thing to hold racist tendencies but be unaware of it. It’s another thing altogether, especially in an era of supposed intellectual awareness, to allow such blindness in our own time. We all share the guilt. We must all share in making it right.