Fighting Suicide

In Indian Country, poverty, isolation, lack of adequate resources to treat mental-health issues, substance abuse and family problems compound the risks of youth suicide, Wagner said.

“There is this feeling of being trapped, and having nowhere to go.”

This quote is from this Seattle Times article: Tribes fight suicide, a leading killer of native youth

Suicide is a complicated issue and it seems as if most people don't understand the plight of Native people. Read some of the comments to the article and you will find the ignorance and the reflection of the desire to assimilate Natives to the oppressive society.

People tend to belittle the problems that lead a troubled teen to suicide. I've heard an officer give his theory of high rates among Natives in Anchorage due to the darkness of winter. Are we really that simple?

Let's explore each of the reasons given in the quote for answers/clues/reasons behind high rates of suicide. And please remember that for each of these reasons given, there is a tendency to blame these Native people (and I must acknowledge that it might have been Wagner's intent but the tone of the newspaper article tends to read that way as evident in the article's comments). Also remember that I see the relationships between what seems to be unrelated reasons and I will point those relationships out.

Poverty: Native people were sometimes removed from their traditional homelands so that outsiders could live and farm there (big example: the Cherokee and the Trail of Tears), and were usually moved to a dry desert area with less resources. Limited economy on reservations leads to low employment rates and therefore poverty. Poverty is also tied to self-worth, when our means of traditional livelihood (hunting, gathering, canoe-building, artwork, medicine) were removed our ways of determining our value to our societies were taken away. What is the meaning of our lives, what is our purpose? Related to poverty is inadequate education.

Isolation: Again, we were sometimes relocated to an isolated location so that we wouldn't be a "problem" to the general public any longer. Reservations were created to create isolation. Out of sight, out of mind. In Alaska, traditional villages were connected through trade and traditional gatherings/celebrations brought people together to visit. Modern transportation is expensive and modern economy removes the trading and bartering system (it is still there but at a much smaller scale). Traditional dances and gathering were illegal and demonized by the missionary system. Dances and celebrations have to be revived in order to combat isolation. Isolation is also related to family life, traditional family recognizes a huge extended family that would live together and provide emotional and economic support when needed. Modern family is restrictive, the nuclear model creates isolation by claiming that only the mother, father, and children are important. Only the nuclear unit has the "right" to deal with its own "business". When a problem arises the burden falls on the nuclear unit and the sense of community responsibility is lost.

Lack of adequate resources to treat mental-health issues: Native health care is guaranteed through treaty-rights. Treaties were a negotiation where a tribe allows outsiders to live and use traditional land in exchange for acknowledgment that a tribe is a sovereign identity (self-governing) and in exchange for municipal services that all American communities enjoy. Municipal services such as running water, sewage/waste management, education, and health care (something changed in American society to privatize health care). The services are not paid for by American tax-payers, the perpetuation of this lie, I believe, is tied to the desire to remove treaties and remove the responsibilities of the American government. Services are paid for by land trusts such as forestry. Again, reservations that were moved to a location with less resources and poor land trusts will have poor municipal services. Indian Health Services clinics and hospitals also tend to have recruited poor/low quality doctors and health-care workers, professionals that are attracted to reducing their student loans more than caring for people of a group that is better understood for its stereotypes than its true value.

Substance abuse: Western culture has a horrible habit of taking good medicine, such as tobacco, and abusing it until it becomes an addiction. Western culture doesn't view alcohol as a poison because many European groups have evolved an enzyme that helps their bodies metabolize alcohol so that they can 'handle' alcohol. This enzyme is not present in most of the world's population and it turns 'white normalization' on it's head because Europeans are the special subset, not the norm. The science behind alcohol consumption hasn't become widely known and people view the common and natural inability to process alcohol as a weakness or it is somehow tied to the person's mental or emotional capacity to control themselves. I believe that most alcoholism is a combination of genetic predisposition to addictions in general and a past riddled with emotional trauma. I have a lot of empathy for alcoholics because I believe most people are trying to escape or numb something horrible, they need emotional support to heal their trauma in order to end the addiction. Lack of empathy from society towards addictions only compounds the problem.

 I want to reiterate because I want everyone to know this simply: it is NORMAL for the human body to not be able to consume alcohol. There is nothing wrong with you, you are as the Creator intended, you are a decent human being that can live a full and happy life without alcohol.

Family problems: The traditional family was broken by almost every facet of the federal government's assimilation policy but what holds a larger share of the cause of broken Native families is boarding schools. I get sick to my stomach when I think of recounting the horrible things that happened in boarding schools. 50% of the young children that were taken away from their families didn't survive attending boarding schools. The schools attracted pedophiles and many students were molested and raped. All children were ridiculed for their hair, clothing, language, and culture and all of these qualities were systematically stripped away. Surviving students returned home speaking a different language than their parents and grandparents, and this effectively breaks the tradition of transferring oral history and traditional education. The traditional methods of dealing with emotional trauma were lost (and often deemed to be illegal by the local Indian Agent's discretion) and boarding school graduates were left to deal with their traumas on their own.

A cycle that I see in oppressive society is this: create trauma, leave victims without support systems for dealing with trauma, blame victims for bad behavior due to inflicted trauma. Related to this cycle is the ignorance to the cycle. There is a close-guarded and systematic denial of the trauma cycle. Lack of empathy for the victims of oppression leads to an over-inflated empathy of the oppressor's self, which is reflected in what I call White Guilt. (I need to devote an entire article to White Guilt later.) 

After the boarding school era came the adopt Native children out of Native families era which lead to further family problems. Both of these events are symbolic of a long history of viewing Native people as wards of the state, which means that we are viewed as being unable to care for ourselves and therefore unable to care for our children. In the oppressive society there is an ingrained distrust of Native families and it is another part of the cycle of blaming victims. Of course, family problems are more complicated than this short discussion and they are also related to the following points.

The quote from Wagner above does not mention several horrible factors that would affect any human being, such as sexual abuse (including domestic violence), generational depression (or multi-generational trauma),  and systematic racial discrimination.

Sexual abuse: I could point to statistics but the sampling is usually very flawed and underrepresents the reality of high rates of sexual assault, abuse, and rape against Native men and women. I believe the high rates of sexual abuse are due in a large part to the sad cycle of abuse introduced by missionary workers at boarding schools and in isolated small village churches. Child victims that are left without support to heal from their abuse repeat the cycle with their family members. Alcohol and drug abuse compound the abuse by creating behavior that wouldn't have been committed by a sober attacker and often times the alcohol or drugs were consumed in order to escape or numb childhood sexual abuse. Sexual abuse among family members creates intense stress within the family, with some members unaware of the abuse and the victim/child struggling between wanting to be loved by their abuser and wanting to end the abuse by speaking out.

Multi-generational trauma: Each generation bears the trauma from the generations before. The youngest generation has the most risks and struggles and also has less resources and support. Risks are worse now than in previous generations because abusive substances and destructive weapons are easier to obtain. Traditional support systems and medicines (herbs, gatherings, songs and dances) have been degraded and taken away systematically by assimilation policy. Support that is usually given by extended family members isn't available when a child is removed from their traditional community. Traditional methods of determining self-worth have also been removed by systematic denial of the right to hunt, fish, sing, dance, practice medicine, and create art. The non-traditional economic system is greed-based and places more value on the amount of money a person has rather than on their character's qualities or how they help society progress.

Generational depression is the result of hundreds of years of oppression. The goal of the US government was to solve the "Indian Problem" by systematically removing our culture after outright extermination didn't work or was no longer 'appropriate'. In the oppressive society the oppressors hold all the pieces and make up all the rules. And this is where hypocritical oppressive rhetoric is created in order to escape from guilt (guilt is absence of empathy for the victim), which ultimately results in victim blaming. The rhetoric is used to justify past oppression by abusing the negative definition of karma (they deserve what happened before because of how they behave now). Oppressive society creates unfair environment, economy, and poor mental health and then blames the victim.

The oppressive society also holds the power to define who is Native through state and federal recognition, the government is also able to revoke recognized status at their discretion. Native status becomes a form of internalized oppression when Native people demand of each other to prove that they are 'true' Natives. Oppressive people also demand that Native people behave as an idyllic, static, and pre-contact society. Oppressive society continues to retain the right to scrutinize and judge Native behavior because the desire to assimilate Native people into English American society is still strong. The desire to assimilate correlates to the desire to control resources.

“There is this feeling of being trapped, and having nowhere to go.”

Every aspect of life can be negatively affected by simply being a Native youth. In my life I've struggled with every bullet point that I've discussed. In my early 20's I struggled with a dark and deep-rooted depression. My thoughts of suicide scared me and I felt out of control, as if my brain was a separate entity from the rest of my self. As complicated as the reasons leading up to suicide can be, the reason I survived the depression was, looking back, simple. I knew I had something to contribute to society. I wanted to be a mother - I wanted to continue to break the cycle of abuse and raise children in a healthy environment. I have thoughts and gifts that I can share with the world. I have a voice.



  

Columbus Day

"for with fifty men one could keep the whole population in subjection and make them do whatever one wanted." ~ from Christopher Columbus' log book

Columbus carried out this plan and committed genocide until there were no Arawak left in their homeland, their island. Is this the mindset that we wish to celebrate? Before I continue I would like to share more disgusting examples of what Columbus and his men did to the Arawak (according to Howard Zinn): hung 13 Natives at a time in honor of Jesus and his disciples, tore live children apart and fed them to dogs, enslaved mothers - overworked and underfed they could not produce enough milk to feed their babies.

It almost feels like the examples should be enough to convince anyone that Columbus was not a man worthy of remembrance.

There is a sinister force at work here; dark, invisible, pervading among all American citizens regardless of their origin (what kind of message does it send to immigrants when Columbus is celebrated at a federal level?) or method of elementary schooling. Historical guilt. It is the force that drives American historians and public school teachers to change history to myth, to remove or ignore murder, overt racism, and greed. (I feel that I am missing some big point here, this force is hard for anyone to understand and simply talking about it makes *every* person cry out 'But I don't think or feel that way! I know it's not my fault'. And yet it exists.)

To attempt to make myself clear, I need to highlight a line from the opening chapter of Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States:

"To emphasize the heroism of Columbus and his successors as navigators and discoverers, and to de-emphasize their genocide, is not a technical necessity but an ideological choice. It serves- unwittingly-to justify what was done."

Unwittingly - no need to feel threatened by the unintended justification of Columbus' actions. What I would like to see is very simple. Change the tone of the day by removing his name, call it "New World Day" or "The world is round? Day" or something that has been meditated upon and voted in such a way that pesky historical guilt doesn't get in the way. Stop the harm that historical guilt is unwittingly causing.

I can't leave this post without pointing out that Columbus was a horrible navigator and his crew didn't discover America. Norse settlers living on Greenland traveled southwest to areas of Canada for timber, a full 400-500 years before Columbus.

The idea of Manifest Destiny began with Columbus, he claimed land because he had the power of a Christian God on his side. His actions set the stage for how all Native Americans would be treated and regarded. The end of genocide will not happen until he is no longer mystified as a great man and his name is no longer celebrated.

Bias and Blind Teaching

While attending the University of Washington I took the Environmental Studies series, and during one of the 200 level classes we read a research paper about pre-contact Pacific Northwest Native population. The paper basically said that pre-contact population estimates were skewed because European disease had spread through traditional trade routes ahead of European explorers. So when explorers first arrived what they saw was a population that was already decimated by a wave of disease. It was previously thought that explorers arrived when Natives were inland for the season.

I was really excited to be reading about this subject and thought that our class was discussing it to open our eyes to anthropology and question the conservative/status quo population theories. Then it was time to discuss the paper during our class time with the teaching assistants. Their goal was to have us ask ourselves what our own biases were while reading this paper and their example was to tell us that 'scholars' had rejected or refuted the author's findings because they felt that he held a bias in favor of Pacific Northwest Native people. They claimed that Natives had something to gain by proving that their populations were bigger than previously thought and the author's work couldn't be trusted if he was 'Native friendly'.

I raised my hand and told the teaching assistants that I'm Native and I thought the article was interesting and it's science so why can't we believe it? The T.A. gave me a look and said 'well, you're Native so you have a bias, too. Don't you?'.

I was appalled that we were given this great opportunity to turn the way that pre-contact population was viewed around but instead we were told to be careful to believe what we read because the author might be biased. Why did the example have to involve a Native issue?

(I have a lot of theories and analysis that I could give but I've run out of steam with my thoughts tonight and will have to edit and say more later. I've got more stories of anti-Native teaching at UW to add, too.)

Manifest Destiny

This isn't going to be a history lesson or a very scholarly discussion about where the idea of Manifest Destiny came from. I think that the Wikipedia entry is fine if that's what you want to learn about. What I want to talk about is what lies below the thin layer of political correctness that tries to cover everything, from what we are taught in public school to the wiki entry.

So, let's get this out of the way. The concept of Manifest Destiny is the purest form of racism that you can find. There are cutesy descriptions of what it means but the way I see it, Manifest Destiny is the idea that Europeans were favored by God and God's invisible hands cleared the way for European settlers.

I have to admit that my interpretation of the term is based on my experieance of learning about the term in high school. I think that I was in the 9th grade and had just moved from Iqaluit in Canada, so if it was something that was covered in a previous history lesson I missed it. The way that I remember it being described was American settlers wanted to move westward but there were always struggles with Native groups. Native American immune systems are incompatible with European 'herd' diseases. The invisible hand of Divinity was clearing the land ahead of settlers. I made my own connection to conclude that settlers believed that God favored them and wanted them to inhabit America and He showed His favoritism by killing the Natives for them.

I was frustrated and appalled that people would believe that God favored one race over another. (I was raised to believe that God loved all of mankind equally.) There was no outlet for my frustration because there was no class discussion of what was really going on. We simply moved on to the next topic.

And so I remained in a fog of confusion over what was really bothering me about this concept. For many years I couldn't understand why it annoyed me so much. Because the concept was explained in vague terms and covered up with just enough political correctness junk to mask the real meaning.

I think that there are many ethical implications for teaching the concept of Manifest Destiny in this way. This is the best example of history being written by the winners. It's a form of brainwashing and it creates a culture of sub-conscious racism. It penetrates so many facets of American culture and I cringe every time that it is thoughtlessly mentioned in movies and television.

What happens is that well-meaning and kind people, who would never have overtly racist thoughts or behavior, end up saying subtle racist phrases. When I try to explain my ideas I am responded with 'well, isn't that what happened?' and 'don't call me racist!'. (I have a very hard time explaining where I am coming from and it's very frustrating. I even worry that what I am saying here won't be understood.)

So here is the discussion on theology that we can't avoid. I don't believe that there is anyone that can prove to me that God created a ranking system based on the color of a person's skin. Even if you aren't religious, prove me wrong with science. There is no inherent difference between races, we are all the same. Why would God want to kill millions (I will have to talk about pre-Columbian population in another entry) of his children? I believe that what happened was a test for both Natives and Europeans. It's unfortunate that most Europeans interpreted susceptibility to disease as a sign of their superiority and used the knowledge of lack of immunity against Natives. It's also unfortunate that Natives allow history to be taught in this way.

No, God did not favor Europeans and gave them America from east to west coast. And I'm not saying that anyone is racist for using unconscious racist phrases. It's just a product of the way that history is taught in public schools and it needs to change. Educate yourself, stop and ask yourself if this widespread idea is ethical, and teach your children to read between the lines and ask questions for themselves.

Introduction

This is a place for me to type out my thoughts on various issues and topics relating to the Native American experience. I am Inupiaq and was born in Nome, Alaska and lived there until I was about eight years-old. My favorite, and most influential, places to live were with other tribes. These included my hometown - site of a gold rush and one of the few 'wet' Native villages; Mobridge, South Dakota - where Kevin Locke taught me to count on my ribs and pray in sign language; Iqaluit, Baffin Island - before the Canadian government gave the land back to the Inuit, I was allowed to take Inuit classes until middle school; and Neah Bay, Washington - where I went to high school and didn't fully embrace the culture until I went on a Canoe Journey with my brother, also the site of 'controversy' as the tribe fights to begin hunting whale again. From these places I take many lessons and am grateful for the opportunity to have grown up with Native people. I attended the University of Washington and intend on finishing my degree within their Program on the Environment. I found a Native community within UW as well, and that is where I found my passion for Native issues. For the time being I am a stay-at-home mother of two and I am unsure how quickly each essay will be finished. Forgive me if my words seem jumbled and trailing, the best time for me to type is late at night right before bed (and sometimes beyond my normal bedtime).

The first essay I would like to write will be about Manifest Destiny, and there is the inspiration for this blog's title. I enjoy learning from others and welcome comments and ideas and I hope that my readers have an open mind for what I have to say.

Quyanna!