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