HEARING OF A suicide calls forth only silence at first. There’s nothing you can say. Language vanishes into the void as the heavy punctuation of a life ended prematurely settles on your shoulders. A halt, a full sentence stop. An emptiness invades your spirit, and you understand clearly the nature of powerlessness.
Indians die at rates five to six times higher than the rest of the population. Among our youth, that translates to mean an incredibly high incidence of suicide. Our mortality rates at birth and from disease, violence and suicide have always been far greater than the norm. In the nation state at large, the prevalence of suicide among First Nations you this a more pressing issue than any land claim, treaty negotiation or rights dilemma. It’s far more important than payments aimed at allaying old hurts, and far more vital to our well-being. Native people don’t need to die in such numbers. We need to live. But for many of us, life brings such soul-eroding despair that it’s an arduous journey to continue.
I learned something of this as a kid. When I was adopted by a non-Native family and plucked from my northern life, I confronted swift and incomprehensible change. There were no words to adequately frame what I felt. Pain existed at a non-verbal level. But fortunately for me, there was baseball.
In my northern schoolyard when I was nine, there was no room for a ball field. There was barely room in all that bush and rock for a playground at all. Our games were kickball, tag or hide and seek. So the game my new classmates played at recess and during lunch hour was a mystery to me. When I was picked to play right field one day, I had no idea what to do. I’d never thrown anything as round and perfect as a softball, and my first throw from the outfield missed badly. When I took my first swing at a pitch, I spun around completely and fell on my face. Everyone laughed, even the teacher. I walked back into the school building with my head hung low. In my gut I felt four things: fear, anger, embarrassment and shame.
I feared I would never fit in or be accepted. I was angry at the laughter, embarrassed at my inability to do what others took for granted and ashamed that I had failed. I couldn’t raise my head in class for fear of the smirking looks that would come my way. No kid wants to let on that they feel like a dumb outsider.
No one knew the depth of the feelings my encounter with a strange game had engendered in me. But I was inventive and courageous, and I made up my mind to learn what the game was all about. I signed books on baseball out of the library and I studied them every night. In a book called Baseball in Words and Pictures, there was a formula I could follow. From then on, I was determined to implement the science of the game.
In the pasture beside our house stood a crumbling old sheep barn. On the barn wall, I painted the dimensions of a strike zone, and from here I measured out the eighteen metres to the pitcher’s rubber, which I marked with a scrap of old board. Every day from then on, I threw an India rubber ball at that barn and retrieved the grounders with a borrowed glove. I practised until I could hit the strike zone every time and scoop grounders effortlessly. After that, I started throwing the ball as high up on the barn’s wall as I could. When it sailed back in a long looping arc, I would chase it and try to catch it. I spent a lot of time hunting it down in the long grass at first, but eventually I could gauge the flight of the ball through the air and snag it with my glove.
Next I took a bat into the pasture, tossing the ball up and trying to hit it. The book had said to keep my swing level, to start with my hips and let my hands follow them through to make contact with the ball. At first I failed miserably. No matter how hard I tried, I could not hit that ball. But after a few days, I was arcing the ball high out into the field. I’d sprinted after it and hit it back the other way. I practised alone. Although I did it out of those hard feelings in my gut, I not only learned the skills, I came to love the game.
Every night as I fell asleep, I imagined myself as a hero on the ball diamond, racing around the bases to the cheers of my teammates. But I was still too shy to try out what I was learning, so I paced around the fringe of the diamond at school while the other kids played. Then a challenge came from another school, and the rules were that everyone from each class had to play. Grumbling, the boys in my class stuck me out in deep right field, where I could do as little damage as possible. Well, I made several great catches in the outfield that day, and I hit the home run that won it for my team. My throws were hard and on the money. I started to be the first one picked in every game after that, and the feelings in my gut vanished like a puff of chalk on the baseline.
What does this have to do with suicide? Everything.
Every Native person, young or old, who confronts a system that mainstream people take for granted carries those same four feelings: fear, anger, embarrassment and shame. Left unattended, those feelings can corrode your spirit. In a very real sense, that is the nature of Native life in Canada— dealing with the lethal stew of emotions that come from a marginalized life. All of us, reserve-based or urban, have confrontations with established systems that confound us, and we have the same simmering reaction. Some of us learn to navigate the territory. Others don’t. Either way, the challenges are great.
There’s a part of me in every Native kid who chooses the dark way out. Somewhere deep inside I’m still that frightened, lonely youngster who desperately wanted to make sense of things. There’s something in that all of us can relate to, actually, but we get so busy and so insular with our manufactured lives that we forget we are part of the same human family. Nonetheless, every needless death lessens us and diminishes our light.
Suicide hurts everyone. For Native people in Canada, it’s an epidemic. On some reserves, the rate of youth suicide is horrendous, and there’s incredible agony for those left behind. The only cure is prevention, and when First Nations leaders discuss the future of our people and chart an agenda for change they’d better start with the issues concerning our youth because this is the generation we will eventually hand the future to. We need our youth strong. We need them here.