Towards an Understanding
“The reason why Aboriginal youth kill themselves at a rate six times higher than the overall population is to stop the pain and hopelessness that result from being subjected to colonization. "You can’t understand Aboriginal suicide without looking at colonization. We, as Indigenous people, must realize that we did not have sky-high suicide rates before the European invasion (contact is too clean a word for what actually happened). "When Canadian society says we’re sick that’s like a psychopathic killer complaining to someone he’s tried to strangle repeatedly that she should do something about the marks on her neck and see a psychiatrist about her recurrent nightmares and low self-esteem.” -- Richard Bull, “Sweetgrass Coaching” I don’t know what else it could be. It’s not like we are all mentally unstable, or that we are taught to yearn for death, or anything in our culture makes us more prone to it. There is a dark current that reaches out from time to time and drags some of