An Onkwehonwe in Kanata

The thing about grief is that you never know when it’s going to sneak up behind you, whirl you around, and kick you in the teeth. It can be during the most mundane moment, or in the middle of a task that you really need to concentrate on. It can be first thing in the morning or in the darkest hours of the night. It’s fast or it’s slow, it can creep up on little cat feet or stomp into your awareness in heavy combat boots. And then you find yourself helplessly weeping over the things that were lost, the might-have-beens, the should-have-dones. Leaving you bereft, and sad, and having to feel everything all over again. When we were home for Christmas, my daughter got an article of clothing that was Jewel’s. In keeping with Haudenosaunee custom, we give away a deceased person’s belongings, so that everyone has something to remember them by but also so that the person’s spirit will not be tied to the earth by their possessions and are free to continue their journey. Carole got a cool, neo...

I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. Christie Blatchford is writing a whole series on the issue of aboriginal suicide… “Lifting the Veil on Native (there’s that N word again!) suicide” is the name of today’s atrocity I mean column. That she has the audacity to do this is amazing to me. It is so loaded with her smug, white privilege and consequently that hand-wringing – “Oh look, those poor NATIVES are so despondent, the white people have to rescue them” thing, which is pretty much the tenor of this article. It centers around some benevolent white policemen – her favourite fucking subject – who are trying to work in suicide prevention in the Nishnabe Aski Nation. More power to them if they can make a difference, but we have been working on this terrible issue ourselves and need to develop more of our own culturally-relevant ways, thank you very much. But since this new series comes in the wake of her so-called “expose” of the poor white folks’ problems in Caledonia, I’m feeling a tad s...

“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 ...

On Friday November 12, my beautiful cousin Jewel woke up early, got ready for school as usual, then went to the basement of her mother’s house and hung herself. She was 12 years old. I cannot describe the shock, the shudder of horror, the indescribable heartbreak that reverberated through two families and an entire community when this news spread like wildfire. I found out through a phone call around noon (on a day that I was coincidentally celebrating my birthday) and I thought I was going to pass out, throw up, or do both at the same time. I fell to my knees and sobbed when I got off the phone. Within two hours I was in the car with my shell-shocked kids, on the way back to the reserve to be with my family. I believe that I have cried more tears these past four days than I have in my entire life, and my life has not been without its share of heartbreak. But this, this loss of our talented, lovely, brilliant little Jewel, this has eviscerated me and has somehow ruptured something in m...