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Antoine Mountain
Guest columnist
Monday, November 26, 2007
As promised at the start of this series to do with the residential school years I also wanted to put in a word or two to help the youth of today to understand how we got to this point today with many of them wanting to end it all.
Feelings of suicide go a long ways back for our Dene people, although we are only now really seeing our people act on it.
In the last few years we have been hearing a relatively new term, "PTSD", a fancy medical term called "post-traumatic stress disorder."
There isn't a lot of research that has been done on this human condition, but it became more common after soldiers started coming back from Vietnam seriously bent out of shape.
And it turns out that many of our own First Nations peoples went through the same kinds of severe trauma that these young U.S. soldiers did, and are living with the same symptoms of this disease.
In my last article I mentioned a few failed attempts at suicide that happened while I was going to tech school in Thunder Bay, Ont., way back in the early 1970s.
I think a lot of our survivors of the residential schools had similar experiences, though for the most part we have learned to live with it hidden away back there somewhere.
I used to spend a good part of each year, before 9/11, going to the American southwest, to visit amongst our southern Dineh relatives, the 'Navajo'.
I did this each winter for ten years, four months at a time - from the middle of October to the middle of February - when I would return to paint for another summer in the North.
One of the things I always recall from those times was that almost all the people I associated with down there were these Vietnam veterans, soldiers who had gone through this same PTSD.
When I thought about it some more I found out that these people share exactly the same kind of lonesome feeling as we, survivors of the residential schools, do.
It is not exactly something you can point to directly and say "this is what it's all about," otherwise we could do something about it.
In fact, it is true that the medical world and healers are just lately finding out more about this one condition. But as a survivor of these schools I do sort of know how the young people of today can end up feeling a deep sense of loss and inexplicable grief and despair that would make one want to reach for a rope or a gun.
Just know, young people, that you are not alone, and believe it or not, help, in one form or another, is on its way. All we can do is hold on, for now.
- Antoine Mountain is a Dene artist and writer originally from Radilih Koe'/Fort Good Hope. He can be reached at www.amountainarts.com