Journalist
Tanya
Talaga gained attention with Seven
Fallen
Feathers, about the young
indigenous men who disappeared and were
found
dead while attending indigenous high
school in Thunder Bay. She gave the Massey
Lectures in 2018, and I was given the
book. All
our Relations: Finding the Path Forward,
Anansi, 2018, has five chapters,
one for each of the lectures. Her
first
chapter, We
were always here, begins
in Thunder Bay where young indigenous were
found dead. This is in Nishnawbe
Aski Nation (NAN) a political organization
comprising 49 First Nations spread
over the Northern two thirds of Ontario.
Seven girls from Poplar Hill First
Nation and Wapekeka First Nation took
their own lives within a year of each
other. We get a look at the scale and
personal impact of suicides and the
politics of ignoring the situation in
Ottawa. Talaga
makes Senator
Murray Sinclair’s point that it is
important for a person to know where they
came
from, where they are going, what their
purpose is and who they are. Indigenous
children should enjoy their rights as
children – like clean water – but they
should also be able to feel proud of their
history and who they are. Talaga
introduces
the problem of indigenous youth suicide,
giving accounts of particular young
Indigenous
who died by suicide in Canada. Each
tragedy is preventable and makes a huge
impact on a community. High suicide rates
are a modern phenomenon. In Canada,
before the forced resettlement of Inuit
into towns and before the Indian
Residential Schools, suicide was rare. The
same high suicides rates hold true
for the Sami population in Scandinavia and
for Indigenous peoples in Brazil and
Australia. Indigenous young men now have
the highest suicide rates globally. She
reminds
us of Thomas King’s thesis that Indigenous
peoples have been caught up in an
artificial history imposed by the wider
society and its movies. Recently, Dr.
Dumont at the University of Sudbury has
worked at indigenous answers to “where do
we come from” for the Anishinibeg people -
with a different worldview. His work
is in the tradition of Turi, a reindeer
hunter and Sami who in 1910 wrote Turi’s
book of Lappland. The Sami people
have lived for thousands of years in the
North of Norway, Sweden, Finland and
Russia as reindeer herders. Turi describes
the traditional life, family
structure, schooling of children and
traditional treatments. He describes the
migrations of the people with the
reindeer. As the numbers of settlers
increased in the Nordic countries, the
Sami were pushed out of traditional
grazing lands to allow the development of
agriculture. They are now at the
extremes. Few know how to work without
reindeer. The
Aborigines
say they were always in Australia. They
were cultivating crops and
living in large villages when settlers
arrived to establish a penal colony. Those
villages were very old. In the past, North
and South America had a larger
population of Indigenous peoples. In
northern South America, peoples developed
astronomical
charts and used them in constructing
pyramids that formed the centres of
cities. Between 800 and 1200 near today’s
St Louis, Missouri, Cahokia was the
largest and most advanced city north of
the Rio Grande. It was replete with
pyramids, plazas, thatched houses, temples
and public spaces. In Brazil, 1-5
million people lived in the Amazon area
leaving us some two hundred vast geoglyphs
– geometric designs on the ground. The New
World was already an Old World. Talaga’s
own neighbourhood
of Beaches, Toronto, is on the traditional
territory of the Mississaugas – as
the French dubbed the Ojipwe. They were
allied with the Three Fires Council,
one of the oldest political confederacies
on Turtle Island. It exists today. Talaga
recalls Senator Murray Sinclair’s concern
about knowing who we are, where we
came from and where we belong. She is a
single mother of two children, with a
Polish father and a mother from Fort
William First Nation. She grew up in a
Toronto
“cookie cutter” neighbourhood disconnected
from her mother’s ancestry, “a
by-product of the residential school
system and the Indian Act”, wanting to
reclaim what was lost for the next
generation. The
second
chapter, Big
Brother’s Hunger, introduces
two survivors of a residential school, now
community leaders. They are on a raft
on the Albany River introducing a team of
youth to the land, spirituality and
Indigenous
issues. There are insights. Big brother
has an insatiable appetite, devouring
everything. Little brother has become a
slave to gather food – chopping down
everything he sees, sweeping up all the
fish, stealing the gold and diamonds
deep inside the earth. When will Little
brother say “enough”? To the south of
the Albany river pit mines have laid waste
to miles of boreal forests. Prospectors
are moving north searching for diamonds
and chromite. One De Beer’s mine can
pump 150 million litres of water per day
from a pit to access diamond deposits.
This water flows into a tributary of the
Albany. The Cree have surrounded these
rivers for as long as they can remember.
The Indian is tied to the land, the
language, the way of thinking and of
living. A bulldozer cuts into the soul. So
the youth are shown where they come from. A
third
school survivor, now an Elder of Nishnawbe
Aski Nation, shares wisdom over his
Tim Horton’s triple triple. Fur traders
were the first to come, changing the
relationship to the land so we took more
than was needed. Then the missionaries
changed our relationship to the creator.
There are now more ways of believing
so belief is weak. Then the Indian Act
took people off the land and put them onto
reserves. Then came the residential
schools, separating children from
families,
communities and the land. Knowledge was
not passed on. Parents lost their
purpose. A
year after
Columbus, the Pope legitimized Spanish
colonization with a Doctrine of
Discovery for lands belonging to no one.
To indigenous people this term meant
land in common: for the Plains Indians
tracking buffalo, for the Inuit crossing
land and frozen sea by dog sled, and for
the Sami following reindeer. To
settlers the term meant that land followed
the rules of territorial acquisition
and occupation. The Doctrine had a major
impact on emerging nation states into
the 18th-20th
centuries. The Treaty of Paris ended the
American War of Independence. It
recognized the US as an independent
republic
but said nothing about sovereignty for
indigenous nations. Land promised to
those who fought with the British went to
the Americans. In
North
America, territorial acquisition was by
treaty with separate indigenous nations
– some 370 in the US. Talaga gives an
account of the brutal breach of those
treaties.
There were wars taking huge swaths of
indigenous territory, relocations of
indigenous to west of the Mississippi. All
of the buffalo were killed - so
ending the life and livelihood of Plains
Indians. There was a “Trail of Tears”
forcibly removing Cherokees under
appalling conditions. Then came the Indian
Residential Schools in the US. A US
indigenous population estimated at 600,000
in 1800 was 228,000 in 1890. In
Canada,
treaty 9 was negotiated in 1905-1906 for
lands between the Great Lakes and James
Bay - Ojibwe, Cree and Oji-Cree
territories. For $4 per year the
Indigenous
were to live on reserves that they
understood would be theirs for residence
with continuing access to the lands. The
fine print had them giving up the
land. Those who signed were told their
children would have an education in a
residential school. The Indian Act
governed every aspect of indigenous life.
It
granted status, a number, and gave power
to send children to distant residential
schools. The Inuit in the arctic used dog
sleds to follow the migration
patterns of various artic animals
travelling over frozen sea and land.
Demand
for furs led to moves further North.
Settlements developed around Hudson Bay
Company
trading posts. Residential schools were
introduced. In the 1950s 100 autonomous
Inuit groups were moved into 13
settlements. Canada outlawed the
traditional
way Inuit handled dogs. Between 1950-1970
the RCMP culled the sled dogs. The
end of the dogs ended the possibility of a
traditional Inuit lifestyle. Extermination,
isolation
and assimilation repeat in the history of
indigenous peoples around
the world. Brazil is a particularly tragic
example. In the early 1500s the
Portuguese set up coastal settlements and
developed a colony of plantations
supplying sugar, run by a mixture of
African and Indigenous slave labour. In
1969 English writer Norman Lewis wrote a
report “Genocide” about the
enslavement and murder – particularly the
further land grab to develop rubber
plantations in the 1950s and 60s. Whole
groups of indigenous were massacred.
Government
recognition of limited lands for the
Guarami in 2005 was followed by a court
ruling stall in 2010 and renewed killings
of leaders as indigenous tried to
occupy their land. The Guarami currently
have a tiny fraction of the land
promised. The suicide rate is over 30
times that of the general population of
Brazil. The Third Space
chapter explains the community involvement
in the
birth and naming of an Indigenous child
and the wider kinship and community
support for that child, such that removing
a child results in multiple losses.
An Australian expert in mental health with
an aboriginal background served on
the Commission investigating child sexual
abuse in Australian schools,
churches, sporting clubs, orphanages and
disability services and the responses
of these bodies. The report had a guide to
the Aboriginal and Torres State
Islander communities to take into account
their unique factors. Between 1910
and 1970 Aboriginal and Torres State
Islander children were forcibly removed
from
their homes. Some were put into white
homes, others into orphanages and other
institutions. Many were physically or
sexually abused, neglected and given a
poor education fitting them only to be
labourers or domestic workers. The
indigenous peoples were largely jobless in
impoverished conditions in cities
and towns where they fell into patterns of
addiction leading to poor health and
low life expectancy. They suffered
discrimination and were over-represented
in
the prisons. Children grew up with no
sense of where they belonged. They began
killing themselves. A
1997 Australian
report “Bringing them Home” put
recommendations before the Australian
parliament. There was an apology, but most
recommendations still await action.
Today’s
youth are born to insecurity and are at
risk of suicide, self-abuse or sexual
abuse. Any responses to trauma and mental
health needs come from the same
churches that were a source of the
original trauma. The Third Space is a
place
in between the desired world of belonging
and care and the traumatic world
experienced by forcible family and
community separation. That is where
indigenous people in Australia are now
caught. Twenty
years
ago Mike Metatwabin, tasked with
translating at a NAN leadership meeting,
happened upon a young man preparing for
suicide. Mike listened and talked until
the crisis passed. He had stumbled across
a sexual abuse victim from an
Anglican priest, Rowe. Rowe had been
widely respected and trusted in indigenous
communities, but he was a pedophile. Mike
became the lead commissioner for the
Mushkegowuk Council of Cree Nations’
report on suicides. He began reaching out
to sexual abuse victims across NAN
territory. The impact on the lives of an
estimated 500 abused by Rowe is ongoing,
and suicides are one of the
consequences. It compounds the effects of
the residential schools: broken
marriages and families, physical and
sexual abuse, violence and domestic
assault, broken men with confusing
thoughts and few places to turn to. Many
who
took their lives in the spike of suicides
in the 1990s were youth abused by
Rowe, who was convicted in 2012. Today the
communities in this area have one of
the highest suicide rates in the Western
world. There is a plan to respond: Focus
groups for elders followed by focus groups
of men and women living through that
time, plus training for band councilors
and front line workers on sexual
boundaries and trauma, with protocols for
responding. The
Inuit are
involved in conversations on sexual abuse
and gender based violence to protect
children. Sexual abuse is a factor in
suicides but it has not been talked about
openly. It is acknowledged in the
Saskatchewan First Nations Suicide
Prevention
Strategy. Seabird is a seeming modern
progressive community in Fraser Valley BC.
It is part of the Stó:lō Nation. It is
working on suicide prevention. There is
an account of the Elder leading this work
and a gripping account of a mother
traumatized
by the suicide of her son, who was
followed in suicide by some of his
friends. “People
who
do not live in an Indigenous community
cannot grasp what it is like to live in
an environment where suicide is the norm
…” Death is our life says a South
Australian Elder. Suicide prevention
strategies reach to Nunavik, the Inuit and
Washington State. In
Brazil,
Indigenous people continue to be pushed
from the land. Since 2007 there have
been 833 murdered and 350 suicides.
Lacking land, some still live “in the
gutters.” There can be clusters or a
series of suicides when suicide becomes
normal and an ever-present option as has
happened in North America, including
Navajo, Inuit and Northern Ontario. There
are
studies to suggest that connection with
the community plays an important role
for youth establishing who they are and
where they belong. This is the shape of
a suicide prevention strategy for
indigenous youth for Seabird and Frazer
Valley. Scooping children into state care
with white families is problematic in
Canada where state intervention should
focus on solving family problems. A
similar issue is growing in Brazil. Colonial
communities
continue to grapple with intergenerational
trauma – the Sami from
policies of assimilation, in particular in
Norway. Suicide among the Sami led to
Simon, a successful Sami musician,
returning to following the reindeer herds
and struggling against the loss of land
for cottagers. This underlying land
issue is a fitting end to the chapter. I breathe for them,
Chapter 4 shows aspects of health care
that I
found new. Designed by Indigenous
architect Douglas Cardinal, Ottawa’s
Wabano Centre
provides holistic relevant health services
to First Nations people. Talaga
describes indigenous people discussing how
suicide affects youth in their
communities. A young First Nations
paramedic tells how youth use 911, but
rushing them to a hospital that then lets
them go isn’t enough – they need
on-going care. “I work CPR on young
people, I breathe for them” he said. The
Indigenous want holistic medical care and
the experiences of residential
schools and Indian Hospitals has left a
mistrust of Western medicine. From
1942-1952 experiments on child nutrition –
including malnourishment - took
place at 6 residential schools. Parents
were unaware! In
Australia,
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders
don’t access health care for lack of
culturally
appropriate care and they fear being moved
away from their community. Two
thirds of
American and Alaskan Indigenous people
live in urban centres. A third of them
don’t
have a doctor and a third don’t have
health insurance. The US Federal Indian
Health Service is for those in one of 573
recognized tribes - for 2.2 million out
of 3.7 million Indigenous people. And
living conditions are part of health.
Without income, employment, food, shelter
and social equity, Indigenous
children live without a sense of security
and without human dignity. A
physician
in Sioux Lookout gave Talaga the history
of Indian Hospitals – segregated
hospitals developed in the 1920s because
regular hospitals didn’t want to treat
Indigenous people. Between 1930 and 1940
TB death rates were the highest ever
recorded and rates for children in
residential schools were the highest.
There
was a damning report of conditions in
residential schools in 1907 by the chief
medical officer of Canada, but it was
ignored. It was apartheid. Talaga says
the health and well being of Indigenous
peoples has never been equal to that of
non-Indigenous Canadians. TB
segregated
wards and wings of hospitals proliferated
in Western Canada – some not only for
Indigenous, but also for Chinese or
Japanese. The nature of the buildings
adapted
as hospitals and the quality of staff were
shocking.
The conditions were horrific –
overcrowded and
with TB patients mixed with other
contagious illnesses. Added to this, there
were harmful experiments and questionable
treatments. Abuses and experiments
extended to children – like TB drug
testing. TB
spread to
the Inuit in the 1950s and by 1956 1/7 of
the Inuit population was in the South
for care - some never to be seen again. In
the 1960’s most Indian hospitals
were shuttered but in 1988 there was a
hunger strike to protest the Sioux
Lookout Zone hospital conditions. That led
to an investigation and report on
living conditions including alarming rates
of youth suicide. There were
recommendations for a single regional
hospital, clean water, proper sewage
treatment and power systems. In 2010 Sioux
Lookout opened a health centre that
is modern and culturally sensitive. The
other recommendations remain
incomplete. In general the health system
in Northern Ontario is still in crisis
and the UN rapporteur on Indigenous
peoples says those conditions extend
across
Canada. In
Australia,
untreated Indigenous hearing issues have
been found to affect school
performance and lead to behavioural
problems. Housing shortages and poverty
compound
educational difficulties. In Brazil,
poverty and preventable diseases in
children lead to high levels of childhood
death. In Canada half of First Nation
children live in poverty and life
expectancy is lower. Use of foster care is
a
problem. Secondary school graduation on
reserves is 35% compared with 85% for
non-Indigenous. TB rates remain high.
Internationally, Indigenous people are
over-represented in jails. In Canada a
quarter of all adults and youth in jail
are Indigenous, while Indigenous
representation in the population is only
about
4.9%. In Australia 27% of inmate
populations come from the 3% of the
population
that is Indigenous. Treatment in jail has
been bad. In Canada in 2015 an
Indigenous man died pinned to his bed in
Sydney NS and in 2016 and 2017 there
were cases of severe solitary confinement
of Indigenous men in Ontario. In
Canada the
federal/provincial mix compounds
difficulties for healthcare. Whatever the
rationale, Northern Ontario healthcare is
not working for the Indigenous. NAN
communities lack doctors and health or
nursing stations vary. First Nations
lack access to medication, treatment of
chronic illnesses and diagnostic
equipment like X-rays. In 2015 Canada’s
Auditor General reported First Nations
in remote Northern Ontario and Manitoba
did not have proper access to basic
healthcare - unlike other provincial
residents in small isolated communities.
Training of nurses was inadequate.
Inspections were lacking. Child health
care
is practically non-existent. Children die
from preventable diseases. Opioid
use is
rampant and First Nations are unable to
cope. Counselors are rare and
substitution programs are in high demand.
Mental Health treatment for children
is an additional problem for Indigenous
communities. For suicide, services are
barely coping. Fragile youth must be sent
to a secure facility thousands of
kilometers from their community, where
they have no one. The community needs a
secure facility for mental health and
addiction. What is needed is promoting
optimal early childhood development and
reducing socioeconomic and other
disadvantages plus developing
interventions designed and administered by
Indigenous people and communities. Canada
is the only G8 country without some
such program. In
Karasjok
near the northern Finnish border in
Scandinavia a Sami Youth psychiatric team
evolved
into the Sami National Centre on Mental
Health and Substance Abuse, SANKS. Most
people are Sami. The program reaches out
to schools, sports and social clubs to
encourage youth to seek counsel from
Sami-trained professionals. The leader,
Gunn, gave out her cell phone number!
SANKS runs a treatment centre for children
and their families in crisis that is
immersed in Sami tradition. It has had
positive results. In
2007 the
UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous
People, UNDRIP, was endorsed by 143
countries, followed by Australia, New
Zealand then the US and last, in 2016,
Canada. In 2018, a private member’s bill
passed in parliament. It requires
Canada’s laws to conform with the
principles of UNDRIP. Indigenous rights to
clean water and to health care are not
seen as rights in Canada. But without such
human rights for everyone there will not
be reconciliation. The
final
chapter, We
are not going anywhere,
begins with an account of the “Quiet Riot”
at the Mennonite Stirland Lake
residential school which a resident
described as a prison. Older boys agreed
to
fight back if one more humiliating
incident occurred: it did; they did. The
police were called to restore order. There
were court appearances. But they
fought for their human dignity. Ottawa,
on
unceeded land of the Algonquins, was the
site of the May 2018 First Nations led
conference “Determination: Moving Beyond
the Indian Act” to determine a
framework for recognizing indigenous
rights as in section 35 of the Canadian
Constitution.
The
conference
was against the Indian Act and in favor of
allowing Nations and
communities to define their own way
forward. NAN argues First Nations did not
give up their jurisdiction of their land
by signing Treaty 9. Steps are being
taken to decolonize health care in
Northern Ontario. And the conference was
told it is not up to the government to
decide who is and who is not Indian –
belonging is not theirs to give. “History
is
shared …” says Talaga. She notes Martin
Luther King Jr, linked “Negroes” to the
US racism against the Indian and the US
policy of wiping out its Indigenous
population. That Civil Rights movement
inspired the American Indian Movement,
AIM, its occupation of Alcatraz Island and
its support in Kenora of the
occupation of what is now Anicinabe Park.
In 1970 that movement inspired the
Native American Rights Fund, NARF,
representing the Sioux tribe in 2016 as
they
were protesting the Keystone XL pipeline
through Nebraska indigenous homelands.
President Trump cleared the protestors in
2017, but the protest had brought
together many Indigenous peoples in
peaceful protest for the first time. These
initiatives
continue. Idle no More seeks Indigenous
sovereignty and it has
prompted teach-ins, demonstrations and
dances across Canada. And there are
links between the Sami people 1970-1983
opposition to the Alta Dam and the 2017
First Nation led opposition to Kinder
Morgan’s Trans Mountain pipeline
expansion through Burnaby Mountain, BC.
There is a connection between all
colonized people and the treatment of
Indigenous peoples in Brazil. And there
is a connection to all of us. Freedom
is a
constant struggle with progress and
regression. One or another country makes a
regressive or progressive move at any
time. In Canada, over a decade ago
parliament supported the Jordan Principle
that would ensure that First Nations
kids get full public services without
discrimination. Yet in 2016 and again in
early 2018 the Canadian Human Rights
Tribunal called for full implementation. Senator
Murray
Sinclair believes the education system has
played a role of leaving most
of the population ignorant and unaware of
a big part of history – residential
schools in Canada, US, Norway, Australia.
Assimilation by education failed but
the terrible legacy remains for Indigenous
peoples – a legacy of teaching about
aboriginal inferiority. The rest of the
population is unaware – including its
leaders, lawyers etc. Now there is hope
that education can reverse that
situation. Talaga
reviews
her book and reinforces her points: the
rights of Indigenous children and what
determines their health everywhere in the
world – clean water, proper
education, nutritious food, safe housing,
safe communities where kids are
tucked up in bed by parents. This is about
both rights and freedom. She
has
written about continuous genocide against
Guarani of Brazil, about loss of
traditional life of the Sami in Northern
Europe and Inuit in Northern Canada,
about policies of extermination in the US
and about legislated racism in
Australia.