Suicide Chronicles, Part 2 of 5: Transforming the Spirit of Suicide   
      
      
      
   Chelsey Luger and Gyasi Ross   
      
      
      
   9/27/14   
      
      
      
      
   Tell all my mourners   
   To mourn in red--   
   Cause there ain't no sense   
   In my bein' dead.   
      
   --Langston Hughes (1902--1967)   
      
   "Yeah. I remember when I was a kid how adults were trying to control my grief,   
   trying to tell me how I was supposed to feel or how I was supposed to   
   behave....that there was a proper way to mourn... and I was interested in   
   improperly mourning."   
      
   --Sherman Alexie   
      
   Ain't no sense.   
      
   Death by suicide is senseless, awful, and sorrowful in every way. We're not   
   here to glorify suicide, we're here to talk about it. Because it needs to be   
   addressed.   
      
   To clarify the context of Mr. Alexie's quote, he wasn't referring to any   
   personal contemplation of suicide when he said this. He was talking about how   
   he dealt with--or was unable to deal with--deaths within his own family. He   
   wailed, he cried, he lost    
   control. He expresses a memory of confusion regarding the appropriateness of   
   his own coping methods, and the fact that other people seemed to have an   
   opinion on whether or not he was doing it right. It's relevant to this suicide   
   conversation, because it    
   calls into question the idea of how to grieve.   
      
   And the fact is, many of us--American Indian people--don't know the answer.   
   Sometimes, a lot of times, we just can't deal.   
      
   It's not that there's something inherently wrong with us. It's that as a   
   people, our souls have been collectively wounded. It's called historical   
   trauma. We're still experiencing grief from the fairly recent genocide of our   
   people, followed by a cultural    
   genocide through assimilation and boarding schools, compounded with a legacy   
   of intentional oppression by the federal government/military, leading to   
   epidemic conditions of poverty, alcoholism/drug abuse and familial losses,   
   which has caused the overall    
   suppression of our voices and dignity by the outside world. These are things   
   that every one of us faces to this day.   
      
   Almost every American Indian person struggles with something that came from   
   this colonial legacy, and for many of us, these struggles are either constant   
   or recurring.   
      
   "I just wish I knew why it happened this way. I really do. I could be so much   
   more peaceful if I just knew why it happened this way."   
      
   --"Dan", a Lakota elder, as told to Kent Nerburn (in reference to this   
   colonial history of violence and oppression).   
      
   Grief and traumatic events are hard enough to deal with when there's a   
   beginning and end. For example, one loses a grandparent to whom they were   
   extremely close. It's hard. I'm not going to say that it's easy to deal with   
   by any means--but at the very    
   least, when something like this happens, we can (usually) justify a reason for   
   it: my grandparent grew old and sick, it was their time. We have the comfort   
   of knowing that everybody has to deal with losing a grandparent at some point   
   or another. It's    
   easier to deal with it because while it's tragic and sad, it's also natural.   
   It's something that we can recover from.   
      
   But for many American Indian people, not only are we born with a sense of loss   
   for our ancestors that we can't even put our fingers on, but we experience and   
   witness heartbreaking and terribly devastating loss relatively frequently   
   throughout our lives.   
      
   On one hand, we're so strong in the sense that there's so much we and our   
   ancestors have overcome. Our communities are intact, we share a deeply rooted   
   love for one another, and we have incomparably powerful cultural heritage. On   
   the other hand, the    
   closer we are to our communities, the more it hurts that we experience and   
   witness, on a near-daily basis, the collective struggle of our people. It   
   hurts to see our brothers and sisters going through alcoholism, relying on   
   drugs, losing their    
   personalities to battles with substances, abusing our loved ones (which is so   
   contrary to our cultural traditions), struggling to pay the bills,   
   encountering risky situations, and very, very often, dying young.   
      
   "So often, as soon as a Native person is able to start coping with one bad   
   thing happening, something else comes up, and it's like, when does it end?   
   Where is the time to heal?" explains Dr. Jacque Gray, research psychologist   
   and Associate Director of    
   the Center for Rural Health at the University of North Dakota.   
      
   And even when healing is taking place, it's back to the question of how to   
   grieve. We do know that prior to colonialism, our people were usually very in   
   tune with the spirit world, usually experienced ceremony and prayer as a part   
   of their daily lives,    
   and were usually engrossed in the traditions of their people and without   
   question were generally more comfortable with how they would go about the   
   mourning process or dealing with sadness. Today, our people are often--not   
   always, but often--removed from    
   ceremonies and culturally familiar ways of dealing with bad situations.   
   Sometimes, suicide feels like the only option.   
      
   It's heavy, heavy stuff we're dealing with. But the good part is, there's a   
   lot of hope and a lot being done to improve the situation.   
      
   APPROACHING HEALING AND SOLUTIONS   
      
   The statistics are bleak--we're not even going to go into the numbers--instead   
   let's just say that yes, Native people, especially youth, die by suicide at an   
   alarming rate. The information is available through the CDC and IHS websites.   
      
   Instead of stats, let's look at solutions and techniques for addressing the   
   issue. We've spoken with dozens of sources--individuals and organizations who   
   are working to combat suicide--all with powerful stories.  Here are a few   
   things that stuck out.   
      
   "If you're feeling helpless, help someone."   
      
   -- Aung San Suu Kyi, Myanmar opposition leader   
      
   Mark LoMurray has been working on suicide prevention for nearly 50 years. He   
   runs an organization called "Sources of Strength," and they partner with   
   tribes and villages all over Indian country. Sources of Strength recruits and   
   trains peer leaders who    
   have often been through traumatic situations themselves to mentor others and   
   spread hopeful messages.   
      
   And that's the trick: staying positive, and focusing on strengths, not   
   weaknesses. If you're in a situation where you can help somebody, remind them   
   of how you got through something rather than emphasizing how difficult it was   
   in the moment. Emphasizing    
   the negative can lead to further feelings of helplessness.   
      
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)