Invisible North by Alexandra Shimo

Author:Alexandra Shimo
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dundurn
Published: 2016-08-25T04:00:00+00:00

Nine

Comparisons

Tell a person long enough and often enough that he is inferior, and likely he will eventually accept the false image you thrust upon him.

— Cree activist and author Harold Cardinal

Mr. Koosees’s interview stayed with me; it still haunts me now. It seems obvious to me that a parent could not stand and watch their kids dying — could not remain trapped with no way out — without wanting to do something drastic. I want this idea to have merit, to connect it to everything else that I have learned about the reserve and figure out how all these little pieces can be pulled together to explain what really happened in October 2005, but none of Kashechewan’s leadership is telling me what I need. Instead, I file some Access to Information requests and I wait.

In the meantime, the reserve is in the middle of a suicide crisis. Two weeks ago a fifteen-year-old girl tried to kill herself by taking a rope and putting it around her neck and then attaching it to the tallest thing that she could find in her bedroom. The girl’s father found her before the rope got too tight, thank God, and then did what always happens when someone tries to kill themselves: medevacked them to the nearest hospital with an open bed, which, in this case, was Timmins. The date was significant — it was on the night before the anniversary of the successful suicide of a fourteen-year-old girl from Kashechewan the previous year. Many are worried that the attempt will trigger other kids and there will be a cluster.

Suicide attempts are not rare in this tiny community of 1,800. There will be 34 by the time the year ends.[1] On average, there are 16.2 per year, according to NAPs statistics. Then there are the pacts. In January 2007, a suicide pact formed between 21 people, mainly children and some as young as 9. They overdosed on pills. Fortunately, they were found before the drugs were fatal. That same month, there was another pact among girls aged nine to twelve. In the summer of 2006, a group of seven seventh-graders, five girls and two boys, tried to kill themselves again with pill overdoses in the girls’ bathroom of their school.

After the latest attempt, the teachers decide to look out for anyone who is acting strangely or talking about wanting to die. We are all told to keep our eyes peeled. It isn’t much as a suicide strategy, but it’s better than doing nothing. That’s how I found myself listening in on the conversation of a group of six children between ages nine and fourteen standing on the porch of one of the corner stores on a Saturday night. I am trying to be discreet, but Tom, a gregarious boy of nine, notices that I’m eavesdropping.

“Alex.” Pause. “Have you ever suicided yourself?”

“What?” I ask. Did he read my thoughts?

He pretends his hands are a noose and mock strangles himself.

He asks again: “Have you ever suicided yourself?”

I am surprised.

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