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What If It Doesn’t Get Better? Queer and Aboriginal Youth Suicide
My mother says that when I was born she was given more tiny dresses than I could ever wear because they didn't have flowers at her father's funereal and, "people wanted to do something." My grandfather was a suicide. Sometime in the months between my conception and birth he walked then swam straight out into the salt water at Willows beach and never came back. They identified the body by the tattoos on his arms.
Right now in North America there seems to be an epidemic of suicide, not grandfathers but teenage boys who are gay or whose peers think they are. It makes me sick, my people, my younger brothers are dying by their own hand. As an out dyke with access to middle-class resources like a laptop and the internet, my e-mail and Facebook page are deluged with links to stories of queer kids who have killed themselves and to public responses. Responses like sex columnist Dan Savage's "It Gets Better" project, a YouTube channel where LGBT adults are invited to post videos telling of their own experience and survival to encourage youth who are bullied and harassed or pop singer Cyndi Lauper's "Give a Damn" campaign where celebrities speak out against violence and discrimination experienced by Queers, especially youth.
The messages in my inbox come from mostly by white, progressive friends and are often accompanied by some declaration like, "LGBT youth have the highest suicide rate of any group." This statement that makes me profoundly uneasy, I want to say, "but that's not true." In Canada, where suicide is the second leading cause of death for everyone aged 10 to 24, the Aboriginal youth suicide rate is somewhere between 4 to 6 times that of their peers-it is highest for young men--for LGBT youth the suicide seems to happen at 3 to 4 times the rate of their peers. Figures for the US show roughly the same proportions with a slightly lower suicide rate overall. But I am afraid that pointing this out will be heard as an insult on Queer communities' grief or a white woman talking bad about Aboriginal people.
Statistics are incredibly difficult to find and to compare for a host of reasons. The suicide rate is likely underestimated both for Aboriginal and LGBT youth. Many suicides (overdoses, shootings, automobile deaths) are recorded as accidental. Non- status Aboriginal people and those living off reserve are not counted in some studies. Prisoner suicide rates are higher than the rest of the population and Aboriginal people are disproportionately incarcerated in the US and in Canada. Aboriginal people make up a smaller proportion of the population than queers and of course there are Aboriginal kids who are Two Spirited, gay, lesbian, trans, bisexual and gender queer. And after all, how do you know if a dead kid was gay or if he just walked swishy?
I have no interest in some mathematical pissing contest over who is dying fastest, but the fact remains that Aboriginal kids are dying by suicide at a rate equal to or exceeding that of queers and nobody is flooding my inbox with pictures of their beautiful dead faces.
Aren’t we, me and my friends, the nice white liberal homos who care deeply that kids are dying, kids that could have been any one of us. Aren’t we participating in some kind of a whitewash when we remain ignorant or silent about the death of aboriginal youth?
Obviously being born Queer or Native or both doesn’t make you weak or flawed or predisposed to suicide. And even when substance use and family mental-health are factors, and God knows they were in my family, internal factors are not all that contribute to suicide. For Queer and for Native youth, external and systemic factors--living in a situation of pervasive violence, hatred, slander, abuse, indifference, and danger with no hope of escape--lead some to take their lives.
Some of the e-mail messages I get about gay kids dying are about sharing information among the like-minded. Some decry the lack of accountability for bullies and schools and education systems that allow children to be terrorized. Others, like the "It Gets Better" project, call on adults to reach out to kids with the message that if they can find support and endure, they will emerge into a wider world where they will find love, safety, and acceptance. When children are dying all of these seem inadequate.
Sharing information is not a substitution for action.
It is true that the tyranny of highschool doesn't last forever, nor does the trauma and drama that everyone experiences in adolescence-but it seems fundamentally flawed that what we are calling queer kids to do is hold on until the privileges of adulthood to kick in, and for some, the greater privileges of race, class, mobility, and education. Love, safety and acceptance should not be privileges.
And what if it doesn't get better? For Aboriginal youth, the external and structural factors that contribute to youth suicide don't go away after high-school. Aboriginal people have some of the highest poverty, lowest literacy, and highest unemployment rates, the most new cases of HIV, staggering numbers of children apprehended from their families, greatest chance of living near environmental toxins, highest rates of sexual violence. On nearly every reckoning of social good, Aboriginal people come last or near last, but in white queer circles I hear precious few voices crying out for accountability for the structural bullies and racist systems that make this so.
This is not a carefully crafted argument, or a complete analysis of all the issues but it seemed more important to speak now than to get it exactly right. And my prayer, because I do pray, is that the grief and outrage of people like me (educated queers, white "progressives", facebook time-wasters) lead us to action for change, not perpetuating harm. Like my grandfather's friends and neighbours who started this dyke's life with a closet full of tiny frilly dresses, "people want to do something." My desperate hope is that this powerful outpouring of feeling, for what we have suffered and what so many children are suffering, can lead us to acknowledge, to honour, and to follow the leadership of Indigenous people, people for whom an epidemic of youth suicide is only one of the assaults against which living is an act of daily resistance.
Ours are not the only children dying.
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17 Comments so far
Show AllWhile the U.S suicide rate for LGBT kids may be lower overall than other countries, what must be considered is how Gays are treated in other countries, and also the rise in religion-based anti-Gay hatred taking place in this country at present. No doubt as this hatred-driven bullying gets worse, the suicide rate here will climb.
Sadly, in some locations Aboriginal suicide is almost becoming a cultural tradition. Climate extremes might contribute, I'd not want to try wintering in Moose Factory.
Cynically, it would still be worth looking at suicide rates before and after proliferation of reservation-based casino gambling and new tribal wealth. What are the effects upon culture?
This is so sad it's hard to know what to say. Maybe saying something isn't what is needed here.
We should listen. We should listen to what these children are saying, ask them if we have to, and do everything we can to make the world the place they tell us they want.
We are all permanent exiles from the past.
bit off-topic, but why is the US the only place left in the hemisphere where its native people are still called "Indians"?
I know, this is just one of the things the US does to be obstinately contrary to the rest of the world, but it is an important one.
It's Columbus Day Monday. :wink:
Be sure to give syphilis to someone wearing an iron hat.
I would but I'm not American and don't have it.
:D
We tend to think of =Indians= as woods or plains cultures. But as you get above 50 degrees north latitude there commences a morphing towards tundra and Inuit subarctic cultures. Geographically, Canada incorporates cultures of all three kinds, and the best thing to do, lexicon-wise, is abandon plural nouns other than =aborigines=. This is necessary, less in social reference than it is in legal treaties and government documents. It is also silly to be named or identified by folks who made a geographic mistake. I was on my way to China but you Celts got in my damn way, so, hoot mon, I'm calling you guys Chinks.
I'm not sure. However, I think television reruns might have something to do with it. All those old cowboy movies are still around.
As a kid back in the 50s I noticed that pejorative terms had an incredibly long shelf life. One of the specialties of the group in power is bending and corrupting the language so that even innocuous terms associated with a the 'out' group can be considered denigratory.
I'm sure Trylon could shed some light on this deliberate practice of constantly undermining the self worth of someone you consider the 'other' in the hopes that they will just die.
In this increasingly violent world where insensitive people seem to thrive and gentle, non violent people are being crushed, these poor young souls commiting suicide are not a surprise. Sensitive people are usually far more intelligent than the insensitive assholes that worship power. The sensitives see a cruel Hobbesian world becoming worse, not better. So they make what they perceive to be a rational decision and exit this bullshit planet.
It's not right and it's not fair but it IS a rational act. They KNOW what kind of world they live in. And the responsibility for this tragedy lies with the media and the power brokers in our society that specialize in killing hope.
Responding to your off-topic comment, perhaps "the US the only place left in the hemisphere where its native people are still called 'Indians' " because a great many of the First Peoples, Aboriginals, Indigenous People, Native Americans, and/or savage redskins within the US choose to call themselves that. In fact, almost the only people I know who call Native Americans "Indians" any more are either Indians themselves or people of another ancestry who live, work, or play with them. ("Native American" or "American Indian" would be maybe third-runner-up after actual tribal identity in popularity/common usage, although among some older people "Native American" would be uttered with a sigh of resignation to changing fashions.) And "aboriginal" would just have them - and me - asking why we're all of a sudden talking about Australia.
So it's really not something "the US" does as some sort of linguistic monolith. It's a piece of actual self-determination that has nothing to do with the ongoing and often circular shifts in naming conventions dictated by people - "first", second, or third - whose motivations are to enforce a collective identity on otherwise disparate groups.
Racism against aboriginals in Canada and Australia is so deeply ingrained in the white psyche that I have seen over the decades that I have been in North America, that I have no words to describe its inhumanity. It gives the lie to the oft repeated myth that Canada is a tolerant and pluralistic country. New immigrants from Asia such as the Sikhs from India and the Chinese, both whom came in late 1800's and early 1900's to Canada met with profound racism, as much or even more than black slaves escaping from the US and settling in Eastern Canada. But the Asian immigrants were from ancient cultures with cleverness gathered from millenia of city living and bargaining and trade and organization. They could form self-contained communities with fantastic group support and both drive and culture to get educated fast and put the whites, at least the white yahoos who were none too bright bullies, in their place. Also their motherlands were fighting gutsy battles against Euro-American imperialism and winning. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour may have been a tragedy for Americans, but for the Japanese, even if was by a fascist samurai mentality, was a bold statement to the world that "we are here" and "we have arrived", and "take us seriously".
There are no such organizations and forces to help Aboriginal peoples to ward off cultural racist dominance of white Christian culture, ESPECIALLY Catholic in Quebec. This dominance is not only subjugating by force, but continuous mockery of the traditions and beliefs of Aboriginal peoples in favour of "Jesus loves you" if you submit to white people and lick their asses after they ate sumptuous meals and relieved themselves.
Today this overt racism is not carried out by politically correct whites. But now the racism on aboriginal peoples is one of racist benign reglect and herding them into "Reservations" and leaving them at the mercy of their "elders" and "chiefs". These are usually old farts who like to come out in costumes for visiting British royalty and Olympic Games, but do nothing else for their peoples. They are also corrupt and uneducated;they are not Nelson Mandelas or Ghandis. They are similar to religious old farts in Islam and Christianity and Hinduism that are the most bigotted against LBGT inside their own cultures. That is why Laura is getting e-mail from only "progresive whites" onthese suicides of LBGT.
Nothing is going to happen until in the near future, about 25 years at most, as far as I can tell from my reading of science, that:
1. Gender change will be a walk in procedure at clinics, and the the generation then will be well educated in human biology to realize that being homosexual has nothing to do with mental screw up or relgioun (hopefully religions would have been wiped out by then by reason)defined anti-god or whatnot, but an entirely normal natural state in which the other gender's biology in brain or body or both dominates.
2. Skin colour, hair colour, eye colour and facial or other human body part change will be so cheap and easy that most people then would laugh at our and earlier generations Neandertal attitudes and bigotry based on biology.
3. Robotics and holographics would be advanced to the point that sexual taboos would look ridiculous as those mechanisms have no "souls" to begin with to be "corrupted" by the devil.
I may sound like a starry eyed optimist, but what science has changed in rigid and stupid cultures in the last 50 years, I would not bet the farm against my predictions if I were a you. As for the present, we are muddling through all this as is so common in human societies. The best thing to do is to keep on using a global communication system such as the INTERNET to inform people who are progressive and also to organise LBGT and Aboriginals like the Asians did in North America. Also use graphics and animation to inform and organize and show who the "enemyy" is to very young, innocent aboriginals and LBGT and give them HOPE in SCIENCE as I have said to not end their lives but to realize that liberation is coming soon from this religion dominated bigotted insane world created by old farts my age or about 10-15 years younger like Obama and Stephen Harper.
I am old curmdgeon and can't do much physically to help. But I can just imagine all those beautiful kids all alone and lonely in the world they find so confusing that I want to hug them all and tell them to fight back in packs and never alone and not to lose hope, not in some misty eyed god but in the strength of science and reason.
Peace
You may be correct, and in a best case scenario the things you mention could come to pass. But I fear we are heading into another "Dark Ages" period where religious fundamentalism takes over, education and advancement of the common people takes a sharp decline, and only the elite get the benefits of science.
There is no hope in science per se. Science is a methodology and a body of knowledge.
There is hope in action motivated by LOVE.
But use reason to inform as to the best action to achieve goals.
Perfect.
Joe
Morticia, write a note to read the new book by Stephen Hawking, =The Grand Design=. When you agree or disagree with something strong enough, enter it to a reading log book.
Science is of course not a methodology. Anyone having read even, for example, the most basic physics since Newton would realize that the Law of Action and Reaction, or the Law of Gravity (Newtonian)are not "methodology" but ONTOLOGY. Einsteinian Law of Garvity, which requires a 4-dimensional curvature of space-time is again ontology, albeit profound since that is not accessible to our senses but only to our mathematics and experiments guided by that mathematics that measure the effects ( such as bending of light) were the ontology true. To say mathematics is a methodology is nonsensical. Science and mathematics provide a picture of Nature to humankind that is unrivalled in clarity, truth, usefulness and human progress and enlargement of thinking abilities for progressive interaction by any other picture provided by any other human activity since the dawn of life.
The only people who claim otherwise are people who get cold in their spines when hearing or thinking about things mathematical because of childhood traumas at school or home when the conceptual,counting and logical faculties of the brain were being activated. The only faculty, as Chomsky has conjectured from the speedy capacities of infants to pick up natural human languages from the very small data inputs of hearing adults speak, is the LANGUAGE ORGAN, or UNIVERSAL GRAMMAR in the biological brain-mind, that is always activated first. That is the only faculty "Luddite" anti-science people like Morticia, who would never survive even one day without electricity, clean water, heat,thermodynamics, the internet,medicine, have when they reach adulthood. This faculty is notorious, as Chomsky has shown, for producing strings of SYNTAX correct meaningless sentences because the SEMANTIC content of words must come from an ontology of Nature, which requires the other faculties, which are minimally, if at all, developed in totally literary or artistic people.
That is why a sentence such as;
"There is nothing in Nature but only LOVE" appears as meaningful to them. Though syntactically correct, precisely what is love as a state of the brain-mind and how that one item in Nature is all encompassing of Nature that it will become operationalized to prevent the suicides are not questions that trouble poetic, romantic, mystic, literary people. That there has been "love" around for millenia, but love never cured cancer, polio, leprosy, or pneumonia are questions meant for working class boffins to handle, not the literary elites such as Morticia.
In a like manner, a sentence such as (analogizing Chomsky):
"Red dragons sleep soundly after gorging on unicorns in Africa."
was meaningful, and still is, to billions around the world. But at least there are possibly, courtesy of Post Newtonian science, particularly biology, chemistry and such, hundreds of millions of people would now now for certain know there are no dragons in the world, red, blue or green or any colour whatsoever. But even within that group, I would bet, there may be a large number, particularly in eurocentric countries, japan etc. who may believe that it is possible to find unicorns in Africa. Prior to science, the above sentence was meaningful to a vast majority of humans purely because it is syntactically correct and the literary, poetic and artistic output of humans, including and especially religion, sanctified and endorsed that sentence and others on dragons. The Bible still talks about a great dragon at the "end times", and all the tea party loonies, and many literary only and mystic liberals also, I am sure, also believe in.
Thus to me, not only religions are dangerous to the progress of humankind away from superstition, fears and brutalising each other, by believing meaningless syntactically correct strings of lexicon such as "there is only love", which is no different from "Jesus is the only hope" or "Allah will put all LBGT in hell", but also in alienating humans from Nature.
So yes, science will put an end to this tyranny of superstition and language without meaning driven prejudice against LBGT. Love, whatever it is, won't be able to do a damn thing. If it could, it would have already solved all human problems in co-existing in the Natural world by now since that love brain state has been around in all higher mamals for at least a 100 million years.