Sweetgrass Coaching

Nepotism leads to hopelessness and can be linked to soaring suicide rates.

It is no coincidence that suicide rates are the highest in nepotistic Native communities.

How much hope can a Native youth have when she can’t get a meaningful job with her community because none of her relatives sit on the band council?

What do you think happens to her self-esteem and sense of community?

If that youth can’t find a meaningful job with her community, then what do you think happens?

At the best case, she goes to the city and uses her education there to land the meaningful job she couldn’t get at home. Brain drain is another unforeseen effect of nepotism. Our young are increasingly getting an education in the hopes of helping their community. Instead, many return to rejection from a ruling council that is seemingly intent to blackball its most qualified individuals.

At the worst case, depression ensues. If left untreated, she withdraws after knowing she’ll never use her education to help her people. If there is no one around her who’s healthy enough to notice, she, like many before her, could take her own life.

There is a direct link between nepotism and youth suicide rates. I’m not saying that nepotism is the only factor to high suicide rates, but it is a factor, and one that has remained largely unstudied.

This is all too common in Native communities and it must stop.

I encounter this example in many communities I travel to and it breaks my heart. These are the same communities in which the leadership publicly speaks about the importance of their youth. For the most part, it’s just rhetoric.

If we really care about our youth, we will take great measures to ensure the practice of nepotism ceases and a meritocracy is allowed to take hold and fluorish.

Nepotism is defined as:

Anyone in the Native community is familiar with this term and its practice. Most Native people tacitly accept nepotism as just the way things are done in Native politics.

What happens most times is that after a band election, jobs of high responsibility are given to the relatives of the election winner. The chief slowly or quickly gets rid of the old regime and replaces it with those he or she can trust.

The thinking is that resolutions will be quickly voted through and budgets will be constructed to ensure the chief gets his way on band initiatives. This is one key way that our band councils get mismanaged, money goes missing, and the status quo always has blackjack.

Go to ten band council websites and if the administration staff is listed on it you’ll see a disturbing similarity in a last name that’s over-represented. That’s nepotism at work.

Was it always like this? Without having a crystal ball, I say no it wasn’t. The reason being is that we had traditional forms of governance that protected against this practice.

Many nations employed a clan system, whereby each clan had a specific function that maintained peace and stability.

What happened to this system? In many healthy and resilient nations, this system is still used to govern, resolve conflicts, and create order.

In many others, colonization has seriously undermined the power and influence of the traditional clan system. In some communities, the damage is severe. Generally speaking, the further west one goes in Canada, the stronger the connection is to the clan system and traditional forms of government.

Of course, there are exceptions to this rule. For example, the Haudenoshone (Iroquois) Confederacy is still very strong in its traditional hereditary leadership.

Are Native people alone in practicing nepotism? No. One only has to look at current American politics to see the antithesis of meritocracy taking hold. However, that shouldn’t give us any reason to celebrate.

In a future post, I will write about the relationship between nepotism and residential school syndrome.