I take many of the ideas in this post from Darien Thira, an expert in the field of Aboriginal suicide. I spent all of last week in Nanaimo learning how to deliver his suicide prevention workshop.

The reason why Aboriginal youth kill themselves at a rate six times higher than the overall population is to stop the pain and hopelessness that result from being subjected to colonization.

You can’t understand Aboriginal suicide without looking at colonization. We, as Indigenous people, must realize that we did not have sky-high suicide rates before the European invasion (contact is too clean a word for what actually happened).

When Canadian society says we’re sick that’s like a psychopathic killer complaining to someone he’s tried to strangle repeatedly that she should do something about the marks on her neck and see a psychiatrist about her recurrent nightmares and low self-esteem.

This intended target would not show these symptoms and others if this strangler never attacked her in the first place. You see the problem does not lie with the target as it does with the strangler. The problem with this psychopath is that he never goes away.

That is the point that Roland Chrisjohn makes in his book “The Circle Game” when he unpacks the term residential school syndrome and places the sickness squarely with the insatiable colonizer. What follows, is his theory:

DIAGNOSTIC CRITERIA FOR
RESIDENTIAL SCHOOL SYNDROME:
POST COLONIAL MODEL

Residential school syndrome is a personality disorder manifested in an individual’s
specific behavioural action of:

(1) Obliterating another people’s way of life by taking the children of the group away
from their parents and having them raised in ignorance of, and/or in contempt for,
their heritage;

(2) Helping himself/herself to the property of the target group;

(3) Pervasive pattern of attempted indoctrination of children of another group of
people.

Symptoms must also include at least four (or more) of the following:

(1) a grandiose sense of self-importance and/or infallibility;
(2) unjustified feelings of moral and/or intellectual superiority;
(3) an intense desire to change the subject when phrases “economic self interest”
or “crimes against humanity” arise, or the words “genocide,” “racism,”“colonialism,”
or “oppression” are heard;
(4) lack of personal insight, or an absence of self-criticism;
(5) unwillingness to accord human status or rights to creatures not passing arbitrary
and inexpressible “standards”;
(6) obsession with juggling history books and/or shredding documents;
(7) marked fluency in rhetoric, including ability to sound like apologizing without
doing so, to call people “liars” without actually using the word, and to sound
sympathetic while studiously avoiding any criminal or financial liability;
(8) tendency to repeat certain phrases like “We don’t need an enquiry” or
“Let’s let bygones be bygones”.

Chrisjohn, R., Young, S., & Mauraun, M. (1997). The circle game: Shadows and substance
in the Indian residential school experience in Canada. Penticton, BC: Theytus Books, Ltd.