Lower instances of suicide were also found in communities where more than 50 percent of the people spoke their Indigenous language. This probably isn’t much of a surprise to an Indigenous person. We know our cultures have meaning and worth, that that culture lives and breathes inside our languages.
Canada knew that, too. Which is why they fought so hard to make us forget them.
There are two scientific designations for depression. The droller, more scientific term for melancholia is “endogenous depression.” In contrast to exogenous, or reactive, depression—which stems from a major event such as divorce, job loss or death in the family—melancholic depression has no apparent outside cause. In other words, it comes out of the blue. This is a rather ridiculous way of putting it when you consider that depression itself is sometimes referred to as “the blues.” The blues coming out of the blue. Go figure.
I’ve heard one person translate a Mohawk phrase for depression to, roughly, “his mind fell to the ground.” I ask my sister about this. She’s been studying Mohawk for the past three years and is practically fluent. She’s raising her daughter to be the same. They’re the first members of our family to speak the language since our paternal grandfather a handful of decades ago.
“Wake’nikonhra’kwenhtará:’on,” she says. “It’s not quite ‘fell to the ground.’ It’s more like, ‘His mind is…’ ” She pauses. She repeats the word in Mohawk. Slows it down. Considers what English words in her arsenal can best approximate the phrase. “ ‘His mind is…’ ” She moves her hands around, palms down, as if doing a large, messy finger painting. “Literally stretched or sprawled out on the ground. It’s all over.” She explains there’s another phrase, too. Wake’nikonhrèn:ton. It means “the mind is suspended.”
Both words indicate an inability to concentrate. That’s one of the signs of depression. I know because I’ve checked it off in the copy of Mind Over Mood I took out from the library. It says my depression currently scores a 32 out of a possible 57, or 56 percent. Not the worst. At least I’m not considering suicide. Suicidal thoughts is number ten on the checklist.
There is nothing in the book about the importance of culture, nothing about intergenerational trauma, racism, sexism, colonialism, homophobia, transphobia. As if depression doesn’t “see” petty things like race or gender or sexual orientation.
“We’re all just people, man,” melancholia mutters, pushing its white-boy dreads aside as it passes me a joint.
I’ve heard people say that when you learn a people’s language, you learn their culture. It tells you how they think of the world, how they experience it. That’s why translation is so difficult—you have to take one way of seeing the world and translate it to another, while still piecing the words together so they make sense.
Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about why there is no Mohawk word to differentiate between reactive and melancholic depression. No scientific jargon to legitimize and pathologize. Just wake’nikonhrèn:ton and wake’nikonhra’kwenhtará:’on. A mind hanging by a thread, and a mind spread out on the ground. A before and an after—the same way we measure ourselves against colonialism. What does that mean about our culture?
If we had had more terms and definitions backing up our understanding of depression, would we have been better equipped to deal with it when its effects began tearing our communities apart? Would those who wanted to civilize us have been more open to listening to our pain if we’d used their words? How much could “endogenous,” “exogenous,” “depression” or “melancholia” have helped when they’re all essentially referring to the same thing? How many ways do we need to describe a person in pain that needs help to heal?
Is there a language of depression? I’m not sure. Depression often seems to me like the exact opposite of language. It takes your tongue, your thoughts, your self-worth, and leaves an empty vessel. Not that different from colonialism, actually. In fact, the Mind Over Mood Depression Inventory could double as a checklist for the effects of colonialism on our people. Sad or depressed mood? Check. Feelings of guilt? Check. Irritability? Considering how fast my dad’s side of the family are to yell, check. Finding it harder than usual to do things? Well, Canada tried to eradicate our entire way of being, then forced us to take on their values and wondered why we couldn’t cope. Definite check. Low self-esteem, self-critical thoughts, tiredness or loss of energy, difficulty making decisions, seeing the future as hopeless, recurrent thoughts of death, suicidal thoughts? Check, check, check.
And if colonialism is like depression, and the Onkwehon:we suffering from it are witches, then I guess it shouldn’t surprise anyone that our treatment has always been the same: to light us on fire and let us burn.
I now understand why that therapist in that church reminded me of residential schools. When I think of that man sitting across from me, chastising me for not saying the right words, the words that made it easy for him to understand me and cure me, I think of how my great-grandparents felt when priests and nuns did the same to them. The difference is that the therapist was trying to cure me of being depressed; those priests and nuns were trying to cure my ancestors of being Indian. In some ways they succeeded. In many they did not.
Both depression and colonialism have stolen my language in different ways. I know this. I feel it inside me even as I struggle to explain it. But that does not mean I have to accept it. I struggle against colonialism the same way I struggle against depression—by telling myself that I’m not worthless, that I’m not a failure, that things will get better.
Our Haudenosaunee condolence ceremony was created by Hiawatha to help a person in mourning after a death. Whoever is conducting the condolence recites the Requickening Address as they offer the grieving person three strands of wampum, one at a time.
One: soft, white deer cloth is used to wipe the tears from their eyes so they can see the beauty of creation again.
Two: a soft feather is used to remove the dust from their ears so they can hear the kind words of those around them.
Three: water, the original medicine, is used to wash away the dust settled in their throats that keeps them from speaking, from breathing, from reconnecting with the world outside their grief.
I know this is supposed to be a ceremony for people with reactive depression caused by a death. As far as I know there is no condolence ceremony for those Onkwehon:we suffering from melancholia—those who are, in effect, mourning themselves. There’s no collective condolence ceremony for our people, either—those who need help to see our beauty and hear our songs and speak our language. But maybe, one day, there can be.
Things that were stolen once can be stolen back.
HALF-BREED
A Racial Biography in Five Parts
Dental hygiene was a self-directed exercise in my childhood home, which meant it didn’t happen. Unused toothbrushes sat stiff-bristled and impeccable in cups beside the sink. I only ever noticed a smell on my father’s breath, though: an alcoholic bitterness. The smell usually corresponded with the subwoofer trembling at midnight, spitting out Bonnie Raitt and other smooth-voiced saints of heartbreak.
I separated my father into two entities: the one who played Resident Evil with us for hours, laughing when a zombie jumped out and scared him, then sneaking outside to bang on the living room window to scare us in turn, and the one who stared at me dead-eyed when I asked him to turn down his drunken music. Mom never bothered to explain why Dad’s voice was so loud and slurred. I had no clue my father was having problems weaving himself into the tapestry of white suburban bliss. I never knew about the promotions he’d seen slip past him despite being one of the top salesmen in every company he worked for. I never knew about the rampant alcoholism on his side of the family, its body count. All I knew was when we went down to Six Nations for the powwow, all my aunts and uncles and cousins were loud and laughing, too, their breath the same scent I then considered genetic. They didn’t dote on my siblings and me the same way they doted on my cousins, pinching t
heir cheeks with one hand, holding a beer bottle in the other. But at least there was musical consistency: Bonnie Raitt always there, crooning me awake.
In grade two I went to Native American Magnet School #19 in Buffalo, New York. Part of its mandate was to provide a class for its handful of Native kids to learn Native culture. Every day we would slip away from the droning arithmetic of our classrooms into a space dispassionately hung with dreamcatchers and laminated warriors. The curriculum was a grab bag of general knowledge. What the Navajo ate, what the Oneida wore. Neat, bloodless trivia isolated from historical context. They’d show us teepees and longhouses and adobes drawn over state lines, as if we could belong in America as easily as those sketches on that map. Then we’d sneak back to our regular classes and continue like we never left, a collective amnesia settling over us.
There was one white girl in my Native class: Regina. She wanted to make crafts and sing songs with her best friend, Brittany, so her parents claimed a sliver of Cherokee ancestry and the school let her in. I hated this, because I hated Regina. Before she came along, Brittany was my best friend. The way Regina’s parents successfully lied her way into my Native class filled me with a rage so intense it could only ever be understood by fellow vengeful seven-year-olds.
The other kids knew why we were being whisked away between math and spelling. Yet when my new best friend, a Puerto Rican girl named Rosita, saw my father and asked if he was Native, disgust curdling her words, I paused. She couldn’t already tell? Where did she think I went every day?
I had never really considered it before, but I looked more like Regina than I did my father. It was as if his genes had skipped over me entirely. I realized then I had a choice. I’d fallen down a rabbit hole into a racial Wonderland where logic was negotiable. Only I wasn’t Alice; I was the Cheshire Cat, the Trickster. If I wanted I could say I was part Mexican or Italian or Mongolian, and the person would squint, but nod. As though they accepted that America’s melting pot would sooner or later boil all races down to a pale person like me.
“He’s not Native. He’s Puerto Rican.”
Like Regina, I could pretend.
I waited to be called out as a fraud, for my father to stride over and tell everyone the truth. But nothing happened. Incredibly, Rosita believed me. I was too cool to be Native anyway, she rationalized, too clean. She cemented our newfound racial sisterhood with a necklace of the Puerto Rican flag cleverly assembled from red, white and blue pony beads.
I wore that necklace with an absurd, anxious pride, wondering whether Regina felt the same uneasiness when she brought home her construction paper headdresses and three sisters soup recipes.
My mother, like any good Catholic, raised us in the faith. We were fed divine mercy chaplets and patron saints more often than food. Even my steely-willed father wasn’t immune; he converted to Catholicism for her eventually. I still remember his baptism. It was a bizarre tableau, a scene from some forgotten fairy tale: a giant Native man hunched over a stone fountain meant for babies as water spilled from his thick black hair. After that he dutifully sat in the pews with us on Sundays, silent and focused until he had to shut us up with a furrowed glare.
When we moved to Six Nations he started going to Longhouse and getting involved in sticky rez politics. Staying out long and sleeping deep. Finding his roots, he said. Mom said roots were nothing if they led to Hell. All her prayers’ intentions were for his recommitment to Catholicism. While we kids droned half-heartedly through every Hail Mary, her prayers took on the tenor of threats. She claimed she was just worried about Dad’s soul, but it was more than that. Every step he took towards his Native identity was another step away from her. With us she felt the same. If we ever went to Longhouse she’d rant for hours about how we weren’t just Native, you know. We had other heritage and we shouldn’t hide it. Were we ashamed of our own mother?
It was around this time I started taking Canadian History in high school. We covered residential schools in broad strokes and clinical tones, giving the impression these schools were from an era long past. Kids pulled screaming out of their homes, forced to speak English and say the rosary and endure all manner of abuse, returning to families with whom they could no longer communicate. My teacher never mentioned that the Mohawk Institute, Brantford’s residential school and unhappy home for over two hundred Six Nations kids, remained fully operational until 1970. I’m not entirely sure she knew, despite its having been turned into a museum a short drive away.
I asked my father if he knew the residential school was open until the ’70s. “The Mush Hole? Yeah.” His voice was terse, pained, as if I was picking at a scab that had just started to heal. I dropped the subject.
My curiosity was hardly sated, though. As soon as my dad went out, I explained what residential schools were to my mother. She being our family’s religious ambassador, I asked her how members of the Catholic Church could do such awful things to children. She hesitated. Then, with a politician’s duplicitous finesse, she said that while those priests and nuns were extreme, they did save many Indian kids’ souls. They probably thought they were doing God’s will. It seemed strange that she—the most compassionate person I’d ever met—was defending such abusive methods of indoctrination, as if Heaven were a gang you got jumped into. “It was another time,” she said. “They had different ideas then.”
She’d start a rosary just as my father was supposed to get home from some community meeting. A door slam would announce his entrance and just as quickly his exit. My mother’s face was like shards of glass, broken but dangerous.
On the hour-long bus ride from our homes in Six Nations to our high school in Brantford, Ontario, one person was wordlessly, unanimously agreed upon as the bus punching bag. Most years it was Ryan. His sloped forehead, large stature and passive nature proved an irresistible cocktail to the violent and otherwise insecure. That is, until Ryan’s mother pulled him off the bus and Carrie came along. I was in grade eleven, she was in grade nine: loud and raucous and well liked. You could tell she had a white mother, too, but all it took was one good “innit” to know Carrie belonged in ways I never could. Besides, her hurricane of a personality prohibited certain questions about blood quantum and skin shades.
She’d been on the bus a week. As usual, I kept to myself, hood up, headphones on, straining for invisibility. When the handfuls of pennies smattered against my head, I was only shocked for a moment. Her laugh was unmistakable, her sugary voice spitting “white girl” like fire. Her pale jester face—somehow swept of all irony—ducking down every time I turned around.
My Trickster designation was officially null and void.
That’s when it became clear: whiteness meant different things in different contexts. On the rez, Carrie and I could share skin colours and still be perceived entirely differently as Native people. While my culture was derived solely from Michael Jackson videos and Disney’s dubious visions of femininity, Carrie’s culture was slowly, carefully poured into her hands the same way generations of Six Nations people had culture poured into theirs. It didn’t matter that I never chose to be born in Buffalo and raised generically American; that’s just the way it was. Eventually there was nothing for me to do but sit there, let the pennies ricochet off my head and hope my non-reaction would make Carrie bored instead of incensed.
The day my kid was born, the powwow was rained out. All the spectators and dancers made for the lacrosse arena, leaving Chiefswood Park soggy and deserted. I hated those arena powwows. I hated that my boyfriend Mike’s first powwow was one of those powwows. The experience wasn’t right without the dancers blurring against the grass like rushed strokes of paint, haggling over beaded jewellery I couldn’t afford, dribbling Indian taco grease onto my shirt and giggling as white visitors claimed their great-great-great-grandmother was a Cherokee princess.
It had been eleven days since my due date and I’d been having irregular contractions for the past two. My dad and brothers were away on a month-long Unity Run, culling m
y support system down to a skeleton crew. I wondered whether my dad’s absence had anything to do with my staunch biological dismissal of his many “marry Native, have Native babies” speeches. Before he left he reminded me my child wouldn’t have a status card, that Mike wouldn’t be allowed to live on the reserve. I’d rolled my eyes, all eighteen-year-old panache.
My water broke. When we arrived at the birthing centre, my midwife took control, not even balking at my insistence that Coldplay’s Parachutes soundtrack the next twelve hours. As the labour progressed, though, my father’s family history began prowling in the back of my mind. I hadn’t given it much thought until then. I thought of his mother, the only one in her family who didn’t go to residential school, leaving her Six Nations home for Buffalo so her children, too, could bypass the Mush Hole. His father murdered by a white bartender over ten dollars. His older brother murdered by two white men in a roadside scuffle. He himself beaten to a bloodied mass by a white man with a baseball bat at a bar. His was a family legacy that often changed forms. One day it appeared as a six-pack of Bud Light, another as white fingers squeezing a trigger. Sometimes it struck with such violence its only consolation was that it was over quickly; other times it snuck up, draining a life one excruciating drop at a time.
Then my kid came barrelling out of me. Once their complexion settled from the red shock of newborn skin to soft pink, my anxiety abated. Any visible traces of their Native heritage had been blotted out. They didn’t even have the brown eyes I’d considered my family’s defining trait; squinting from between blond lashes were two splashes of indigo. As much as it made me sick to admit it, internalized racism had warped me so much that I was actually relieved that my child didn’t look like my father, my aunts, my uncle, my grandmother. In a better world, one that didn’t treat my dark-skinned relatives with violence and indignity and death for the way they looked, I would have been able to long for my child to have the thick, black hair and deep-brown skin my family members have without feeling fear. I would have been able to be disappointed that I didn’t see visible reminders of my family line peeking through in my child. I wanted to be able to be disappointed. At that time, in this world, I wasn’t. I knew those eyes, that skin, had given them a shield when they could have been a target. Now my kid could, if they chose, deflect the sharp, parasitic legacy of shame and violence they’d inherited and disappear into whiteness. I’d been given the same shield, the same opportunity. I’d never had any of the experiences my father’s family had. I probably never would.
A Mind Spread Out on the Ground Page 2