Life was the ‘trauma’ for these youth
Aboriginals faced nothing but barriers
On Friday, I flipped through the autopsy and toxicology reports that are exhibit No. 4 in the Ontario coroner’s inquest now underway into the deaths of seven aboriginal young people.
The reports were made public last week, as the inquest opened in Thunder Bay, Ont., but only when I got back to Toronto did I have time and heart enough to look at them.
The jurors already had been given the brutal synopsis: All the kids had been drinking, most heavily, before they died, far too soon. Traces of Oxycodone were found in the blood of one; several probably had smoked weed.
Paul Panacheese died of undetermined causes, but may have had a stealth heart condition that caused him to collapse. Robyn Harper literally drank herself to death two days after arriving from her far-flung reserve to go to school. Reggie Bushie, Kyle Morrisseau, Jethro Anderson and Curran Strang all drowned in local rivers, with alcohol intoxication a contributing cause of death; Jordan Wabasse drowned too but decomposition made the blood-alcohol test unreliable.
They died over the course of almost 11 years — the oldest Paul at 21, with three, Jethro, Reggie and Jordan only 15 — ending in 2011.
In these clinical reports are traces of the vibrant young people these kids were, and evidence of how defeat had gnawed away at their edges.
Paul already had mild emphysema, so strongly linked to cigarette smoking, in both lungs. It’s a disease that usually doesn’t show up until the fifth decade of life when one can no longer ignore the cough or phlegm. But just barely into his second decade, he had it. Bets are he was a smoker; vir- tually all the native kids I saw in Thunder Bay smoked, and many of the adults too.
A line in Paul’s autopsy report solemnly reported, “No history of trauma,” meaning he had no recent injuries implicated in his death, of course.
But it made me crazy: He grew up on Mishkeegogamang First Nation, or Mish as everyone calls it, where the rate of accidental death is about 10 times the norm for the Canadian general population, where there are virtually no jobs, and where adolescent suicide is a veritable plague. His former girlfriend told the jurors that for the year she knew him, he used Oxy, Percs, cocaine and Ecstasy.
His history was all trauma, all the time.
Or consider Curran, from the Pikangikum First Nation, or Pik.
A recent special review of youth suicides in Pikangikum — done by the office of the Ontario chief coroner in 2011 — examined the suicides of 16 youth between the ages of 10 and 19 who hanged themselves in the two-year span from 2006-08.
Pik is remote, reachable only by air and winter ice road. It has about 2,400 residents, most of whom have no indoor plumbing or running water and only unreliable power. Most people depend on social assistance. The school burned down in 2007 and the portables used in its stead house at any given time only half the children who should be in school. Alcohol and solvent abuse are rampant.
On the night of Sept. 22, 2005, Curran was drinking with friends by a river; he was too drunk to walk, and was later found in the floodway.
Or how about Jordan, whose magnificent full name was Jordan Titus Lawrence Wabasse? Found on the river ice, two months before his body was recovered, were his Toronto Maple Leafs cap and Bauer goalie mask.
Robyn and Kyle both came from the Keewaywin First Nation.
Kyle was a grandson of Norval Morrisseau, the late, great aboriginal artist, and was a talented painter himself, according to his brother, Josh. Like Robyn, like so many kids his age, Kyle had a couple of tattoos — a key with 89 under it on one forearm and a K at the base of one thumb.
Robyn, the only one of the seven to die outright of acute alcohol toxicity, had multiple tats — among them a blue one on her neck that read “WOLV” and her own name, Harper, on her right wrist.
On her left forearm were multiple thin, superficial, white slash-like scars, as if she’d been cutting.
After a night of drinking, she was found on the floor of her boarding home on Jan. 13, 2007, vital signs absent.
One of the inquest lawyers last week — and almost without exception, they come at the evidence from a particular angle, with a view to the recommendations the jury may make — asked a couple of the witnesses if one of the dead kids had ever complained about “barriers” to getting help, whether for adjusting to life in Thunder Bay or addiction counselling.
It was to laugh, albeit bitterly: These children faced nothing but barriers, and in our affluent and lucky country, we collectively tolerate that they should live like this.
No wonder one of the inquest participants says he always has two conflicting impulses when he’s in the North: One is to run away screaming and never look back or go back; the other is to move there.