Death and How To Avoid It - Part Six by Dave Jaffe

    Part Six


          In part five of this story I told of how I met a rich man who boasted that he got to his present affluent state all on his own. Like many successful people he refused to acknowledge how lucky he'd been.  Suppose now that this man had been born into a First Nation family. Once again he wouldn't be living as long as many Caucasian Canadians do.
    Half of all First Nations children are poor. And many of them as they grow up die long before they turn sixty years old. Attawapiskat is yet another impoverished First Nations reserve in Canada. Its chief once went on a hunger strike to protest the terrible conditions that many of the reserve's 2,000 people were living in.
     In April 2016, 11 people in Attawapiskat tried to kill themselves. First Nations people, not just women but men too often live in the most deplorable conditions. They huddle together in very crowded houses. Many of them drop out of school before they graduate. Some sniff glue, shoot up heroin, drink themselves to death, and often die violent deaths. Not all First Nations people are poor or violent. Many aboriginal Canadians work hard and do get an education.Yet far too many die at an early age, especially if they're living in isolated communities in Canada's north.
     The cause of their despair is the Caucasian men who flooded into Canada from the 17th century on. They pushed a side the First Nations onto ever shrinking reserves and later herded young natives into terrible residential schools. "When the white man came to Africa," the U.S. writer James Baldwin wrote, "the white man had the Bible and the black man had the land. Soon the white man had the land and the black man had the Bible."
    The same thing happened in Canada to aboriginal groups. One day these people who were the first inhabitants of this country will be full citizens of Canada. Yet that days hasn't so far arrived. Right now a First Nations person is far more likely to die at an earlier age than most other Canadians.
    All the world's people live in a hierarchy. How long you live depends upon where you're lodged in the hierarchy. Many of the 7 billion people who live in this world live on the lower rungs of the ladder. They were just born in the wrong time in the wrong place. So death hovers over them much more closely than those born in a different time and a richer place.