I have been working as an actor for many years. But never before in my work — at least not until April 2021, when I was filming the seventh episode of Reservation Dogs — have I had an out-of-body experience or cried out involuntarily. This time, my body took over. I was shaking, adrenaline coursing through my body as all my nightmares of losing loved ones were unearthed to haunt me anew.
The reason for my visceral reaction: never in my career as an actor, or in my experience as a viewer of TV and film, have I experienced a work of popular culture that addresses suicide among Indigenous peoples with the care and directness that Reservation Dogs does.
Suicide has affected every Indigenous community on Turtle Island and countless Native families. According to the Centers for Disease Control, Native American people have the highest rates of suicide of any racial/ethnic group in the United States. And in Canada, First Nations people living on and off-reserve, Métis and Inuit, die by suicide at a higher rate than non-Indigenous people — in some cases, upwards of 33 times higher.
But these statistics are not just numbers to us; they represent our real friends and family members, each one with an entire community struggling alongside them, and grieving for them after they’ve departed. We may hear these numbers in mainstream news reporting, but we rarely encounter the lives of our Indigenous kin who died by suicide. We rarely witness the aftermath, the friends they’ve left behind. And that is exactly what is explored in the heartbreaking and heartwarming seventh episode of Reservation Dogs, a show that I have the privilege to be a part of, playing the character Elora Danan.
Read more at Time.com.
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