(memoir III)

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People handle conflict in different ways …

there are those that are afraid of fighting,

there are those that come to enjoy it, 

and there are those who understand the necessity of it. 

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When I was a kid, in the arctic, they put me up two grades because the school system in Nunavut was fucked. Education only works if you seek to meet the students at their level, and in Nunavut, the idea of school was both novel, and decidedly western. It'd been less than a century - three generations - since the Inuit people were forced to give up a nomadic way of life. Their first encounter with school would have been through the residential ones - the ones built for the sole purpose of forced integration and cultural genocide. The end product of those early schools, the ones from the 50s, was rape; it was suicide en masse, murder, humiliation and despair. When the res schools closed, public ones opened. And though the children of those early school-survivors attended the new, public schools, it was kind of hard to blame those kids if they had yet to fully understand the purpose of it, even while they were in attendance. 

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Over three generations, they'd went from a subsistence lifestyle - all rooted in land skills - to being forced to sit in military desks with iron bars welded to the windows. It's no wonder the entire institution was fucked. 

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Inter-generational trauma, they call the problem now, but when I was a kid that word didn’t exist.  

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They put me two grades ahead because in eighth grade we were still coloring maps with crayons, and if I'd gone through the system the way it'd been designed, I'd have come out the other side at a life-altering disadvantage. My parents knew that, and moved me from the elementary into the highschool early - there weren't any bars on the windows in that one. 

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I was white. I was a white kid with two parents that fed me. And that immediately separated me from those that I shared the class with. I had friends, a group, but I grew up with the critical knowledge that being noticed by people that had less than you did was a good way to get yourself hurt. I knew that rule applied to my own friends, and so in highschool, because I was placed into 10th grade classrooms, I rarely spoke. 

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I was close with this other white kid from Newfoundland, he and his brother were close with some of the brothers from my elementary school, and we all kind of cliqued up. I was accepted by the group as the small, quiet elementary kid that was smart enough to keep up in 10th grade.

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I could write in complete sentences, that was all it really took.  

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    One of those friends, low on the social totem pole, realized that if he punched down a little bit it would temporarily make him feel better about his own life. Anthyme, was his name - not a bad guy, he was just fostered by his uncle, lived in a shared home with too many people and didn't know his own dad. Anthyme probably had fetal alcohol syndrome, too; his eyes were a funny shape and that's one of the strongest indicators for FASD. To cut a long story short, there was one week where Anthyme started hitting me at school. We were all friends, so it was played off as fun, but I could tell that it was more than a game for Anthyme. I think for him it was about assigning blame onto somebody, hitting someone smaller, the way he was, because it's all he'd really known and because I was quiet and would take it. I didn't want to attract more attention, so for a while I'd let him do it. 

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Eventually, I learned that if you let someone hit you, if you allow them to, they will. 

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They'll do it over and over, because you haven't given them a reason not to. 

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One day, I beat the f*****g s**t out of Anthyme. I just turned on a dime, in the middle of one of those music classes where you all pretend to play the recorder, and I hit him in the face until I was sure he wouldn't get up. I'd had enough - other kids were starting to follow suit and I realized that I'd be in a bad way if I didn't do something. 

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I did it really fast, and I remember the look of panic the teacher had when he dragged me into the hallway.

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I was 11. Anthyme was 15. His cousins were 20. 

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Years later, when I left the north, I learned that Anthyme had killed himself - alcohol related suicide. A lot of kids killed themselves while I was at school. A lot of girls were raped, sometimes by family. A bunch of the kids I knew were convicted for that, or for homicide, assault, drugs or some other thing. 

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There was one case where a student shot themselves in the crawlspace of the principal’s house; there was another where a girl hung herself in the school bathroom. Kids were killed by dogs, they would wander into the sled-teams that were never fed. They’d die huffing gasoline, self asphyxiation. But generally speaking kids died most by suicide. It was a town of less than 2000 and it happened at least twice a year. Because I was little, my parents never talked to me about the adult criminality in town, but there were these houses we used to call ‘haunted’ that would be boarded up and unused. I learned later that murder-suicides were incredibly common. 

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Anyways, this isn't a pity party, it was what it was. All I'm doing here is lending some context. 

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It was after I'd hurt Anthyme that I started to understand why I needed to. I fought a lot after that, I can think of at least one other person I’d hurt that eventually took their own life. His name was David.

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As an adult, I grappled with all of that - guilt, survivor’s guilt maybe - ashamed that I had a family affluent enough to move us south. I didn’t understand why it happened when I was young, why so many people were so broken. 

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And they were. They were broken in a way that the south likes to ignore. 

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Over time, I started to sift through the details and make sense of it all. I took university classes that were theoretical. They'd discuss systemic violence in First Nations communities, cultural erasure and the consequence of residential school. We'd take notes on it like it'd happened a hundred years ago, and it was hard not to tell the professors that I'd lived alongside those problems - that they weren't theoretical, that they had names, and that I'd known them.

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After a while, and while navigating that guilt - wracking my conscience a little to try to decide if the feelings I had were justified - the key question I eventually asked myself was: “if you knew how it would end for Anthyme, what would happen to him, would you still have hurt him in the way that you did?”

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I struggled with that question for years. 

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He was my friend. 

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And though I expect it's not the answer those professors would have accepted on our exams, nor the one I like to admit to myself, or to others, I'm still resolved in my answer: "yeah, I probably would have."

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I liked Anthyme, and we were all good friends, but if you let someone hit you and get away with it - doesn't matter who they are, or why they did it - you're just killing yourself along with them. It might not seem right, it might seem like a cruel resolution, but it would be as necessary now as it was then, and I would do it all the same.

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I miss him. I miss that place. And we'd made up before I left. 

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But, no question, if I had to do it over I would have hurt him all the same.

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