Deciding to Live
Dear Native Co-Counselors,
For the past two Novembers, Darlene Daniels and I have traveled to Montreal, Quebec, Canada, to introduce Co-Counseling at a non-RC Native conference “Dialogue for Life” that addresses the epidemic of suicide in Indian Country. The women Co-Counselors from Kahnawake have assisted us.
The first year, approximately seven hundred First Nations people were present. Each of them had been close to someone who had committed suicide. This year was similar.
We’ve introduced RC to over a hundred people each year, but most of them live in remote and isolated communities and we have not figured out how to consistently stay in touch with them.
Right now, on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota (USA), there are ongoing suicides of young Lakota people. I know of four young Native people who have some knowledge of Co-Counseling who struggle frequently with suicide recordings. These are just the ones I know of. I am sure that you or someone you know also struggles with the recordings.
How do we get enough discharge to have enough attention to turn the tide on these internalized genocide recordings? How do we get enough discharge to lead in our communities that don’t have large RC Communities as a resource? We can take the lead here. It means making sure that we are well discharged. It means being brave enough to have a plan of action and daring to love someone enough to get in close with him or her. It means giving up our own addictions and lifestyles that pull us toward the recordings.
I propose that for the next period of time—say, nine months—each Native RC leader have one five-minute session a week taking the direction, “I decide to live. I decide to live fully for my people. And this means . . . .”
Today is a good day to live for my people.
Marcie Rendon
International Liberation Reference Person for Native Americans
Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA
Reprinted from the RC e-mail discussion
list for leaders of Native Americans
1Darlene Daniels is the RC Area Reference Person for Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada.
2 Khanawake is the Kahnawake Mohawk Territory, a reserve of the traditionally Iroquoian-speaking Mohawk nation on the south shore of the St. Lawrence River, in Quebec, Canada, across from Montreal.
3 The Lakota people are an Indigenous people of the Great Plains of North America. They are part of a confederation of seven related Sioux tribes and speak Lakota, one of the three major dialects of the Sioux language.
4 Distress recordings
5 “Turn the tide on” means create the momentum to end.
6 "Say" means for example.