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Gasoline Sniffers

Canada's Innu tribe is on the verge of extinction.

by grimy | 2002.10.20

"Someone is always worse off than you are."

When life gets rugged, the preceding is a phrase that can make your day a little brighter. For me, on those dark college nights prior to a doomed final exam, this advice always fought off the academic demons. The history book would be heaved under the desk, a Simpson's tape popped in, and a fat joint rolled.

But the peace of mind always comes at someone else's expense. And it so happens that the pond is always stocked with people suffering from shitty circumstances: the shackled teenage slaves in Sudan, the chemically gassed Kurdish children in Iraq, the walking skeletons in Ethiopia and the bloody torture chambers of North Korea.

Yes, we all know life sucks for many.

While the world's malice assumes all sorts of forms and styles, its geographic location always lies in the land of sick and twisted countries -- far away from home and hovering outside the orbit of reality.

So it was to my surprise, one drunk night, when a gentle Canadian, over an orange glowing candle, told of the skeletons that rattled in the closet of good old Canada.

Canada, a land that snootily deems itself the social conscience of its big brash brother America, is universally extolled for its nationalized health care, UN peacekeeping missions, economic equality and tolerant bear-hugging men.

But no, my blurry-eyed friend slurred, that was not the entire story. Things were not perfect, real shit, some Chinatown cop-killing-worthy shit was going down in Canada's very own backyard.

I learned about Canada's hidden ugliness on that fateful evening. Needless to say, my pleasant buzz became an foul drunk. Stumbling home that night, I peered into the faces of passing Canadians, searching for a hint of the shame that lay several hundred miles north from the avenue we shared. Behind their innocent fat ruddy faces flashed the images of the gasoline-sniffing boys and girls -- the brain-dead generation my friend had nervously described.

It is the Innu tribe, a group of Native Americans located in Canada's northeast corner, that is family to the gasoline-sniffing kids. Before the French sailed to the New World and butchered the beaver, centuries before the British strong-armed Eastern Canada under one rule and many moons before socialism-friendly Canada emerged, the Innu tribe hunted the caribou in the region of Labrador, an snow-bound area north of Quebec. The Innu was a self-sufficient and traditional society and everything was real good.

During the Vietnam War, the floorboards were laid for the Innu's tragic demise. The Canadian government forced the Innu tribe to give up the migration game and settle into villages. Then came the government schools, missionary churches and government services. Somewhere in the fiasco, the Innu tribesmen lost their spear-heaving skills.

By the 1970's, the Innu tribe had little more than a listless existence in the squalid conditions of their poverty-stricken villages. In a thoughtful gesture, the Churchill Hydroelectric Development Project flooded their remaining caribou hunting grounds and NATO jets, arriving as part of a Northern Hemisphere security force, flew low above the treetops and scattered any possible remaining hunting prey. By the end of the 1970s, the caribou hunt was dead.

Since the 1970s, the Innu transgression has been breathtaking. It is a nauseous story packed with adolescent sexual abuse, domestic beatings, rampant alcoholism, stinking poverty, and of course, gasoline-sniffing kids.

Today, in the villages of Davis Inlet and Sheshatshui, communities of 500 and 1000 inhabitants, droopy-eyed eight-year olds roam freezing dirt roads with gasoline-filled plastic bags plastered to their small mouths. For hours at end, they get high in the cold; their brain cells saturated in the gasoline and brain damage slowly settles in. Their red eyes spew puss and their noses drip bloody mucus. After a busy day of gas-sniffing, the children trudge back to their shit-hole homes where drunk and unemployed parents, (close to 80% of the working population are without jobs), wait to smack them around.

95% of the children in Davis Inlet and Sheshatshiu will not graduate high school and some will not live to be 18. 42 % of the children have contemplated suicide and 28% have attempted suicide. Early in the 1990s, a string of adolescent suicides in Davis Inlet triggering Survival International, a charitable organization that works with indigenous people, to bestow the Innu children with the dubious honor of being the most suicide-ridden people in the world.

In November 2000, Innu Chief Simeon Tshakapesh released a study that determined 154 of the 169 youths in Davis Inlet had inhaled gasoline while 60 youths were chronic users.

According CBC, a leading Canada news body, gasoline inhalation is real fuckin' bad.

Gasoline fumes affect the body and brain the same way alcohol does: blurry vision, slurred speech, euphoria, laziness and a loss of appetite. Bridled along with the euphoria, is sporadik dry heaving, sores of the mouth and nose, and throat and ear infections.

It is easy to spot a sniffer.

The effect of gasoline gets more serious when we dig deeper into the body and get to the innards. Sniffing brings permanent damage to the liver, kidneys, eyes, bone marrow, heart and blood vessels. The poisonous lead content of gasoline also causes convulsions, impaired mental function, neurological damage, kidney damage, irregular heart beats. And than there is the "sudden sniffing death", which transpires when the heart undergoes unbearable stress and collapses.

CBC reports that gas-sniffing can only be combated through the isolation of gas-sniffers and a strong family support network. In Davis Inlet and Sheshatshiu where the family structure is booze-ravaged (according to CBC studies, close to 50% of adults are alcoholics), there is little hope for the critical support.

In November and December of 2000, the most serious chronic sniffers were extracted from Davis Inlet and Sheshatshiu and placed in hospital barracks in Goose Bay, Newfoundland to undergo a detoxification process. There, the children recounted tales of beatings at the hands of adults, hungry cold nights and the incineration of friends when cigarette smoking and gasoline-niffing were mixed. After several weeks, the children were shipped back home.

While the children returned clean, the waiting communities of dark cold drunk nights had remained the same. This past winter, the gasoline-sniffers have reverted back to sniffing gas for hours and passing out in the snow.

Sadly, a long-term plan to fight the gasoline-sniffing problem does not exist. The root of the problem, poverty and alcohol, remain firmly entrenched.

Like animals, human groups gradually become extinct. Although the Canadian government consistently provides services in an attempt to yank the gasbags away from the children's faces, the efforts have largely failed. The grain-lcohol is too plentiful, and the poverty is too extreme.

The Davis Inlet and Sheshatshiu communities will continue to be battered and bludgeoned, always unable to assimilate with North American society. Eventually, the Innu will disappear. For the Loosie.com generation, the extinction of a human race so close-by has never been witnessed; maybe we should at least acknowledge the death of the Innu.

Maybe their lives are a tad to shitty to pad one's own self-esteem when things look down.

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