The Roots Beneath My Brother’s Suffering
I want viewers to enter this space and confront these realities from an Indigenous perspective, where art does not imitate life but restores relationships. Drawing on Tuck’s (2009) essay, “Suspending Damage: A Letter to Communities,” my work aligns with her “desire-based” narrative, which opposes defining individuals solely by the harm they have experienced. Instead, it focuses on resilience, imagination, and the capacity for healing.
Through spiritual and narrative approaches, I retell these stories as continuations of strength, love, and cultural survival. Ultimately, my work seeks to foster a deeper understanding and empathy towards those affected by addiction, highlighting the power of art to convey complex human experiences and promote healing within communities. This approach enables a richer dialogue about the realities faced by individuals and families, bridging gaps in understanding through the lens of culture and personal experience.
The Roots Beneath My Brother’s Suffering
In the fall of 2024, the phone rang on a gray Saturday afternoon. My brother’s voice came through thin and strained, threaded with pain. He told me he needed to reach the emergency room. I recognized that sound immediately. It carried years of substance use, cycles of effort and relapse, and the heavy shame that often follows Indigenous experiences of addiction, shaped by silence and stigma. His words arrived in fragments, shaped by withdrawal and exhaustion. I listened, already gathering my keys, already knowing where this road would lead.
When I arrived at his house, the air felt unnaturally still, as if the walls themselves were holding their breath. He climbed into the passenger seat without saying a word. His body trembled in sharp waves. His jaw remained tight, and his hands clenched. I drove faster than I should have, offering steady words meant to ground us both. Every mile carried urgency, fear, and an unspoken history rooted in long patterns of survival and harm within our family and community.
At the hospital, he sank into a waiting room chair while the front desk worker moved through questions she was not prepared to ask. The sterile space reflected a broader reality. This rural facility, like many others, lacked readiness for the cultural and clinical realities of addiction within Indigenous lives, where medical systems often fail to address historical trauma, relational harm, and cultural context (Duran & Firehammer, 2017; Johnson-Jennings et al., 2023). Nurses moved quickly once we were brought back, searching for a vein shaped by years of struggle and use. When they finally succeeded, the IV fluids began to drip. The room seemed to soften. My brother drifted into an uneasy sleep. I remained beside him, counting his slow and uneven breaths.
Later, a nurse spoke quietly as she adjusted his chart. She shared how often cases like his arrived through their doors. “Every week now, and we are not equipped for medical detox.” Her words stayed with me, heavy and unresolved. Gratitude felt thin in the face of such honesty. Sitting in that squeaky plastic chair, my thoughts returned to the boy he once was. I saw him at ten years old, riding his BMX bike, laughing with an uneven mullet haircut and a mouth full of dirt, words, and bad jokes (Indian teasing). That boy still lived inside the man now resting before me, struggling to find his way back.
As he settled deeper into sleep, his breathing came in shallow waves, each one carrying pain the medication failed to fully quiet. His body hovered between surrender and resistance. I watched closely, trying to understand how the river of his life had carried him to this bed, a place that held both suffering and a fragile longing for renewal.
Stories like this-----
Stories like this live in every Indigenous community I know. They surface in whispered grief and open anger. They hold truths beyond the reach of statistics. They carry intergenerational loss, policy failure, and the suffocating weight of stigma (Brave Heart & DeBruyn, 1998). Within these stories, endurance remains. Tenderness lives in remembrance. Strength rises through telling. Life insists on itself, even when systems attempt to silence it.
