Bruce Granville Millerthe land as an outcome of their spiritual connection to the landscape
and other spiritual entities. The band won, but on the wrong grounds
and in the wrong venue. Indigenous epistemology, in this case, asserts
that the human system of reciprocity includes non-human beings,
which have to be considered. Failure to do so is dangerous.
Recently, I participated in a friendly and revealing conversation be-
tween a prominent psychologist who has carried out valuable studies
of suicide in Coast Salish communities and an indigenous psychologist
who is herself a member of one of the communities. The mainstream
psychologist explained that although he studies suicide, suicide itself
is unimportant because it is symptomatic of the greater problem of
the large number of people who have become despondent. Suicide, he
concluded, was the moment in which a small number of these people
made the conscious choice to end their lives. To the indigenous psy-
chologist, this viewpoint missed the mark. She responded that, in her
community, suicide represented the communities’ failure to support
the spiritual nature of the deceased rather than an individual decision
by the suicide victim. She placed the psychology of suicide within the
domain of Coast Salish notions of spirit beings that establish relations
with human beings and become part of one’s being. Separation from
these spirit beings, the failure to create a proper relationship, spiri-
tual harm, and disruption in one’s spiritual life could cause the death
of a human. The complex of winter ceremonials and spirit beings is
social, rather than merely private and personal, and family members
and other winter ceremonial dancers who have helped someone cre-
ate and develop the relationship with the spirit beings have a continu-
ing mutual obligation. The pathology that results in death, then, can-
not merely be a private matter. And, for those community members
who have not obtained a spirit helper, they still live within what the
Coast Salish theorize as the embrace of the extended family within
the animated universe.
This exchange reflected significant epistemological differences, even
though both psychologists argue that culturally intact communities
would have lower rates of suicide than ones with little active indige-
nous cultural practice. The differences in position, though, suggest dif-
ferences in what might be done to diminish the likelihood of suicide