10
RECLAIMING YOUTH AT RISK
Profile in Discouragement: A Psychological Orphan
An intelligent, thoughtful youth, Richard withdrew into himself and began expressing his loneliness in a diary. School teachers were not successful in reaching out to him or cultivating his talent. He began to describe himself as “an outcast” and his frustration would occasionally break through in some act of desperation. He ran away, heading for the North like a salmon swimming upstream to its place of origin. He stole a car, shot a cow, and several times he made attempts at suicide. Once he was found sitting in front of a 7–11 store bleeding from the wrists. Another time he was curled in a dog house with “please help me” written in his own blood. Finally, cut off from human bonds, failing in school, powerless to control his life, overwhelmed with feelings of worthlessness, Richard Cardinal, age 17, hanged himself from a board suspended between two birch trees at his last foster home. Richard would have been just another marginal person whose death attracted no more attention than his life, except for a powerful documentary produced by The National Film Board of Canada.27 The film captured the attention of a nation that
© 2002 by Solution Tree Press. All rights reserved.
Richard Cardinal was removed from his alcoholic parents at about the time most children were starting school. A Metis Indian from Canada, he and his siblings were dispersed to foster care, generally with white families. His short life would teach much about the indifference of people as he spent 13 years being shunted to a seemingly endless string of homes, schools, youth shelters, and treatment facilities. Each time he was moved was like pulling a piece of used tape from a wall and trying to fasten it again. Before long he seemed to have lost all ability to build close attachments with adults in his life. In a few placements he was reunited with his brother and sister, but when he had to leave them again, he was shattered by the pain of separation.