I grew up on a reserve near Lethbridge called the Blood Reserve. I was a very shy person, with little happiness in my life. I had gone through extreme poverty and violence at home and I was picked on by the students at school. The students at school classified me as "different", because I concentrated on books and because I was poor, I did not have the cool gear that they had, like the coats with the Nike sign, the shoes with a Michael Jordan logo, or the top CDs of the year. I had bushy hair, old clothes and a phoney smile. It hurt to be called names and it hurt to not have a friend in the world. I went to school, knowing I would be placed in the gutter each and everyday by my fellow peers, but I got used to it. I don't know why I got used to it. It was like sleeping on a bed with a nail sticking out of it it hurts and is very unpleasant.

I was subjected to racism and prejudice in the community that I lived in. I am native and very proud of my culture, but the non-native community made me scared of being me. Racism, to me, is a world disgrace, that limits and puts restrictions on people from being who they really are. It eats away at peoples lives and teaches hatred; it's a book with pages and pages of lies about one's life and about a people's life. On my way home from school, I was often subjected to the racism of these people--but I turned around, ignored them and shouted the great cries of freedom...freedom to be who I was, an Indian. I was certainly strong, but it hurt because I knew that this would go one forever. When I mentioned before that I was living in extreme poverty, I did not only mean that I was hungry, I did not only mean that I was in tattered clothes, but I meant I was living a life of peoples left over adventures in life, and missing great opportunities--like being myself.

My self-esteem was at an ultimate low, I had no self-respect, and no confidence in myself. This was caused mainly due to the reputation chains that were tied on to my legs. The feeling of being different, lead to feeling depressed and then lead to suicidal feelings. I will admit that this classification of my identity caused me to hate life, the life that I had was just a complete drag.

I did not feel like becoming suicidal, to get attention, I did it because I was distressed and felt that the world was spinning in a direction not of my own. But in a direction, where my fate would be the same, sad and lonely life, with no friends and no true happiness. It does not take long and it does not take a lot of effort to make someone feel low and negative, to make someone feel different-to make them feel nothing like a human, but an alien from Mars, who has seventeen ears and nineteen mouths. I have heard the stories of other young people who consider themselves to be classified as different, too. It is when I hear their stories that I think of how much the world sucks, but I believe that it is a struggle, a challenge that we have to undertake.

I am reminded of a story that an elder once told me: An elder and a young man walk into a forest. The young man was very masculine, confident, strong ready to take on the world alone. The elder handed the youth a stick and asked him to break it. The youth promptly broke the stick in two. The elder handed the youth 10 more sticks. The youth broke those as well. After searching for a while, the elder found 150 sticks which he bundled together and handed to the youth. Try as he might, the youth could not break the bundle of sticks. He could barely even lift the bundle of sticks. The Elder said, we are like the sticks, easy to break as one but impossible to break together.

I now know, that when you have the support of your friends, you can not be broken as easy as if you had not a friend in sight. To accept someone for who they are is a major accomplishment, and what must be done is we must create a ripple effect across our land to eliminate some of the problems and issues that prevent us from moving towards a society of tolerance and one day celebrating diversity.

Diversity and Tolerance--think about those two words and think about their effect on the world in the future, will they be a positive or a negative effect think real hard. I hope that you now have clear a understanding of my experiences with being labelled as different. I overcame it, but I think I will always think of myself as different from others in some way.