Substance Abuse In The Legend Of The Sugar Girl By Joseph Boyden

Thousands of First Nations people were forced to go to residential schools, thousands had their lives ruined by the years of physical, emotional and even sexual abuse. These people had their culture stripped away from them, and they were thrown out into the world without a clue about how to survive in it. The traumatic events that occurred at the residential schools gave countless victims PTSD leaving them to resort to substance abuse to smother their pain and causing many to die alone with no one to remember them. Examples of those affected by the actions of the priests and nuns who ran the schools can be found in Sammy Aandeg of Drew Hayden Taylor’s Motorcycles and Sweetgrass and in the Sugar Girl of Joseph Boyden’s The Legend of the Sugar …show more content…
Sammy Aandeg is no exception to this. The author describes early in the book that “ten years of living at the residential school, plus over half a century of living with the effects of that school and finding new ways to damage his body hadn’t left much of the young, defiant boy. Instead, there shuffled an old, broken-down man who reeked of alcohol” (Taylor 57). After many years of using alcohol to try and ward off nightmares and flashbacks Sammy is stuck in a cycle of substance abuse. At first, alcohol can feel freeing and allow a person to forget about all worries and be happy but after a little while alcohol suddenly switches to having the opposite effect by inviting all the anger and sadness a person might have into the spotlight. Sammy uses alcohol to forget about his trauma despite all the terrible things it caused him to do to the people around him which led to Sammy being cut off from the rest of the …show more content…
His trauma has caused a disconnection between him and the rest of the world. Sammy is stuck in his own head and he thinks he can deal with all his problems on his own. Maggie supports this analysis when she says, “we’ve all tried to help Sammy. Some of our health workers have gone up to see him, my husband even arranged for a psychiatrist to visit him, but nothing. He’ll only talk in Anishnawbe, and not many psychiatrists are that fluent in it. Sammy doesn’t want to be helped” (Taylor 181). The first step in recovery is admitting something is wrong but since Sammy will never admit he needs help, no one will ever be able to help him. Following the path he is currently on, Sammy will end up dying alone with no one to remember how smart he actually is under the layers of anger and alcohol. This is this unfortunate truth for many victims of the residential school