Today our guest is Mi’k­maq Phi­los­o­phy Hon­ors Stu­dent at St. Thomas Uni­ver­si­ty, Shaunessy McK­ay. We dis­cuss the sec­ond print­ing of her and Onei­da Pro­fes­sor of Psy­chol­o­gy at STMU, Dr. Roland Chrisjohn’s book: –Dying to Please You: Indige­nous Sui­cide in Con­tem­po­rary Cana­da – . In response to the ris­ing need for men­tal health sup­port work­ers and psy­chol­o­gists to vis­it FNMI com­mu­ni­ties beset by youth sui­cide epi­demics, McK­ay and Chrisjohn’s work pro­vides an essen­tial con­tri­bu­tion to the con­ver­sa­tion. Specif­i­cal­ly, –Dying to Please You– reads as an intel­lec­tu­al coun­ter­pounch to non-Indige­nous the­o­ries of sui­cide, name­ly the the­o­ret­i­cal gap of how oppre­sive sui­cide works. We dig into McK­ay’s work with sur­vey­ing the dis­ci­pline of sui­ci­dol­o­gy and how the two uncov­ered ear­ly Karl Marx as a foun­da­tion­al piv­ot point on the con­ver­sa­tion of sui­cide and alien­ta­tion. McK­ay also pro­vides us with her inter­pre­ta­tion of ​“informed resis­tance” the duo’s sug­ges­tion of how Indige­nous peo­ple strug­gling with self-harm can lean-on and lean into, as a way of over­com­ing the oppre­sive alien­ation of set­tler-colo­nial­ism. Their book is avial­able through They­tus Books or online as a .pdf.