Suicide

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Suicide The Persistence Of
Identity In The Face Of Radical
Cultural Change Michael Chandler
University of British Columbia
Presented at the Assembly of First Nations
National Policy Forum, 19 April 2005
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Youth Suicide as the Coal Miners Canary of
Cultural Distress
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Introduction

• The work that I will describe forms a part of a
  larger research
• enterprise that is, in some descending order of
  generality, about
• Possible meanings of self- and personhood
• The process of identity development
• The challenge of achieving personal cultural
  persistence in a changing world and
• The serious prospect that youth suicide is the
  penalty of personal and cultural failures to
  achieve a sense of continuity in time.

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Three Orienting Questions

• How is it that, given the inevitability of
  change, individuals and whole cultures succeed in
  preserving their identity in time?
• How could it be that young persons in general,
  and Aboriginal youth in particular, attempt and
  go on to kill themselves at rates dramatically
  higher than other age groups?
• How did it come to pass that Canadas Aboriginal
  population, and in particular its youth, has the
  highest known suicide rate of any culturally
  identifiable group in the world?

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Four Easy Pieces -An Overview

• Part I The one self to a customer rule
• Part II Self-continuity in suicidal
  non-suicidal youth
• Part III The epidemiology of suicide in First
  Nations communities
• Part IV Potential Action Policy Implications

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Part I The One Self to a Customer Rule

• The Antinomy of Sameness and Change

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Part I
The One Identity To A
Customer Rule

• If they are to remain recognizable as instances
  of what selves and cultures are ordinarily taken
  to be, both individuals whole cultural
  communities must satisfy at least two
  constitutive conditions
• Both are forced by the temporally vectored nature
  of our public and private lives to constantly
  change.
• Inevitable change not withstanding, both
  individuals and cultures must be understood to
  somehow remain recognizably the same.
• As such, personal and cultural continuity (which
  embed both sameness change) are not elective
  features of persons or whole cultural groups,
  but constitutive conditions of their coming
  into being.

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Bows SternsLife is like a skiff moving
through time with a bow as well as a
sternWilliam James

• The claim that the earlier and later
  manifestations of a life or culture must somehow
  count as belonging timelessly to one and the same
  continuant is true for at least two persuasive
  reasons
• One of which is quintessentially historical and
  backwards referring
• The other forward anticipating, and so all about
  securing our own as yet unrealized futures.

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Part II Self-Continuityin suicidal and
non-suicidal youth
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Adolescent Suicide

• Failures in Self-Continuity are STRONGLY
  associated with suicide risk
• 83 of suicidal subjects could mount NO argument
  for self-continuity (in self or others)

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Part III The epidemiology of suicide in First
Nations communities

• Cultural continuity as a protective factor
  against suicide in first nations

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BC Study

• Information on every suicide in British Columbia
  (19872000)
• Age, gender, date...
• Means of death associated factors (e.g.,
  alcohol, drugs, police involvement)
• Geographic location
• Aboriginal Status

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Native Suicide

• Canadian First Nations suffer from the highest
  rate of suicide of any culturally identifiable
  group in the world
• Native suicide rate is 3 times higher than the
  rate for the general Canadian population
• Native youth are 5-20 times more likely to die by
  suicide than are their non-native peers

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Population Statistics
Youth
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Aboriginal suicide rates as actuarial fiction

• Variability as a function of
• Census District
• Band/Tribal Council

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Suicide by Census District
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Youth Suicide Rate by Band (1987-2000)
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Youth Suicide Rate by Tribal Council
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THE OPEN QUESTION

• What distinguishes Aboriginal communities with no
  youth suicides from those in which the rate is
  alarmingly high?

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What Doesnt Work

• Urban/Rural/Remote location
• Children and youth in care
• Family structure
• Population density
• Income adequacy
• Unemployment
• Labour force skill levels
• Education completion rates

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Cultural Reconstruction(What Works)

• Self-government
• Land Claims
• Education
• Health Services
• Police/Fire services
• Cultural Facilities
• Knowledge of Aboriginal   Languages
• Women in government
• Child Protection Services

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Community Factors
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Youth suicide rate by number of
factors present in community (1987-1992)
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Overall rate by number offactors (1993-2000)
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Part IV Potential Action Policy

• The Myth of the Monolithic Indigene
• Indigenous Knowledge, Knowledge Transfer, the
  Exchange of Best Practices

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Potential Action Policy Implications

• Of the several potential action or policy
  implications that flow from the research that I
  have summarized I will mention only two
• The first of these concerns the implications of
  exposing as false what I will call the myth of
  the monolithic indigene.
• The second turns on the low to absent rates of
  youth suicide noted in many Aboriginal bandsa
  fact that is seen to recommend a more lateral
  transfer of knowledge and best practices between
  Aboriginal communities.

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I. The Myth of the Monolithic Indigenethe
actuarial fiction that it is possible to
capture the diversity of a whole provinces or
countrys Aboriginal life in a single, totalizing
(often statistical) gaze.

• The first
• In BC alone there are more than 200 Aboriginal
  bands that collectively speak fourteen mutually
  un-interpretable languages, occupy diverse
  corners of a territory bigger than Western
  Europe, live in sharply different ecological
  niches and spiritual worlds, and have radically
  different histories, both with the now majority
  culture and with one another. What the research
  summarized earlier plainly shows is that this
  radical diversity also extends to the
  distribution of youth suicides. That is, the
  youth suicide rates observed across the different
  Aboriginal communities in BC presents a wildly
  saw-toothed picture. While some communities have
  suffered youth suicide rates as much as 800 times
  the national average, many othersmore that half
  of BCs bands have no reported youth suicides
  in the 14-year study window we have considered.
  As such, while it continues to be statistically
  true that the overall provincial rate of youth
  suicide is somewhere between five and twenty
  times that of the general population, this
  summary statistic tells us nothing about any
  particular group or community that deserves being
  acted upon.

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Action Policy ImplicationOne

• If
• In light of the radical diversity in the rates of
  youth suicide (and much else besides) evident
  across BCs Aboriginal communities, there really
  is no monolithic indigene, no other, and no
  such thing as the suicidal Aboriginal
• Then
• A) All totalizing, blanket statements created by
  arithmetically averaging across all of the real
  cultural diversity that does existall attempts
  to tar everyone with the same broad
  brushautomatically amount to actuarial
  fictionsmyths that, in addition to being
  seriously misleading and defamatory, tend to
  sponsor the misappropriation of scarce human and
  financial resources and

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Action Policy Implications...

• B) No one size fits all solution strategy to
  the problem of Aboriginal suicide could possible
  be made to work. Rather, any serious attempt to
  address this or related health problems must
  necessarily begin with concerted efforts to
  determine how such problems are actually
  distributed across the Aboriginal population.

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Action Policy ImplicationTwoIndigenous
Knowledge, Knowledge Transfer, The Exchange of
Best Practices

• The Second
• What our research also makes plain is the
  existence of a large, but poorly appreciated
  source of real cultural knowledge about how the
  problem of Aboriginal youth suicide might be
  addressed. That is, clearly contained in the
  finding that more than half of BCs Aboriginal
  communities have youth suicide rates lower than
  the general population is the evident fact that
  real indigenous knowledge about how to address
  this problem must evidently already be well
  sedimented within these communities themselves.
  Such Aboriginal groups necessarily know and do
  things that are unknown or left undone by other
  communities (both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal)
  where youth suicide is epidemic. If proper
  attention and weight were given to this fact,
  then it would become necessary to radically
  re-think two of governments most cherished
  catch-phrases of the day knowledge transfer
  and the exchange of best practices.

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The marginalization of indigenous knowledge
practices

• Part of the residue of colonialism is a lingering
  form of epistemic violence that works to
  condemn the best thoughts and practices of
  indigenous people to a derivative and subjugated
  epistemic existence. Having marginalized
  indigenous voices
• By counterposing them against supposedly more
  real scientific knowledge
• By equating otherness with ignorance
• By canceling or negating or emptying indigenous
  knowledge forms of legitimate meaning
  (Fanon,1965) and
• By branding them as naturally childish and mere
  superstition, members of the dominate society
  are left largely unopposed in characterizing what
  Aboriginal peoples often experience as still
  further attempts at intellectual conquest, as
  benign, and well intended civilizing, or
  educative missions. (Ghandi 1998).

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Putting the lie to the equation of otherness
and ignorance

• Given the fact that more than half of the bands
  surveyed have youth suicide rates lower than
  those found in the general populationsrates
  that are effectively zeroit is evident that
  some Aboriginal communities are already in
  possession of highly effective forms of knowledge
  and practicesknowledge about how to make life
  worth living that could potentially be put to use
  by others
• Two general sorts of questions immediately arise
  in response to these findings. One of these
  asks
• A) What, exactly, are those knowledges and
  best practices? while the other has to do with
• B) How is such knowledge best transferred or
  shared?

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Aboriginal Best Practices

• It is, our data show, straightforwardly true that
  those Aboriginal communities in BC that have, for
  example, achieved a measure of self-government,
  or were quick off the mark to litigate for
  Aboriginal title of traditional lands, and that
  have otherwise successfully wrestled from the
  hands of government some measure of control over
  their own civic lives, have manifestly lower or
  absent youth suicide rates. While this is not the
  same thing as ensuring that such communities have
  declarative knowledge of what they are doing
  right, or that they undertook such cultural
  preserving steps with the explicit intent of
  lowering the youth suicide rates, it is
  nevertheless true on its face that, sedimented
  with such collective best practices is a
  measure of real procedural knowledge about what
  is involved in creating a local world in which
  youth find life worth living.

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Knowledge Transfer

• Knowledge transfer, as commonly understood, is a
  top down process by means of which scientific
  knowledge generated within the Academy is made to
  trickle-down until it eventually reaches
  community level workers. In addition to being
  suspect on other grounds, such made in Ottawa
  solutions are broadly seen as disrespectful by
  served communities, and openly confirmatory of
  the positional inferiority commonly accorded to
  Aboriginal culture.
• What the research that I have presented suggests
  as an alternative is that if indigenous knowledge
  is recognized as real knowledge, then, in the
  place of more traditional top-down approaches,
  what needs to be seriously explored is the
  possibility of a community-to-community,
  lateral transfer of knowledges and best
  practices between groups that have enjoyed
  greater and lesser levels of success in meeting
  the needs of their own developing youth.

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ConclusionsFour Easy Pieces

• Recourse to some means of preserving a sense of
  personal and cultural persistence is a recurrent
  parameter of self-understanding, perhaps common
  to all human cultures.
• Those adolescents who fail to successfully
  sustain a sense of self-continuity suffer a loss
  of connectedness to their own future, and are
  thereby placed at special risk for suicide.

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ConclusionsFour easy pieces

• 3. Individual and cultural continuity are
  strongly linked, such that First Nations
  communities that succeed in taking steps to
  preserve their heritage culture and work to
  control their own destinies are dramatically more
  successful in insulating their youth against the
  risks of suicide.

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ConclusionsFour easy pieces

• 4. There are at least two obvious action or
  policy implications that flow from this research.
• The first of these turns upon exposing as false
  what I have called the myth of the monolithic
  indigene the actuarial fiction that it is
  possible to capture the diversity of a whole
  provinces or countrys Aboriginal life in a
  single, totalizing (often statistical) gaze.
• The second is that, in light of the rich fund of
  indigenous knowledges and practices shown to be
  scattered throughout the Aboriginal population,
  traditional top-down strategies of knowledge
  transfer should be retired in favor of a more
  lateral transfer of knowledge.

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With thanks to...

• Marlene Atleo, Jessica Flores, Pam Frank, Erica
  Gehrke, Darcy Hallett, Catherine Horvath, Cathy
  Hull, Marla Jack, Leigh Koopman, Chris Lalonde,
  Aislin Martin, Lisa Moberly, David Paul, Jesse
  Philips, Holly Pommier, Bryan Sokol, Ulrich
  Teucher, Florence Williams

• Canadian Institute of Health Research, Michael
  Smith Foundation for Health Research, Social
  Sciences and Humanities Research Council of
  Canada, the Hampton Fund, the Human Early
  Learning Partnership

E-mail chandler_at_interchange.ubc.ca