CULTURAL CONTINUITY

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• CULTURAL CONTINUITY
• THE SOCIAL-EMOTIONAL WELLBEING OF
• FIRST NATIONS YOUTH
• Michael J. Chandler
• The University of British Columbia
• IUHPE Conference
• Vancouver, BC
• 10 June 2007

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Introduction
The work on which I want to report forms a part
of a larger research enterprise that is, in some
descending order of generality, about
1. Possible meanings of self- and personhood 2.
Continuity the process of identity
development 3. The challenge of achieving
personal and cultural persistence in a changing
world 4. The serious prospect that youth
suicide is a penalty paid for personal and
cultural failures to achieve a sense of
continuity in time.
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Four Easy Pieces An Overview
Part I The one self to a customer rule Part
II Self-continuity in suicidal and non-suicidal
youth Part III The epidemiology of suicide in
Aboriginal communities Part IV
Language preservation as a protective
factor against suicide in First Nations youth
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Part I The One self to a customer Rule The
antinomy of sameness change
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The Antinomy of Sameness Change

• If they are to remain recognizable as instances
  of what selves and cultures are ordinarily taken
  to be, both individuals and whole cultural
  communities must satisfy at least two
  constitutive conditions
• 1.) Both are forced by the temporally vectored
  nature of our public and private lives to
  constantly change
• 2.) Inevitable change not withstanding, both
  individuals and cultures must be understood to
  somehow remain recognizably the same.
• As such, the constructs of 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 stern.
William 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 reasons
• One of which is quintessentially historical and
  backwards referring how history makes morality
  possible.
• The other forward anticipating, and so all about
  securing our own as yet unrealized futures how
  care and concern presuppose a stake in ones
  future.

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Part II Self-continuity in Suicidal
Non-suicidal Youth
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Youth suicide is a cultural coalminers canary
of cultural distress
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B) Self-continuity in Suicidal Non-suicidal
Youth
Type of continuity warrant by suicidal status
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Part III The Epidemiology of Suicide in First
Nations Communities Cultural Continuity as a
protective factor against suicide among First
Nations youth
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Aboriginal Suicide in Canada

• Indigenous communities in Canada have the highest
  rate of suicide of any culturally identifiable
  group in the world.
• The overall First Nations suicide rate is 3 times
  higher than the rate for the general Canadian
  population.
• First Nations youth are 5 to 20 times more likely
  to die by suicide than are their non-Indigenous
  peers.

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British Columbia (BC) Statistics
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BC Statistics Youth
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Lies, Damn Lies, Statistics First Nations
suicide rates as actuarial fictions
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BC Within Canada
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BCs Footprint
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Variability in Suicide as a Function of Census
District, BC
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BC Youth Suicide Rate by Band (1987-2000)
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BC Youth Suicide Rate by Tribal Council
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THE OPEN QUESTION What distinguishes First
Nations communities with no youth suicides from
those in which the rate is alarmingly high?
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What Doesnt Work Trawling aimlessly through
Statistics Canada data

• Urban/Rural/Remote location
• Children and youth in care
• Population density
• Income adequacy
• Unemployment
• Labor force skill levels

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Cultural ReconstructionWhat Works Theory
Driven Measures of Cultural Continuity

• Self-government
• Land claims
• Education
• Health services
• Police/Fire services
• Cultural facilities
• Women in government
• Child protection services
• Knowledge of Indigenous languages

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BC Youth Suicide Rate by Cultural Continuity
Factors (1987-2000)
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BC Youth Suicide Rate by Number of Factors
Present in Community (1987-1992)
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BC Overall Suicide Rate by Number of Factors in
Community (1993-2000) A Replication
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Part IV Language Preservation as a Protective
Factor against Suicide in First Nations Youth
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The Viability of Aboriginal Languages in Canada
During the past 100 years at least 10 once
flourishing Indigenous languages have become
extinct in Canada, and at least a dozen more are
judged to be on the brink of extinction. Worse
still, according to McConvell and Thieberger 80
of such languages spoken at the turn of the
century will die in this generation. Given that
language is one of the most tangible symbols of
culture and group identitya link which connects
people with their past, and grounds their social,
emotional and spiritual vitality (Norris,
1998) the loss of any of these languages spells
the end of a way of looking at the world, of
explaining the unknown and of making sense of
life.
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BC as a Worse-case Scenario
However wide spread and regrettable the erosion
of Indigenous languages across the whole of
Canada may be, matters are worse still in the
province of British Columbia, where the data I
want to share was collected. Of the 11
distinctive language families that exist across
Canada, about half of these are found in BC. As
such, while BC has the greatest linguistic
diversity, it has one of the smallest language
populations and the largest number of endangered
languages.
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Knowledge of an Indigenous Language The Ability
Index
If everyone who claims knowledge of an
Indigenous language (defined by Statistics Canada
as the self-reported ability to carry on a
conversation in such a language) had acquired
that ability as a mother tongue or home language,
then dividing the mother tongue population of any
group into the number who claim such knowledge
would produce an Ability Index, or ratio, equal
to 100. Interestingly, when Canadas overall
First Nations, Métis, and Inuit population is
considered, the resulting Ability Index,
according to the 1996 Census, equals 117. The
1991 Aboriginal Peoples Survey further indicates
that, among young persons 10-14, for every 100
off-reserve Registered Aboriginal children 165
claim to speak an Indigenous language. The clear
inference supported by such figures is that large
numbers of people have acquired their knowledge
as a second language, learned in relatively
well-organized communities with off-reserve
schools, child-care facilities, Head Start
programs, and friendship centers.
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A Pilot Project

• My research colleagues and I are currently
  engaged in a program of research meant to explore
  how information about knowledge of a First
  Nations language might relate to youth suicide
  rates.
• Previous work has demonstrated that
• Although First Nations youth suicide rates for
  the province of BC are alarmingly high, these
  rates vary significantly from one community to
  another and
• Those bands that strive to connect to their
  cultural past and gain con-trol of their cultural
  future have dramatically fewer youth suicides.
• Taking a lead from these earlier findings, the
  new work on which I want to report explores
  whether a further cultural continuity marker
  community-level knowledge of an Indigenous
  language makes an additional and independent
  contribution to the prediction of First Nations
  youth suicide rates.

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Indigenous Language Knowledge
In many ways, Indigenous language knowledge would
appear to be an especially pertinent indicator of
community attempts to connect to their cultural
past and preserve their cultural future. This is
particularly true in BCs First Nations
communities where, without special diligence, no
Indigenous language could realistically be
expected to survive beyond one or two more
generations. By examining the degree to which a
community-level measure of Indigenous language
knowledge serves to predict youth suicide rates,
this research tests the prospect that connecting
to ones culture through the medium of
traditional language knowledge may serve to
bolster cultural continuity and wellbeing among
First Nations youth.
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1. The Research Question
More particularly, the research to be reported
tests whether Indigenous language knowledge adds
predictive power to the existing list of Cultural
Continuity factors previously identified.

• METHOD
• Information about First Nations language
  knowledge came from the 1996 Statistics Canada
  Census and was compiled by Norris and MacCon
  (2004). These data specify
• a.) The number of First Nations people in each
  census district in British Columbia
• b.) The band most evident in each census
  district
• c.) How many of these people stated on the census
  that they have knowledge of an Indigenous
  language. This information was used to
  calculate, for each band, the proportion of band
  members who claimed knowledge of an First Nations
  language.

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2. BC Suicide Data
As previously reported, data on suicide rates and
the distribution of cultural continuity factors
across communities cover a 6-year period from
1987 to 1992. These data were first analyzed by
conducting a factor analysis in which the
previous complement of cultural continuity
factors were combined with the newly introduced
index of language knowledge. The relation
between youth suicide and language knowledge was
then tested, first by itself, and then in
combination with the other cultural continuity
factors.
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BC Suicide Data
Because the incidence of suicide is low relative
to the size of the population, and because First
Nations communities are generally small, these
analyses relied on grouping bands together into
larger population units based on their
dichotomized scores on the cultural continuity
factors. The index of language knowledge was
also dichotomized, and those bands (16) having a
score above 50 on this variable were then
compared with the bands (136) in which less than
50 of their members claimed no working knowledge
of an Indigenous language.
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3. Results
Factor Analysis Language knowledge was
first correlated with the previous set of six
cultural continuity markers previously
identified. For the most part, these
correlations are moderate, although the language
marker is less closely correlated with the other
continuity measures than these measures are with
each other. A principal components factor
analysis was then conducted on the six cultural
continuity variables previously reported, plus
the new index of language knowledge. Results
suggest that these variables continue to be best
represented as a one-factor solution, with this
factor explaining approximately 30 of the
variance.
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Results
Suicide Results indicate that those bands
with higher levels of language knowledge (i.e.,
more than 50) had fewer suicides than those
bands with lower levels (i.e., less than 50).
More specifically, high language knowledge
bands averaged 13 suicides per 100,000 while
those with lower language knowledge had more than
6 times the number of suicides (97 per 100,000).
These differential rates reflect the fact
that, between 1987 and 1992, only one youth died
by suicide from within those 16 bands that had
the language marker while, from the remaining 136
bands, 84 youth died by suicide during this same
6-year period.
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4. Discussion
In general, two main findings support the
contention that knowledge of a First Nations
language is not only related to youth suicide,
but also can serve as an additional index of
cultural continuity First, the factor analysis
demonstrates a one-factor solution with good
psychometric properties. In short, the present
measure of Indigenous language knowledge clearly
qualifies as a good additional marker of cultural
continuity. Second, language knowledge was also
found to be a useful stand-alone indicator of
lower suicide rates. Importantly, not only did
this language indicator independently
differentiate those bands with lower from those
with higher suicides rates, it was also able to
make this differentiation over and above the
discrimination ability of the other six cultural
continuity factors identified in previous
research. These data suggest that language
knowledge can serve as a separate indicator of
youth suicide.
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Conclusions Four 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.
• 2. Those adolescents who fail to successfully
  sustain some self-continuity warranting
  strategies suffer a loss of connectedness to
  their own future, and are thereby placed at
  special risk for suicide.

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Conclusions Four Easy Pieces
3. Individual and cultural continuity are
strongly linked, such that First Nations
communities that succeed in taking steps to
preserve their language and heritage culture, and
that work to control their own destinies, are
demonstrably more successful in insulating their
youth against the risks of suicide.
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Conclusions Four Easy Pieces
4. The present measure of Indigenous language
knowledge (taken alone or in combination with
other factors) is strongly related to youth
suicide rates, and clearly qualifies as an
additional marker of cultural continuity.
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With thanks to

• Marlene Atleo, Jessica Flores, Pam Frank, Erica
  Gehrke, Darcy Hallett, Catherine Horvath, Cathy
  Hull, Marla Jack, Chris Lalonde, Aislin Martin,
  Lisa Moberly, Mary Jane Norris, David Paul, 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 Hampton Fund Human Early Learning
  Partnership Network for Aboriginal Mental Health
  Research

E-mail chandler_at_interchange.ubc.ca