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

Youth Suicide as the Coal Miner’s Canary of Cultural Distress

Introduction

The work that I will describe forms a part of a larger researchenterprise that is, in some descending order of generality, about:

1) Possible meanings of self- and personhood;2) The process of identity development;3) The challenge of achieving personal & cultural persistence

in a changing world; and4) The serious prospect that youth suicide is the penalty of

personal and cultural failures to achieve a sense of continuity in time.

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 Canada’s Aboriginal population, and in particular its youth, has the highest known suicide rate of any culturally identifiable group in the world?

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

Part I: The “One Self to a Customer” Rule

The Antinomy of Sameness and Change

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:

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, 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.

Bows & Sterns“Life 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 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.

Part II: Self-Continuityin suicidal and non-suicidal youth

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)

Part III: The epidemiology of suicide in First Nations

communitiesCultural continuity as a protective

factor against suicide in first nations

BC Study

• Information on every suicide in British Columbia (1987–2000)

• Age, gender, date...

• Means of death & associated factors (e.g., alcohol, drugs, police involvement)

• Geographic location

• Aboriginal Status

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

Population Statistics: Youth

77%

23%

Native Non-native

Nearly 1/4 of all youth suicides are Native

54%

46%

Youth Other

Over half of all Native suicides are completed by young persons

Aboriginal suicide rates as actuarial fiction

Variability as a function of:• Census District

• Band/Tribal Council

Suicide by Census District

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800

900

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30

Census District

NativeNon-Native

Youth Suicide Rate by Band (1987-2000)

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200

400

600

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1400

Band (names removed)

NOTE: Almost 40% of communities had NO recorded deaths by suicide.

Youth Suicide Rate by Tribal Council

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75

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125

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Tribal Council (names removed)

NOTE: 1 in 5 Tribal Councils had NO recorded deaths by suicide

THE OPEN QUESTION

What distinguishes Aboriginal communities with no youth suicides

from those in which the rate is alarmingly high?

What Doesn’t Work

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

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

Community Factors

0

5

10

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25

30

35

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45

Self Govt LandClaims

Education Health CulturalFacil

Police/Fire * Women inGovt

* ChildServices

PresentAbsent

Youth suicide rate by number of factors present in

community (1987-1992)

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60

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0 1 2 3 4 5 6

Overall rate by number offactors (1993-2000)

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0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

Number of Factors Present

Part IV: Potential Action & Policy

• The Myth of the Monolithic Indigene

• Indigenous Knowledge, Knowledge Transfer, & the Exchange of Best Practices

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 bands––a fact that is seen to recommend a more “lateral” transfer of knowledge and best practices between Aboriginal communities.

I. The Myth of the Monolithic Indigene––the “actuarial fiction” that it is possible to capture the diversity of a whole province’s or country’s 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 others––more that half of BC’s 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.

Action & Policy Implication:One

• If:• In light of the radical diversity in the rates of youth suicide (and

much else besides) evident across BC’s 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 exist––all attempts to tar everyone with the same broad brush––automatically amount to “actuarial fictions”––myths that, in addition to being seriously misleading and defamatory, tend to sponsor the misappropriation of scarce human and financial resources; and

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.

Action & Policy Implication:Two

Indigenous 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 BC’s 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 government’s most cherished catch-phrases of the day: “knowledge transfer” and the “exchange of best practices.”

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:

a) By counterposing them against supposedly more “real” scientific knowledge;

b) By equating “otherness” with ignorance;c) By canceling or negating or emptying indigenous knowledge forms of

legitimate meaning (Fanon,1965); andd) 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).

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 populations––rates that are effectively zero––it is evident that some Aboriginal communities are already in possession of highly effective forms of knowledge and practices––knowledge 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?

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.

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.

Conclusions:Four Easy Pieces

1. 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 a sense of self-continuity suffer a loss of connectedness to their own future, and are thereby placed at special risk for suicide.

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 heritage culture and work to control their own destinies are dramatically more successful in insulating their youth against the risks of suicide.

Conclusions:Four 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 province’s or country’s 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.

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@interchange.ubc.ca