From Turtle Island Native Network - comments by Tehaliwaskenhas

SAVE CULTURE, SAVE LIVES!  SUICIDE PREVENTION

By way of comments of Elders and others have known for years that if Aborginal Peoples could hold on to their culture they could survive. Despite attempts by non-aboriginals to destroy our nations, the people have managed to survive. Secretly, some people held on to the beliefs, even practiced them by clandestine means. They are to be honoured for their efforts.

Today, many communities struggle to hold on to the almost bare threads of culture.  The languages, stories, music, dancing, traditions are being restored despite protests from some non-aboriginals who continue to call for assimilation with all its inherent destruction for Aboriginal Peoples.  Is it worth the effort, the struggle, the fight to restore culture?  Doctor Michael Chandlers research testifies to the benefits of Aboriginal culture.

• The clear message that is sent by the evidence brought out in this report is that the First Nations communities that have taken active steps to preserve and rehabilitate their own culture are also those communities in which youth suicide rates are dramatically lower.
• Invest in cultural heritage insulate against suicide.
• Being connected to your culture provides you with a valuable resource, an ally to draw on when your sense of personal identity is in shambles.
• A strong continuity in culture -  a strong protective factor.
• It is not true that all First Nations have a higher suicide rate than the general population but some First Nations do have dramatically higher rates.  Some communities have suicide rates 80 times the national average.  But there are others where suicide doesnt exist.

SAVE CULTURE, SAVE LIVES?  The restoration of Aboriginal culture is a necessary, meaningful and comprehensive community approach to suicide prevention.  The latest research proves it works.  I hope we all will sit up and take note, especially those Reform politicians who would destroy us by their efforts to get rid of our culture and communities.

Cultural Continuity as a Hedge Against Suicide in Canadas First Nations by Michael J. Chandler & Christopher Lalonde, The University of British Columbia.

If, by contrast, you happen to live in a culture, as do contemporary First Nations youth, the fundamental meaning of which is understood to reside in the continuity of its own narrative history, and if your cultural sanctioned ways of thinking about your own self-continuity are similarly prescribed to be narratively based, and, finally, if, after 10,000 years of adaptive success, your culture happened to have been declared stone-aged, and moribund, and a laughing-stock that is, if your cultural practices have been criminalized and beaten out of you through generations of residential schools and genocidal approaches to your language and cultural life then woe be upon you and your chances of declaring your personal existence as having any worthwhile and enduring meaning.  This, as it turns out, is precisely what happened to the culture of every aboriginal group across North America and beyond.  Coming to some better appreciation of these deep-running cultural differences is critical to the success of any ongoing effort to better understand and hopefully reverse the trend toward steadily increasing suicide rates among First Nations youth.

The clear message that is sent by the evidence brought out in this report is that the communities that have taken active steps to preserve and rehabilitate their own cultures are also those communities in which youth suicide rates are dramatically lower.

In addition to all those factors that ordinarily work to undermine cultures and promote their natural deaths, the massed forces of government have also been hard at work actively disassembling aboriginal culture as an explicit matter of official policy. If simple job or marital instability is enough to heighten ones risk to suicide, then what are the prospects for self-harm when ones whole culture is officially condemned, when ones religion is criminalized, ones language forbidden, and ones right to rear and educate ones children suspended?

There is no one, it must be supposed, who seriously doubts that all of this officially sanctioned savagery is not somehow responsible for the fact that, as a group, First Nations people commit suicide at rates, that are, by various estimates, some 3 to 5  times greater than that of the non-native population.

The entire program of research of which the present epidemiological study is part, has been driven by the theory-laden assumption that the problem in understanding suicidal behaviours is not one of appreciating why it might occur to people to end their own lives, but rather why it is given the likelihood that such impulses tend to be a dime-a-dozen, most people, most of the time, end up choosing life. The short answer, we have suggested, is that because it is constitutive of what it means to have to be a self to somehow count oneself as continuous in time, we end up showing appropriate care and concern for our own well-being precisely because we feel a commitment to the future self that we are on route to becoming.  By these lights, people end up being at special risk to suicide whenever they are unable, for whatever reason, to successfully count themselves as continuous.

By hypothesis, it was anticipated that, to the extent that each of these protective factors was present in a given community, some quanta of cultural continuity would be added in place and some reduction in that communities overall suicide rate would be enjoyed.

• Land Claims: communities have either taken, or not taken steps to actively secure title to traditional lands.
• Self-government: communities that were successful in their negotiations with provincial governments in having further established their right in law to a large measure of economic and political independence within their traditional territory.
• Education Services: measured by the percentage of community youth who attended band administered schools.
• Police & Firs Services: Band control of police and fire protection services, ie. community ownership of fire fighting equipment.
• Health Services: meansured by the extent to which health care services are managed by Native communities.
• Cultural Facilities: a community was said to contain cultural facilities if a single facility was specifically designed for cultural use.

A final data reduction step involved simply counting up the number of markers that were present in each community.  Each community was then assigned a score from 0 to 6 and final set of youth suicide rates were calculated for these 6 groupings.

The Results:

Self-government: appears to provide the greatest protective value with an estimated 102 fewer suicides per 100,000 youth within communities that have attained self-government against those who have not (18.2 versus 121 per 100,000).

Land Claims: The rate within communities who have long standing efforts to exert control over their traditional land base is substantially lower.

Education: Only 11.3% of all youth suicides occur in communities in which a majority of children are known to attend band controlled schools.

Health Services: Communities that have some measure of control of the provision of health care services have a smaller percentage of youth suicides.

Cultural Facilities: the percentage of suicides within communities that contain cultural facilities was lower.

Police & Fire Services: Finally, communities that control police and fire have lower suicide rates.

Taken all together, these results are abundantly clear: First Nations communities vary dramatically in the rates of youth suicide & and these differences are strongly and clearly infuenced by the group of predictive variables or protective factors all meant to index the degree to which these various bands are engaged in community practices that serve the purpose of helping them preserve and restore their Native cultures.