The authors address the topic of young Indigenous suicide as receiving increased attention following reports like the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples. Following earlier research (Chandler and Lalonde 1998), the authors take a second time period of data (1993-2000) from Indigenous communities in British Columbia and replicate their original findings. They contend again that cultural continuity, as measured by community activities, lowers a community’s suicide rate. In addition, they add two new components of cultural continuity: local control of child welfare services, and band councils composed of more than 50 percent women.

Abstract: 

This research report examines self-continuity and its role as a protective factor against suicide. First, we review the notions of personal and cultural continuity and their relevance to understanding suicide among First Nations youth. The central theoretical idea developed here is that, because it is constitutive of what it means to have or be a self to somehow count oneself as continuous in time, anyone whose identity is undermined by radical personal and cultural change is put at special risk of suicide for the reason that they lose those future commitments that are necessary to guarantee appropriate care and concern for their own well-being. It is for just such reasons that adolescents and young adults - who are living through moments of especially dramatic change - constitute such a high-risk group. This generalized period of increased risk during adolescence can be made even more acute within communities that lack a concomitant sense of cultural continuity which might otherwise support the efforts of young persons to develop more adequate self-continuity-warranting practices. We present data to demonstrate that, while certain indigenous or First Nations groups do in fact suffer dramatically elevated suicide rates, such rates vary widely across British Columbia's nearly 200 aboriginal groups: some communities show rates 800 times the national average, while in others suicide is essentially unknown. Finally, we demonstrate that these variable incidence rates are strongly associated with the degree to which British Columbia's 196 bands are engaged in community practices that are employed as markers of a collective effort to rehabilitate and vouchsafe the cultural continuity of these groups. Communities that have taken active steps to preserve and rehabilitate their own cultures are shown to be those in which youth suicide rates are dramatically lower.

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The full text of this report is available on ResearchGate and Sage Journals.

Chandler, Michael J., and Christopher Lalonde. “Cultural Continuity as a Protective Factor against Suicide in First Nations Youth.” Horizons—A Special Issue on Aboriginal Youth, Hope or Heartbreak: Aboriginal Youth and Canada’s Future no. 10 (2008): 68–72.