Suicide Among Aboriginal People in Canada - Institut universitaire ...

Chapter 4Traditionalism versus acculturation was measured by the percentage of the county population that wasAmerican Indian. 6 This was intended to tap the degree of contact with non-Indian society. The percentageof the American Indian population between the ages of 18 to 24 was included as a demographic controlsince the suicide rate is known to be highest for this age group.The first and third hypotheses were not confirmed. Mobility was not significantly related to the suicide rate.The percentage of the county that was American Indian was actually positively correlated with the suiciderate. The economic indicators that significantly related to the suicide rate included the unemployment rateand the percentage of families below the poverty line, and there was a trend for the school drop-out ratethat also contributed. Further, homicide was closely related to suicide suggesting that some common factorsincrease the risk of violent death. 7 In addition to such shared underlying factors as alcoholism and familyviolence, the loss of family members by violent death is more likely to lead to complicated grief reactions andincrease the risk of subsequent suicide. When the homicide rate was added to the model, it was the mostsignificant predictor of the suicide rate, followed by the economic indicators.This study is limited by the crude measures of social disorganization and traditionalism; however, of thevariables examined, economic deprivation emerges as the most important contributor to suicide risk.These results suggest it was neither acculturation nor traditionalism per se that contributed to suiciderisk but the degree of economic deprivation. Economic hardship has its impact both through restrictingindividual resources and local infrastructure. In the larger context of a wealthy society, poverty createsfeelings of relative deprivation with consequent damage to self-esteem and self-efficacy or competence.Cultural-Historical FactorsOne of the other things I realized is our Inuit culture, or our traditions ... I guess it wasalways helpful for the youth to go and talk to their elders a lot, and the elders, like a lot ofpeople don’t think that they may have gone through all these situations or what not. Really,they’ve gone through a lot and they know a lot more than we do, and I’ve had a lot of helpfrom elders and maybe that’s just one of the things I could suggest to anyone, is that if theyever needed someone to talk to, the elders can really help a lot too (Inuit youth).Suicide must be considered in its contemporary and historical-cultural contexts for different Aboriginalgroups (Hunter et al., 2001; LaFromboise and Bigfoot, 1988). In North America, historical andethnographic records suggest that suicide was rare in pre-contact times, but data are very limited (Pine,1981). Despite wide variations in beliefs and practices, most Aboriginal cultures had explicit negativeattitudes and prohibitions against suicide. In many Aboriginal traditions, those who died by suicide weredenied ordinary funeral and burial rites and their spirits were said to dwell in a separate realm from thosewho died by other means (Hultkrantz, 1979). This was the case for Athabaskans (Fortuine, 1989) aswell as the Huron and Iroquois nations (Tooker, 1991).6This measure of acculturation is actually a poor proxy for cultural change since the main reason non-tribal memberscurrently live on reservations was the historical practice by the Bureau of Indian Affairs to allocate parcels of land to individualtribal members who could in turn sell these parcels to non-tribal members.7Suicide rates tend to be highly correlated with homicide rates in Native American communities, ranging from r=.44–.52(Bachman, 1992; Young, 1990).59