Native identity crucial

By Christina Palassio

Influential developmental psychologist Dr. Michael Chandler visited the university last Thursday to give a lecture on his research into the epidemic of suicide among aboriginal youth in British Columbia. He called it ‘Surviving Time: Suicide and the persistence of identity in the face of radical cultural and developmental change.”

In a research project that spanned 12 years, Dr. Chandler and his collaborators studied youths from the more than 200 bands within the borders of British Columbia.

Their goal was to discover why young people, specifically aboriginal youth, commit suicide at a much higher rate than other groups. Canada’s aboriginal youth have the highest suicide rate of any identifiable group in the world.

Chandler’s group looked into how individuals and cultures manage to create and maintain identities through time, in spite of living in a rapidly changing world.

One factor appears to be the ownership most people feel over their past and the connection they feel to their future. Dr. Chandler speculates that people who don’t display these connections might be more likely to commit suicide than others.

“We act as we do, at least in part, because we believe that we are the inheritors of our own just desserts,” he said.

He discounted the significance of suicide statistics that lump all bands from all areas of the country together. His research has found that general statistics do not reflect the daily realities of many First Nations communities.

Instead, his research has shown that suicide rates in a band are usually linked to several factors, among them the presence of self-government, land claims, an education system within the community, health services, police and fire services, cultural facilities, women in government and child protection services.

Bands that have six of those eight factors have negligible suicide rates, he said. A band that is self-governing, of which there are few in B.C, is especially unlikely to show a high suicide rate. According to Chandler’s research, about 90 per cent of aboriginal suicides in British Columbia occur in about 10 per cent of the bands.

“Some generic suicide prevention strategy being visited on the whole of the aboriginal community is not going to be successful,” he said. Instead, money should be invested directly into communities so they can help one another.

Concordia’s Loyola International College (LIC) sponsored the lecture in conjunction with the launch of the new website for the Minor in Diversity and the Contemporary World.

The minor was approved last October and William Bukowski, the college’s co-principal, hopes to see full classes by this fall.

“Dr. Chandler really represents what I see as one of the important goals for Loyola College, which is to try to understand the significance of diversity,” explained Professor Bukowski.

“We want to understand why it is that groups of people differ from each other, why it is that growing up in one place is different from growing up in another, and what this means today in a world where there is so much contact between different groups.”