Transferring Whose Knowledge? Exchanging Whose Best Practices? On Knowing about Indigenous Knowledge and Aboriginal Suicide

Abstract

Over the better part of a decade we have been hard at work refashioning a still earlier decade's worth of work on identity development and youth suicide in order to better fit these efforts to the special circumstances of Canadian Aboriginal youth-an ongoing effort aimed at explaining two deeply puzzling matters.One of these concerns the heart-breakingly high rate of suicide widely known to mark and often stigmatize Aboriginal youth; an overall suicide rate that is reported to be higher than that of any culturally identifiable group in the world (Kirmayer 1994).The second of these known facts of the matter (owed largely to our own research) is that the rate of Aboriginal youth suicide varies dramatically from one community to another.As our research in British Columbia clearly demonstrates, more than 90% of Aboriginal youth suicides occur in only 10% of the bands, with some communities suffering rates as much as 800 times the national average, while more than half of the province's 200 First Nations bands have not experienced a single youth suicide in the almost fifteen years for which such figures are available.What obviously needs explaining in the face of such disparities-what inquiring minds most want to know-is what is different about those communities without such suicides, and those in which youth suicide occurs in epidemic proportion?Since 1998 we have provided more than a half dozen journal articles and book chapters (Chandler 2000; Chandler 2001;Chandler and Lalonde 1998;Chandler and Lalonde 2000a, 2000b;Chandler, Lalonde, and Sokol 2000; Chandler and Sokol in press;Lalonde 2003), as well as a book-length monograph (Chandler et al. in press)-a total of more than 300 published pages-all detailing what we take to be our best interim answers to these two troubling questions.In particular, we have shown not only where in the province Aboriginal suicides occur and re-occur, and where they are absent, 5 This is an excerpt from "Volume 2: Setting the Agenda for Change" in the Aboriginal Policy Research Series,

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 65 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.