Short reportAboriginal language knowledge and youth suicide
Section snippets
Youth suicide as a “coalminer's canary” of cultural distress
It has been widely argued that, if they are to thrive, both individual young persons and whole cultural communities must somehow succeed in warranting a sense of continuity, or persistent identity, in a rapidly changing world (Chandler et al., 2003). Nowhere are the costs associated with failures to achieve a proper measure of individual and cultural continuity more apparent than in the identity struggles of young First Nations persons who are required, not only to clear the standard hurdles
Factor analysis
Our indices of language knowledge were first correlated with the previously identified set of six cultural continuity factors. The intercorrelations of all these factors are displayed in Table 1. For the most part, these correlations are moderate, and the language factor seems less strongly correlated with the other factors than these factors are with each other.
A principal components factor analysis was conducted on the six cultural continuity variables reported by Chandler and Lalonde (1998),
Discussion
The data reported above indicate that, at least in the case of BC, those bands in which a majority of members reported a conversational knowledge of an Aboriginal language also experienced low to absent youth suicide rates. By contrast, those bands in which less than half of the members reported conversational knowledge suicide rates were six times greater. Although the newly minted index of Aboriginal language use was found to form a common factor with other previously identified markers of
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank Mary-Jane Norris for compiling and providing the Statistics Canada data regarding Aboriginal language knowledge. We would like to further thank Jessica Flores and Leigh Koopman for all their assistance. This research was supported by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Fellowship to the first author and a Human Early Learning Project grant to the second and third authors.
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