When you read article, it is important to note the before state and after state. There a lot of things that happen in between.
First, you need to understand that this culture existed well before colonization, and it existed in peace. Secondly, the culture's history and knowledge, specifically on how to survive in such a harsh environment, was oral as the Inuit did not pass things on by reading and writing. This is a key point.
It's not that it's impossible to survive in the Arctic, it's that that are many requirements, and these requirements were passed on generation after generation. Much like an Astronaut has to pass tests to ensure that they can survive the remoteness of space, the same can be said here.
What happened next is that the people, who were the 'books' of knowledge were taken away, put in schools, killed, imprisoned, etc. The requirements to be able to live in this environment were no longer being met because the people responsible for the oral transmission of the requirements and knowledge, were no longer capable of doing so. The fragile ecosystem of the Inuit and the remote environment was disrupted.
I don't think people are getting the idea that their oral traditions were essentially what we would call religion. When religion was put forth a long, long time ago, it was there to shepard our civilization by providing requirements so that people can survive, and to enable them to deal with trauma, for example death, anger, etc.
If you were to rip out religion from a population thousands of years ago, burn all their books, and make them forget it, they probably would descent into chaos. This what happened here. The Inuit had their oral traditions, i.e. akin to religion in this example, removed, and the memory or books, disappeared as the information was in the people, and not in a book.
The alcoholism, violence, etc. are symptoms of our current society applied onto theirs. This problem will span generations, and the situation will only improve once they are able to get back their oral traditions, their religion, their way of structuring their life in order to survive in the remote location. Of course, this is more complicated than that because we've now injected our modern way of life into the mix. I don't know what the outcome will be, but I do think once they are able to find their oral traditions, and to remember the stories from the old, they will be better than they are now.
I'm not sure there is really a viable route back. A lot of the traditions and ecosystem that worked before may not be there.
I believe it's more that just the oral tradition. The small insular nature of the communities is also lost and I don't believe the traditional approach would scale to the large urban centres they find themselves in.
This is tangentially related, but a couple years ago a Canadian woman won the Global Teachers Prize. [1] The northernmost area of Quebec has quite a lot in common with Nunavut, being remote and only accessible by air, and struck by high rates of substance abuse and suicide. However, Quebec is so much more densely populated in the south that the total population hides this.
I suspect that the reason the Yukon and the Northwest Territories don't see the huge rate that Nunavut sees is because Whitehorse and Yellowknife (to a lesser extent) represent such a huge portion of the population, compared to Iqaluit.
Based on my anecdotal evidence, the major factors that seems to affect regions with high suicide rates are:
- Isolation/ lack of community connection: Isolated individuals tend to have less social feedback loops, which impacts their perception of the world around them.
- Alcohol and Drug abuse: This can be a byproduct of other areas, as an attempt to help alleviate the perceived suffering, boredom, etc. In my opinion, in the long run, alcohol and drug abuse tend to exacerbate the issue.
- Lack of Vitamin D and Sun: A lack in this areas has been associated with increased bouts and feeling of depression, which can increase thoughts of suicide.
But going by the article, "suicide was rare, and among young people, almost unknown" until contact with outsiders. So I don't think it's just isolation.
It's doubtful that suicide was rare in pre-1950s Nunavut. More likely there is a problem with non-existent records or with definition of what constitutes suicide. In particular, when hunts failed and food was scarce, both infanticide and senilicide were practiced, the latter usually in the form of assisted suicide. See "Law-Ways of the Primitive Eskimos" https://scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu/cgi/viewconten...
If the commonality is that living in these higher latitude zones causes increases in suicide, what happens when/if the Earth hits +4C and the habitable zones become these very same areas? [see map linked below]
There would be obvious confounders, like the despair of knowing that humans decimated the planet's habitability.
>If the commonality is that living in these higher latitude zones causes increases in suicide, what happens when/if the Earth hits +4C and the habitable zones become these very same areas?
When that happens, the deaths from first-order climate related causes (floods and droughts, extreme weather phenomena, raised temperatures, etc) would be so many, that the increase in suicides due to migration to higher latitude zones would be a drop in the bucket...
If people really believe +4C is likely in 80 years, why aren’t they out marching and demanding a move to nuclear power? It’s the only option that doesn’t decimate the poor and drastically increase the price of food, and this magnitudes more likely to be acted upon. Yet the overlap between people against nuclear power and terrified of climate change is a massive majority.
Former Alaskan here. I wasn't shocked to find out Greenland and Nunavut which are also very high north have high suicide rates. The long dark winters can really mess with you after a while which can lead to substance abuse.
I think it is too easy to just make it about the environment. If you read the article it claims the suicide rate wasn't always this high. Something cultural got lost when they transitioned away from their nomadic lifestyle.
Suicide and alcohol related deaths were pretty common on my Ketchikani mom’s side of the family. I imagine it would be worse in Fairbanks, let alone Nome.
I had some friends who did summers in Alaskan canneries, they said all there was to do was drink.
There is more to it than just the weather, as others have pointed out. However, your comment reminded me of "Winter-over syndrome" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winter-over_syndrome) - worth a look for those interested in the effects of long periods of cold and dark isolation on human psychology.
Wondered if Lithuania will be mentioned in the article. Yes, it is. The difference between Nanuvat and Greenland is that their populations are 10 thousands, we are almost 3 million.
I guess Lithuania has he same problem as all the Nordics, dark gloomy weather year round.
I wanted to emigrate to Sweden due to the high quality of life but the dark, drizzly, windy weather really put me off and some locals I talked to said they were really depressed by it and were either trying to emigrate or work remotely from Southern Europe.
In the Blatics it's probably worse as the economic situational is not positive for some people.
Extend the list and you see lots of high latitudes, low incomes, remote rural settings, and indigenous American populations (e.g. Yupik and Inupiaq in Alaska, Sioux in the Dakotas).
Alcoholism is often common in these places, although survey data do not show it affecting the groups in northern Alaska so heavily. Deaths due to chronic liver disease are not particularly high for them, either. There's a distinct history in Nunavut, though, so the story might be different.
Great link. This is the interactive graphic that should have appeared with the article. Instead of a single narrative, users can explore various scenarios as they read along. Looking at this strictly from a geographic standpoint, for instance, there's something weird going on in North Dakota between Carson County and Sioux County. It really stands out on the map. Alaska also looks quite odd.
Alcoholism is always rampant when a population is first introduced to the drug.
Over centuries, evolution acts to produce a population less prone to it, since people who drink themselves to death don't tend to reproduce.
The population that has had access to alcohol for the longest (8000 years, according to a guess I saw somewhere) is the Chinese, where the "asian red flush" gene has developed as a protection against alcoholism.
In case any one doesn't know: Justin Trudeau's father, Pierre Trudeau, oversaw these residential schools, the last of which were only dismantled in the 90s under a different government.
Your first statement is highly misleading, the residential schools started in the 1800s and peaked in 1931. They were also primarily run by religious organizations. The abuse and human experimentation on the childern also predate Trudeau by decades. Yes the federal government had a role in oversight, but to pin the residential schools so completely on Pierre Trudeau is downright disingenuous and masks the complicity of many many other people.
Pierre Trudeau was PM from 1968 to 1984 (with a brief interruption by Joe Clark's PCs)[1]. Residential schools were taken over by the Department of Indian Affairs in 1969 and by 1986 were eliminated or turned over to the local bands[2].
A better characterization is that Pierre Trudeau oversaw the dismantling of the residential schools.
Given that this is an election year in Canada, Justin Trudeau is a candidate and that this is a very deceptive portrayal of the situation, I'm going to assume this is intentional and report.
Mainly driven by alcoholism, and it is very well known:
> Alcohol and drug use among Inuit increased significantly between 1992 and 2004, particularly among young adults. Alcohol users consumed significantly more alcohol per drinking episode than other Canadians in both time periods. Considerable cannabis use was widespread. In 2004, no significant differences in frequencies of heavy drinking episodes were observed by gender, with 60% of drug users consuming alcohol on a regular basis.
and the link between alcoholism and suicide is well documented:
> Various classical studies found an excess of suicide among alcoholics [73–80]. Beck and Steer [81] and Beck et al. [82] found that alcoholism was the strongest single predictor of subsequent completed suicide in a sample of attempted suicides.
> In 1997, Harris and Barraclough, in their unusually comprehensive meta-analysis analyzed 32 papers related to alcohol dependence and abuse, comprising a population of over 45,000 individuals [34]. They found that combining the studies gave a suicide risk almost six times that expected but with variation of 1–60 times. Specifically, they found that the suicide risk for females was very much greater than for males, about 20 times that expected compared with four for males. Suicide risk among alcohol-dependent individuals has been estimated to be 7% (comparable with 6% for mood disorders; [83]). Of 40,000 Norwegian conscripts followed prospectively over 40 years, the probability of suicide was 4.76% (relative risk +6.9) among those classified as alcohol abusers compared with 0.63 for non-drinkers [84]. Similar finding have been made worldwide [85]. Murphy et al. studied 50 suicides and found that an alcohol use disorder was the primary diagnosis in 23% and a co-occurring diagnosis in 37% [86]. Conwell et al. performed a study in New York City and reported that alcohol misuse was present in the history of 56% of individuals who completed suicide [43].
Given the violence, dispossession, and virulent racism indigenous people are and we’re forced to bear, isn’t the alcoholism another symptom, not the cause?
Does alcoholism drive suicides, do suicides drive alcoholism, or do other things drive both suicide and alcoholism (or, perhaps more likely, all of the above)?
Could there be a cultural factor, too? At least historically, in very rough habitats, you really wanted to be useful for your community, not a burden. Many native tribes in eg. Alaska and Canada even had a range of customs around suicide or leaving behind or even killing people of old age and poor condition, usually based on the wish or consent of the victim.
Maybe such attitudes combined with bleak social and economic prospects and general feelings of purposelessness and uselessness could well contribute to the phenomenon?
Agree. IMHO, I think it's very important here to examine historical and other-cultural attitudes toward euthanasia and it's analogues. eg., ritual suicide in feudal Japan. These attitudes seem likely to echo forward from their common-practice eras ...
The more our lives are guided by seeking pleasure and avoiding pain, the more we will find life to be empty and meaningless, and the more suicides there will be.Places with the highest "individual freedom" to pursue all sorts of physical pleasures, especially by changing laws to make unlawful immorality lawful, are the ones with the highest suicide rates.
From my understanding, suicide rates among indigenous Australians are similarly high, particularly in remote communities. I suspect many of the same factors are at play.
> Nunavut’s rate is 100 per 100,000, ten times higher than the rest of Canada and seven times higher than the US.
Ok, that's bad.
But we can connect that to the US: white males with no college, aged 45-54, have a suicide rate of 38.8 and a poisoning (overdose) rate of 58.0[0]. Put those together and that's pushing 100 per 100,000. That's enough to start asking some cultural questions.
However, "During 1999–2003, the suicide rate among Nunavut males aged 15 to 19 was estimated to exceed 800 per 100,000 population, compared to around 14 for the general Canadian male population in that age group."[1]
800 per 100,000? This statistic is staggering for a couple of reasons: its magnitude and the age range.
The graphs in [3] show just how young and male the suicides among the Inuit are. It's no surprise that it's primarily male, because it almost always is, but it is surprising to see an 8:1 ratio and that it's affecting the youth so heavily. For comparison, in the United States the 15-24 age range is near the bottom of the suicide statistics[4].
These are boys born in the 1980's. As bad as the crimes against the Inuits may have been in the 1950's it's a strange territory to wander into where an effect of an atrocity shows up 50 years late in a population that wasn't alive yet. From wikipedia[2]: "...to about 170 in 2002. Some of the reasons given include adverse childhood experiences involving emotional neglect and abuse, family violence and substance abuse, as well as social inequalities brought on by government intervention." (referencing [3]) I can see the argument the author is making here but I don't have the time to address it.
The article is giving the "white guilt" narrative and for whatever reason is dancing around the massive gender disparity in suicide rates. When I see articles like this I wonder how much the author cares about suicide and how much they see it as a platform to write about anti-colonialism.
The history of alcoholism and suicide in Alaska goes back to the time of first contact with outsiders. When westerners first contacted Alaska Native tribes, those "explorers" tended to be people who were after valuable furs, and missionaries. These people were usually a mix of Russians from the west and Americans from the south.
The outsiders brought with them diseases like tuberculosis and influenza, and these diseases were devastating. In many villages, up to 70% of the population died in the span of a few generations. It's hard to imagine how hard this would be to live through. I live in a town of 10,000 and I imagine waking up at some point to only have 3,000 people around, not because people move but because all of those people we knew were dead.
That wasn't all, though. Almost all of the missionaries blamed the survivors for what happened. They said their people died because they worshipped the devil. They took the surviving children away, telling parents they weren't fit to raise their own children. They banned the use of Native languages, and all aspects of Native culture such as dancing, regalia, ceremonies, and more. All of this has led to despair and a disconnect with a rich culture that existed for ~10,000 years before this.
Life for Native people before contact was not perfect. But this is the root of alcoholism and suicide in Alaska, and in many areas with indigenous populations around the world. If you're interested in learning more about this history, I recommend Yuuyaraq: The Way of the Human Being by Harold Napoleon [0], and Chills and Fever: Health and Disease in the Early History of Alaska by Robert Fortuine [1].
What you're recounting seems (from the article) to be the Canadian government's side of the story. The 12th paragraph of the article begins the Inuit's description of what happened.
> Most Inuit look back very differently on this period. Their version begins shortly after World War II, when the US and Canada jointly established a line of radar stations across the Arctic in order to spy on the Soviets and monitor the skies for potential attacks via the North Pole. The Canadian government, keen to prevent the US from claiming sovereignty over this potentially mineral- and natural gas–rich area, hastily established towns and forced the Inuit to settle in them. Older Inuit told me they remember armed police officers arriving at their camps unannounced and ordering everyone to leave. Sled dogs—even healthy ones—were slaughtered before their owners’ eyes.
> The government concedes that thousands of Inuit children, some as young as five, were sent to boarding, or “residential,” schools, where they were cut off from their families, given Christian names and ID numbers, punished for speaking their native Inuktitut language, required to wear Western clothes, and taught a Canadian curriculum that had no relevance to the world they’d been born into. Many were also beaten and raped by their teachers. Some went to the schools willingly, but many reluctant parents, informed that if they didn’t send their children off, they’d be denied government welfare benefits or credit from fur traders, surrendered them in tears.
> Memories of these horrors haunt the lives of older Inuit today. [...]
> Almost all of the missionaries blamed the survivors for what happened. They said their people died because they worshipped the devil. They took the surviving children away, telling parents they weren't fit to raise their own children. They banned the use of Native languages, and all aspects of Native culture such as dancing, regalia, ceremonies, and more. All of this has led to despair and a disconnect with a rich culture that existed for ~10,000 years before this.
Do you have any citations for this? I have read a lot of missionary stories, and have friends and family who have been or are missionaries themselves, and have never heard of anything so heinous. That's exactly the opposite of what missionaries are supposed to be; it sounds more like a particularly brutal form of western imperialism and exploitation than anything else.
> But this is the root of alcoholism and suicide in Alaska
More accurately, conditions today ripe for alcoholism and suicide may be borne out events following contact. There's similar issues in Canada, Siberia.
[+] [-] unfocused|6 years ago|reply
First, you need to understand that this culture existed well before colonization, and it existed in peace. Secondly, the culture's history and knowledge, specifically on how to survive in such a harsh environment, was oral as the Inuit did not pass things on by reading and writing. This is a key point.
It's not that it's impossible to survive in the Arctic, it's that that are many requirements, and these requirements were passed on generation after generation. Much like an Astronaut has to pass tests to ensure that they can survive the remoteness of space, the same can be said here.
What happened next is that the people, who were the 'books' of knowledge were taken away, put in schools, killed, imprisoned, etc. The requirements to be able to live in this environment were no longer being met because the people responsible for the oral transmission of the requirements and knowledge, were no longer capable of doing so. The fragile ecosystem of the Inuit and the remote environment was disrupted.
I don't think people are getting the idea that their oral traditions were essentially what we would call religion. When religion was put forth a long, long time ago, it was there to shepard our civilization by providing requirements so that people can survive, and to enable them to deal with trauma, for example death, anger, etc.
If you were to rip out religion from a population thousands of years ago, burn all their books, and make them forget it, they probably would descent into chaos. This what happened here. The Inuit had their oral traditions, i.e. akin to religion in this example, removed, and the memory or books, disappeared as the information was in the people, and not in a book.
The alcoholism, violence, etc. are symptoms of our current society applied onto theirs. This problem will span generations, and the situation will only improve once they are able to get back their oral traditions, their religion, their way of structuring their life in order to survive in the remote location. Of course, this is more complicated than that because we've now injected our modern way of life into the mix. I don't know what the outcome will be, but I do think once they are able to find their oral traditions, and to remember the stories from the old, they will be better than they are now.
Just my 2 cents.
[+] [-] Guthur|6 years ago|reply
I believe it's more that just the oral tradition. The small insular nature of the communities is also lost and I don't believe the traditional approach would scale to the large urban centres they find themselves in.
[+] [-] ghostbrainalpha|6 years ago|reply
Once the line is broken, it is gone.
[+] [-] firefoxd|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ivl|6 years ago|reply
I suspect that the reason the Yukon and the Northwest Territories don't see the huge rate that Nunavut sees is because Whitehorse and Yellowknife (to a lesser extent) represent such a huge portion of the population, compared to Iqaluit.
1. https://www.globalteacherprize.org/winners/maggie-macdonnell
[+] [-] CarlosCabrito|6 years ago|reply
- Isolation/ lack of community connection: Isolated individuals tend to have less social feedback loops, which impacts their perception of the world around them.
- Alcohol and Drug abuse: This can be a byproduct of other areas, as an attempt to help alleviate the perceived suffering, boredom, etc. In my opinion, in the long run, alcohol and drug abuse tend to exacerbate the issue.
- Lack of Vitamin D and Sun: A lack in this areas has been associated with increased bouts and feeling of depression, which can increase thoughts of suicide.
[+] [-] spinach|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] p1esk|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Merrill|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] heymijo|6 years ago|reply
There would be obvious confounders, like the despair of knowing that humans decimated the planet's habitability.
https://mymodernmet.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/climat...
[+] [-] coldtea|6 years ago|reply
When that happens, the deaths from first-order climate related causes (floods and droughts, extreme weather phenomena, raised temperatures, etc) would be so many, that the increase in suicides due to migration to higher latitude zones would be a drop in the bucket...
[+] [-] merpnderp|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] astrodust|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Raphmedia|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Circuits|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] _yxi6|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TearsInTheRain|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] seanmcdirmid|6 years ago|reply
I had some friends who did summers in Alaskan canneries, they said all there was to do was drink.
[+] [-] milchek|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] daliusd|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ChuckNorris89|6 years ago|reply
I wanted to emigrate to Sweden due to the high quality of life but the dark, drizzly, windy weather really put me off and some locals I talked to said they were really depressed by it and were either trying to emigrate or work remotely from Southern Europe.
In the Blatics it's probably worse as the economic situational is not positive for some people.
[+] [-] kevadk|6 years ago|reply
98.7 - Kusilvak Census Area, AK; 75.1 - Nome Census Area, AK; 64.2 - Sioux County, ND; 58.9 - Buffalo County, SD; 49.3 - Carbon County, UT
https://vizhub.healthdata.org/subnational/usa
Extend the list and you see lots of high latitudes, low incomes, remote rural settings, and indigenous American populations (e.g. Yupik and Inupiaq in Alaska, Sioux in the Dakotas).
Alcoholism is often common in these places, although survey data do not show it affecting the groups in northern Alaska so heavily. Deaths due to chronic liver disease are not particularly high for them, either. There's a distinct history in Nunavut, though, so the story might be different.
[+] [-] DanielBMarkham|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BurningFrog|6 years ago|reply
Over centuries, evolution acts to produce a population less prone to it, since people who drink themselves to death don't tend to reproduce.
The population that has had access to alcohol for the longest (8000 years, according to a guess I saw somewhere) is the Chinese, where the "asian red flush" gene has developed as a protection against alcoholism.
[+] [-] breitling|6 years ago|reply
This is a dark chapter in the history of Canada.
[+] [-] FrankTheBank|6 years ago|reply
But it was indeed a dark chapter in the history of Canada. For those of you curious about the residential schools a basic introduction can be found at: https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/residentia...
[+] [-] Ensorceled|6 years ago|reply
A better characterization is that Pierre Trudeau oversaw the dismantling of the residential schools.
Given that this is an election year in Canada, Justin Trudeau is a candidate and that this is a very deceptive portrayal of the situation, I'm going to assume this is intentional and report.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Trudeau [2] https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/residentia...
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] ekianjo|6 years ago|reply
> Alcohol and drug use among Inuit increased significantly between 1992 and 2004, particularly among young adults. Alcohol users consumed significantly more alcohol per drinking episode than other Canadians in both time periods. Considerable cannabis use was widespread. In 2004, no significant differences in frequencies of heavy drinking episodes were observed by gender, with 60% of drug users consuming alcohol on a regular basis.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4696457/
and the link between alcoholism and suicide is well documented:
> Various classical studies found an excess of suicide among alcoholics [73–80]. Beck and Steer [81] and Beck et al. [82] found that alcoholism was the strongest single predictor of subsequent completed suicide in a sample of attempted suicides.
> In 1997, Harris and Barraclough, in their unusually comprehensive meta-analysis analyzed 32 papers related to alcohol dependence and abuse, comprising a population of over 45,000 individuals [34]. They found that combining the studies gave a suicide risk almost six times that expected but with variation of 1–60 times. Specifically, they found that the suicide risk for females was very much greater than for males, about 20 times that expected compared with four for males. Suicide risk among alcohol-dependent individuals has been estimated to be 7% (comparable with 6% for mood disorders; [83]). Of 40,000 Norwegian conscripts followed prospectively over 40 years, the probability of suicide was 4.76% (relative risk +6.9) among those classified as alcohol abusers compared with 0.63 for non-drinkers [84]. Similar finding have been made worldwide [85]. Murphy et al. studied 50 suicides and found that an alcohol use disorder was the primary diagnosis in 23% and a co-occurring diagnosis in 37% [86]. Conwell et al. performed a study in New York City and reported that alcohol misuse was present in the history of 56% of individuals who completed suicide [43].
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2872355/
EDIT: even in Japan where there is a significant correlation between alcoholism and suicide rates (in Japanese men at least): https://www.researchgate.net/publication/5865438_Alcohol_con...
[+] [-] claudeganon|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Smithalicious|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] yeahforsureman|6 years ago|reply
Maybe such attitudes combined with bleak social and economic prospects and general feelings of purposelessness and uselessness could well contribute to the phenomenon?
[+] [-] mikelyons|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sdegutis|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] juskrey|6 years ago|reply
Yours truly, Captain Obvious.
[+] [-] 131012|6 years ago|reply
https://www.nfb.ca/film/angry_inuk/
[+] [-] gravelc|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _edo|6 years ago|reply
Ok, that's bad.
But we can connect that to the US: white males with no college, aged 45-54, have a suicide rate of 38.8 and a poisoning (overdose) rate of 58.0[0]. Put those together and that's pushing 100 per 100,000. That's enough to start asking some cultural questions.
However, "During 1999–2003, the suicide rate among Nunavut males aged 15 to 19 was estimated to exceed 800 per 100,000 population, compared to around 14 for the general Canadian male population in that age group."[1]
800 per 100,000? This statistic is staggering for a couple of reasons: its magnitude and the age range.
The graphs in [3] show just how young and male the suicides among the Inuit are. It's no surprise that it's primarily male, because it almost always is, but it is surprising to see an 8:1 ratio and that it's affecting the youth so heavily. For comparison, in the United States the 15-24 age range is near the bottom of the suicide statistics[4].
These are boys born in the 1980's. As bad as the crimes against the Inuits may have been in the 1950's it's a strange territory to wander into where an effect of an atrocity shows up 50 years late in a population that wasn't alive yet. From wikipedia[2]: "...to about 170 in 2002. Some of the reasons given include adverse childhood experiences involving emotional neglect and abuse, family violence and substance abuse, as well as social inequalities brought on by government intervention." (referencing [3]) I can see the argument the author is making here but I don't have the time to address it.
The article is giving the "white guilt" narrative and for whatever reason is dancing around the massive gender disparity in suicide rates. When I see articles like this I wonder how much the author cares about suicide and how much they see it as a platform to write about anti-colonialism.
[0] - Table 1 https://www.pnas.org/content/112/49/15078 [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_in_Canada [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_in_Canada#Among_the_In... [3] - https://www.iwgia.org/images/publications//IA_4_07.pdf#page=... [4] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Crude_US_suicide_rate_by_...
[+] [-] l0l0l0l|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] japhyr|6 years ago|reply
The outsiders brought with them diseases like tuberculosis and influenza, and these diseases were devastating. In many villages, up to 70% of the population died in the span of a few generations. It's hard to imagine how hard this would be to live through. I live in a town of 10,000 and I imagine waking up at some point to only have 3,000 people around, not because people move but because all of those people we knew were dead.
That wasn't all, though. Almost all of the missionaries blamed the survivors for what happened. They said their people died because they worshipped the devil. They took the surviving children away, telling parents they weren't fit to raise their own children. They banned the use of Native languages, and all aspects of Native culture such as dancing, regalia, ceremonies, and more. All of this has led to despair and a disconnect with a rich culture that existed for ~10,000 years before this.
Life for Native people before contact was not perfect. But this is the root of alcoholism and suicide in Alaska, and in many areas with indigenous populations around the world. If you're interested in learning more about this history, I recommend Yuuyaraq: The Way of the Human Being by Harold Napoleon [0], and Chills and Fever: Health and Disease in the Early History of Alaska by Robert Fortuine [1].
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Yuuyaraq-Human-Being-Harold-Napoleon/...
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Chills-Fever-Health-Disease-History/d...
[+] [-] ColanR|6 years ago|reply
> Most Inuit look back very differently on this period. Their version begins shortly after World War II, when the US and Canada jointly established a line of radar stations across the Arctic in order to spy on the Soviets and monitor the skies for potential attacks via the North Pole. The Canadian government, keen to prevent the US from claiming sovereignty over this potentially mineral- and natural gas–rich area, hastily established towns and forced the Inuit to settle in them. Older Inuit told me they remember armed police officers arriving at their camps unannounced and ordering everyone to leave. Sled dogs—even healthy ones—were slaughtered before their owners’ eyes.
> The government concedes that thousands of Inuit children, some as young as five, were sent to boarding, or “residential,” schools, where they were cut off from their families, given Christian names and ID numbers, punished for speaking their native Inuktitut language, required to wear Western clothes, and taught a Canadian curriculum that had no relevance to the world they’d been born into. Many were also beaten and raped by their teachers. Some went to the schools willingly, but many reluctant parents, informed that if they didn’t send their children off, they’d be denied government welfare benefits or credit from fur traders, surrendered them in tears.
> Memories of these horrors haunt the lives of older Inuit today. [...]
[+] [-] TimTheTinker|6 years ago|reply
Do you have any citations for this? I have read a lot of missionary stories, and have friends and family who have been or are missionaries themselves, and have never heard of anything so heinous. That's exactly the opposite of what missionaries are supposed to be; it sounds more like a particularly brutal form of western imperialism and exploitation than anything else.
[+] [-] slothtrop|6 years ago|reply
More accurately, conditions today ripe for alcoholism and suicide may be borne out events following contact. There's similar issues in Canada, Siberia.
[+] [-] dang|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Circuits|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] kortilla|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] aaron695|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] vollmond|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CogitoCogito|6 years ago|reply
Why are you posting your anecdotes like this? You have access to the internet after all:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_r...
For example, on that list the US rates _worse_ than Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Iceland and are about the same as Finland.