Cultural Continuity as a Hedge Against
Suicide in Canada’s First Nations
Michael J. Chandler & Christopher Lalonde
The University of British Columbia
Abstract
This research report examines self-continuity and its role as a protective factor against suicide.
First, we review the notions of personal and cultural continuity and their relevance to under-
standing suicide among First Nations youth. The central theoretical idea developed here is
that, because it is constitutive of what it means to have or be a self to somehow count oneself
as continuous in time, anyone whose identity is undermined by radical personal and cultural
change is put at special risk to suicide for the reason that they lose those future commitments
that are necessary to guarantee appropriate care and concern for their own well-being. It is for
just such reasons that adolescents and young adults—who are living through moments of es-
pecially dramatic change—constitute such a high risk group. This generalized period of in-
creased risk during adolescence can be made even more acute within communities that lack a
concomitant sense of cultural continuity that might otherwise support the efforts of young
persons to develop more adequate self-continuity warranting practices. Next, we present data
to demonstrate that, while certain indigenous or First Nations groups do in fact suffer dra-
matically elevated suicide rates, such rates vary widely across British Columbia’s nearly 200
aboriginal groups: some communities show rates 800 times the national average, while in oth-
ers suicide is essentially unknown. Finally, we demonstrate that these variable incidence rates
are strongly associated with the degree to which BC’s 196 bands are engaged in community
practices that are employed as markers of a collective effort to rehabilitate and vouchsafe the
cultural continuity of these groups. Communities that have taken active steps to preserve and
rehabilitate their own cultures are shown to be those in which youth suicide rates are dramati-
cally lower.
Author Notes:
We wish to thank Lisa Maberly and Holly Pommier for their diligence in locating many of the
sources of data used in this study.
Address for correspondence:
Michael Chandler
Department of Psychology
University of British Columbia
2136 West Mall
Vancouver, British Columbia
Canada V6T 1Z4
e-mail: chandler@unixg.ubc.ca
In press: Transcultural Psychiatry
Cultural Continuity 2
Cultural Continuity as a Hedge Against Suicide in Canada’s First Nations
This research report, which is all about self-continuity and its role as a protective factor
against suicide, comes in three parts. One of these, told as a cautionary tale against all loose
generalizations about aboriginal society as a whole, works to make the point that, while cer-
tain indigenous or First Nations groups do suffer rates of youth suicide that are among the
highest of any culturally identifiable group in the world (Kirmayer, 1994), it is also true that
the incidence of such suicides varies dramatically across British Columbia’s nearly 200 aborigi-
nal groups. Some communities, we demonstrate, show rates some 800 times the national av-
erage, while in others suicide is essentially unknown. A second part goes on to demonstrate
that these variable incidence rates are strongly associated with the degree to which BC’s 196
bands are engaged in community practices that are interpreted here as markers of a collective
effort to rehabilitate and vouchsafe the cultural continuity of these groups. The remaining
part, and the one with which we begin, reviews our efforts to get clear about the axial notions
of personal and cultural continuity, and how our search for some way of understanding youth
suicide has come to turn upon them.
PART I
Personal & Cultural Continuity
It is, no doubt, in some measure just because those who are left dead by their own hand are
necessarily lost to most other kinds of data collection strategies, that epidemiologists con-
cerned with suicide are typically reduced to trolling through whatever sea of demographic
variables dead people ordinarily leave in their wake. As a result, most problem-focused stud-
ies aimed at identifying risk factors associated with suicide have tended to be largely atheo-
retic, data driven enterprises, ordinarily concerned with whatever correlational bits and pieces
manage to get caught up in their actuarial nets. In contrast, the research to be reported here is
not like that. What we mean to describe instead is the end product of a heavily theory-laden
and concept driven program of research into the usual process of adolescent identity devel-
opment—a project that only gradually and reluctantly backed its way into the troubled waters
of risk research. It did so, as we will show, by following a thread that began with a normative
study of the self-continuity warranting practices of standard-issue adolescents, and ends,
where we stand, awash in the brutal epidemic of suicide among First Nations youth.
Because it is far from obvious why the study of young people’s beliefs about personal per-
sistence, or self-continuity, might recommend itself as a vehicle for getting closer to an under-
standing of how cultural continuity might serve as a protective factor against suicide, the bal-
ance of these introductory remarks are given over to linking up these seemingly disparate
matters. In miniature, the argument, to be more carefully unfolded in the paragraphs to fol-
low, goes roughly like this. At least as it is taught in standard Euro-American intellectual his-
tory (e.g., Cassirer, 1923; Habermas, 1991), any followable conception of self or personhood
necessarily presupposes some summing across the inevitable changes that time has in store
for each of us. Any account of selfhood that lacked provisions for linking each of us up with
the persons we have once been, and are now in the process of becoming, would, conse-
quently, prove fundamentally nonsensical.
However constitutive self-continuity may be for our ordinary adult conceptions of per-
sons, children, it would appear, are not born into the world with their own especially high
minded understanding of how such arguments in favor of self-continuity are meant to work.
Rather, they tend instead to proceed only gradually and fitfully toward first one and then an-
other increasingly mature way of warranting their own continuous identity. En route toward
the construction of some acceptably grown-up way of thinking about personal persistence,
children and youth regularly abandon the outgrown skins of their own still earlier ways of
finding sameness within change and so, until newly refitted with some next-generation means
of connecting the future to the past, are often temporarily left without a proper sense of care
Cultural Continuity 3
and concern for the person they are otherwise in the process of becoming. Under such transi-
tional circumstances, when self-continuity has temporarily gone missing, suicide newly be-
comes a “live option” for the reason that the dead person in question would scarcely count as
them.
With respect to all of the prospective circumstances that are most likely to aggravate the
problem of maintaining a sense of self-continuity, two difficulties, in particular, stand out as
especially troublesome. One of these is composed of all those often dramatic adolescent
changes that make up the usual transition to adulthood. The other is more circumstantial, and
arises whenever one’s culture, out of which the particulars of one’s identity are necessarily
composed, is also thrown into serious disarray. In either case the grounds upon which a co-
herent sense of self is ordinarily made to rest are cut away, life is made cheap, and the pros-
pect of one’s own death becomes a matter of indifference. These, at least, are the expectations
that have brought us to the hypothesis that the steps being taken by certain First Nations
communities to protect and rehabilitate the continuity of their own culture might be shown to
work as protective factors against the current epidemic of suicide among native youth.
At least four things naturally follow from what has been said so far, all of which receive
empirical support, either directly from the new data to be reported here, or from the larger
program of research of which the present study is a part. One of these is that adolescents and
young adults, who are classically understood to be undergoing a degree of personal change
that seriously threatens their sense of self-continuity, should evidence a dramatically elevated
rate of suicide and suicidal behavior. The second is that individual youth who are otherwise
marked by a breakdown in their efforts to achieve a sense of personal continuity should be
dramatically over-represented among those known to have made serious attempts on their
own lives. Third, First Nations persons, who are generally acknowledged to have suffered a
train of crippling assaults upon the continuity of their cultural lives should, as a group, be
marked by typically high suicide rates. Finally, if lack of cultural continuity is indeed a risk fac-
tor for suicide, then First Nations communities that are actively engaged in preserving and re-
storing a sense of their own cultural continuity should demonstrate lower rates of youth sui-
cide than do counterpart communities that are not engaged in such rehabilitative measures.
The first and third of these propositions (i.e., that suicide rates will be dramatically higher for
young persons, and for those whose culture is under siege) have so frequently been demon-
strated to be true that they now constitute old news. The remainder (i.e., that suicidal adoles-
cents will prove to be uniquely marked by an inability to sustain a sense of self-continuity; and
that First Nations groups characterized by community efforts to achieve a greater sense of cul-
tural continuity will show reduced suicide rates) are largely untested, and form the subject of
our own ongoing research efforts.
Before turning to the particulars of these data, however, three matters, already briefly
touched upon, require being set out more clearly. First, more needs to be said to clarify what
is meant here by the notion of self-continuity. Second, because it is not widely known, the al-
ready available evidence linking failures in self-continuity and self-destructive behavior needs
to be reviewed. Finally, some better case needs to be made in support of our contention that
self and cultural continuity are necessarily bound up together.
What is Self-Continuity?
Wary readers who find something dangerously esoteric about talk of self-continuity are
well within their rights. As Harré (1979), Rorty (1976), and a host of other contemporary phi-
losophers (Maclntyre, 1977; Wiggins, 1971) have pointed out, the job of working out how even
the simplest of things, let alone impossibly complex human selves, might achieve some kind of
enduring identity needs to be counted among the oldest and most intractable of philosophical
problems. In light of such confusions, the wiser course might have been to stay as far away
from the subject of self-continuity as possible. Or at least this would have been the case if it
were not for the generally agreed upon facts: a) that the requirement that persons be seen to
Cultural Continuity 4
persist in time is an immanent providence at work in all human affairs (Shotter, 1984); b) that
the fundamental logic of the identity formation process necessarily understands each of us as
self-identical (Haber, 1994); c) that a sense of personal continuity is not an elective “feature” of
the self, but a “constitutive condition” of its coming into being (Habermas, 1991), and so
stands as one of those things that everyone needs in some measure in order to count as a per-
son at all (Cassirer, 1923); d) that personal persistence stands as a necessary condition over
which even the term “self” could reasonably be allowed to operate (Shotter, 1984); e) that any
notion of selfhood that was not held to be abiding in this diachronic sense would have no func-
tional value in the operation of any human social order (Hallowell, 1955); and finally, f) that
any society that failed to make provisions sufficient to permit the re-identification of persons
across time would simply fail to function.
For philosophers, then, and for others officially charged with the task of working up ge-
neric accounts of human functioning, it all seems clear enough: any claim to selfhood that does
not include some measure of self-continuity is fundamentally nonsensical (Luckman, 1976).
What about putative owners of selves like you, like us? If losing track of one’s self-continuity
is to somehow figure as a reason in any chain of mental events leading to a decision to take
one’s own life, then it would also need to be experienced, one might suppose, as a personal
necessity. Although, as Lifton (1974) points out, self-continuity may not always be an ordinary
part of one’s moment-by-moment conscious awareness, such convictions do appear to under-
lie and support the tone and quality of one’s self-awareness. This is especially so, it is widely
supposed, during times of crisis and transition when threats to one’s continuity are most in
evidence (Barclay & Smith, 1990). On such occasions—when, for example, we are brought up
short by seeing an old photograph of ourselves, or by the recognition that we have just be-
haved in a way that was once deeply out of character—all of us do evidently feel the need to
scramble for some discursive means with which to argumentatively redeem the implicit claim
that, through thick and thin, we somehow go on being self-same. That is, all appearances to
the contrary aside, we go on being committed to the proposition that the seemingly discon-
tinuous bits that together form the archipelago of our changing selves are somehow either
structurally equivalent, or otherwise functionally interchangeable.
If, each of us is under a primary definitional obligation to repeatedly work out some justifi-
catory means of warranting our belief in our own personal persistence, then the prospect is
raised that, as young persons develop more workable conceptions of their own identity, their
ways of warranting their convictions about self-continuity might also change apace. At least,
this has served as a guiding prospect in our search for possible age-graded changes in the
ways that children and adolescents ordinarily think about their own and other people’s per-
sonal persistence. So far, we and our co-workers (Ball & Chandler, 1989; Chandler & Ball, 1989;
Chandler, Boyes, Ball & Hala, 1986; Chandler & Lalonde, 1994; Chandler & Lalonde, in press)
have taken up such matters with upwards of 200 young persons. While this is not the place for
a detailed recounting of the precise methods and procedures followed in these several studies,
the broad outlines of our findings are clear enough. When apparent disjunctures in their self-
presentations were pointed out, our young subjects of every age quickly came forward with
what they took to be good reasons as to why such evident changes could be discounted in
ways that left untouched what they judged to be the underpinning continuities of their lives.
Middle school children, for example, believed themselves to be self-same because of the simple
existence of one or more personal attributes (e.g., same name, same fingerprints, etc.) that
were thought to stand apart from time. Older adolescents, by contrast, more often found
commonalties either: a) by hypothesizing underpinning genotypic personality characteristics
thought to be capable of bridging the merely phenotypic changes they judged to have taken
place in their more outward appearances; or b) by seeing functional relations thought to make
their own pasts the “causes” of which their present identities were the “effect.”
Cultural Continuity 5
These studies have led us to distinguish a half dozen strongly age-graded ways in which
the young subjects of our earlier research commonly reasoned aloud about their own per-
sonal persistence through time, and differently defend the conviction that they necessarily ex-
tend forward and backward in time in ways that leave them responsible for their own pasts
and committed to their own futures. Setting aside the details about how all of these distinctive
ways of thinking about self-continuity can be ordered in terms of their formal adequacy, or
shown to co-vary with other developmental accomplishments, the essential point is that, with
exceptionless regularity, all of these young subjects were committed to the necessary impor-
tance of, and found some conceptual means of succeeding at, the task of weaving a continuous
thread through the various episodes of their own and others’ lives. What makes this otherwise
uniform achievement somehow deserving of special attention here is that, with almost the
same regularity, adolescents who were also actively suicidal ended up distinguishing them-
selves by utterly failing in their efforts to find any personally persuasive means of warranting
their own self-continuity in time.
What is the Relation Between Failures in Self-Continuity
and Self-Destructive Behaviors?
The foregoing account of the changing ways that young persons ordinarily succeed in war-
ranting their own self-continuity could be substantially correct without, at the same time, actu-
ally making any real contribution to our understanding of adolescent suicidal behaviors in
general, or the extraordinarily high rate of youth suicide in certain First Nations communities
in particular. Among the several reasons to suppose otherwise, two in particular stand out as
especially relevant here. One of these arises out of the good prospects that problems in self-
continuity hold out for making conceptual sense out of the otherwise paradoxical fact that,
with all of life’s potential sweetness full upon their lips, it is adolescents who, more than any
other age group, are quickest to take steps to end their own lives. The other is more straight-
forwardly empirical, and turns on the existence of a substantial body of new evidence demon-
strating that suicidal adolescents are in fact uniquely characterized by a thoroughgoing inabil-
ity to warrant their own continuity in time.
Why do adolescents show dramatically elevated rates of suicidal behavior?
The general problem of finding some objective way of accounting for the fact that adoles-
cents engage in self-destructive behaviors at rates variously described as some 20 to 200 times
greater than any other age group (Hendin, 1982; Petzel & Cline, 1978) is that no one other
than another adolescent could ever be persuaded that “the slings and arrows of outrageous
fortune” actually do rain down more heavily on teenagers than they do upon the rest of us.
What does appear to be the case, however, is that the sharply accelerating rate of develop-
mental change routinely understood to be the fate of adolescents does in fact confront them
with more than their fair share of difficulties in repeatedly re-engineering new ways of count-
ing themselves as somehow persistent through time. That is, if navigating the usual course of
identity development necessarily requires tacking one’s way back and forth between one
qualitatively different self-continuity warranting strategy and the next, and if, while momen-
tarily “between stays,” one is at special risk to temporarily going adrift by losing any work-
able sense of self-continuity, then the prospect arises that, adolescents, more than most, will
also end up losing all proper care and concern about their own future well-being. It is during
these periods of selflessness that the momentary self-destructive impulses, often triggered by
life’s routine hardships, become emptied of their ordinary personal significance, and that sui-
cide suddenly becomes an actionable possibility.
In view of all that has just been said, our own general explanation for the remarkably ele-
vated rates of suicidal behavior characteristic of the adolescent period is roughly as follows.
Momentarily plagued by what we often later judge to be trivial problems, few of us remain
entirely free of occasional suicidal thoughts (Ross, 1985; Rubenstein, Heeren, Housman, Rubin
& Stechler, 1988). All such transient self-destructive impulses notwithstanding, few of us ever