Happy Thanksgiving to all of my American friends and colleagues. And, from a First Nations perspective, a hearty “you’re welcome!”
Over the past two days I have been facilitating a conference of First Nations health directors from around British Columbia. Every year or so, these folks gather to share ideas, learn about emerging trends and participate in policy development with government. When they go back home, these guys run health care systems in small First Nations communities, battling against many issues that affect First Nations health resulting in higher than average rates of diabetes, suicide, abuse, accidents, HIV/AIDS, communcable diseases and many other preventable causes of death and illness. At times I think the pressure of applying band-aids to the complex and systemic problems facing some communities can be immense and the challenges must seem insurmountable at times.
But today, I saw something that looks like magic. In the conference we had a presentation on a paper written in 1998 by two psychologists at the University of British Columbia, Dr, Michael Chandler and Christopher Lalonde. The paper is called “Cultural Continuity as a Hedge Against Suicide in Canada’s First Nations” and I think it’s one of the most important papers I have ever read.
The authors look at the role that cultural continutity plays in supporting invidual self-identity, especially among youth in BC Frist Nations. It works from a well-known correlation between supportive communities, healthy individuals and low suicide rates, but the reall contribution of the paper is that it outlines a course of action communities can take to dramatically lower rates.
To do this, the authors decided that they would try to identify factors that actually represented “cultural continuity” in communities and they settled on six:
- Land claims: First Nations were active in establishing claims for Aboriginal rights and title.
- Self government: a community has had some success in establishing their rights to controlling their economic and political independance.
- Education: First Nations run their own schools
- Police and Fire services: First Nations controlled services with community owned equipment
- Health services: Some direct control over health services
- Cultural facilities: including anything from a longhouse to a community centre and the whole variety of public spaces for community activities.
The authors looked at First Nations that had these six factors in place and found something absolutely amazing. Each of these factors provided a significant reduction in the rate of youth suicides. How much? Look at this table:
Presence of factor | % reduction in suicide rate |
Land claims | 41% |
Self Government | 85% |
Education | 52% |
Health Services | 29% |
Police and Fire Services | 20% |
Cultural facilities | 23% |
Now this is impressive. With some self-government in place for example, a community will reduce its youth suicide rate by 85 percent! But the authors discovered something even more amazing. In communities where these six factors are absent, the youth suicide rate is 137.5 per 100,000. That is 800 times the Canadian national average. In communities where all six of these factors are present, the rate drops to 0 per 100,000. You read it right. Zero. Not one suicide in the five year study period. By creating this kind of institutional support in communities, First Nations will literally save their children’s lives.
The authors conclude, rather modestly I think, that “communities that have taken active steps to preserve and rehabilitate their own cultures are shown to be those in which youth suicide rates are dramatically lower.” If these six factors are present, you are much more likely to find yourself in a community where practices of care, sharing, volunteerism, shared leadership, and supportive relationships are present. I’m willing to bet that this fundamental but relatively simple institution building has a multitude of other positive impacts as well. In communities where suicide is a complex epidemic (800 times the national average! That’s a borderline crime against humanity!) having a clear path towards long term community health is a remarkable gift. It means that people can begin to tackle suicide and other mortality measures collectively, with a place for everyone’s responsibility in the long term outcome. We don’t need professionals or experts, all we need is sincere effort, solid citizen engagement and steady progress towards building institutions. The clear implication is that engagement in community and cultural life spills over into relationships and creates the supportive container that gives youth the confidence and sense of belonging and connection they need.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but holding space saves lives. This is toxin handling par excellence.
Amazing.
Viktor Yuschenko
Here are the voices of protest from Kiev:
- “I don’t realize I’m freezing and exhausted until I get home every night and collapse,” said Alexander Kmet, his hands shoved in his pockets and his shoulders hunched and shuddering as he spoke. “But this is an inspiring moment in the history of our country. We have to be here.”
- “The truth makes us warm,” said Ala Babich, 38, a management student, before breaking into the protest song We Shall Overcome in English.
- “At first we watched it on television because we’re not so young anymore, and we live on the edge of the city,” said Galina Kiyashko, 68, a retired engineer who came to the square with her husband, Grigory. “But our hearts called us out.”
- “Our nation is finally awake,” said Yurig Shekurko, 28, a priest from from Staryy Sambir on the Polish border. “Before, we talked and complained, but now we’re actually doing something.”
- “It’s hard,” said Shekurko, “but freedom is never easy.”
Space is opening in the Ukraine. It’s been four days now and the election has been called for the Victor Yanukovych, but the people know that the result is dubious. It seems inevitable that Viktor Yushchenko will eventually win. My hopes are that democracy wins the day peacefully. This photo is a good sign:
More at the BBC. And here’s a portal for information on the Orange Revolution.
When 200,000 people simply don’t believe it, look what can happen. The Ukraine may yet reverse the trend of many former Soviet republics and join Georgia in turning back creeping authoritarianism.
How can this be happening around the world and the 2000 election get stolen so easily in the USA? Where were the protests in the streets if people believed so strongly that George W. Bush stole the White House? Can you imagine 500,000 people gathered everyday outside the US Supreme Court to state their opposition to the fraud they believed was committed?
Look around. Masses of people who know the truth can change things, but it takes a little work and the courage of convictions to punch through the obfuscation of process and punditry. When the time is ripe, don’t blog it. Get out in the street and live it.
From a fantastic essay in the November issue of Harpers magazine called Quitting the Paint Factory: On the virtues of idleness:
Idleness is not just a psychological necessity, req�uisite to the construction of a complete human being; it constitutes as well a kind of political space, a space as necessary to the workings of an actual democracy as, say, a free press. How does it do this? By allowing us time to figure out who we are, and what we believe; by allowing us time to consider what is unjust, and what we might do about it. By giving the inner life (in whose precincts we are most ourselves) its due. Which is precisely what makes idle�ness dangerous. All manner of things can grow out of that fallow soil. Not for nothing did our mothers grow suspicious when we had “too much time on our hands.” They knew we might be up to something. And not for nothing did we whisper to each other, when we were up to something, “Quick, look busy.”
Mother knew instinctively what the keepers of the castles have always known: that trouble – the kind that might threaten the symmetry of a well-ordered garden – needs time to take root. Take away the time, therefore, and you choke off the problem before it begins. Obedience reigns, the plow stays in the furrow; things proceed as they must. Which raises an uncomfortable question: Could the Church of Work – which today has Americans aspir�ing to sleep deprivation the way they once aspired to a personal knowledge of God – be, at base, an anti-democratic force? Well, yes. James Russell Lowell, that nineteenth-century workhorse, summed it all up quite neatly: “There is no better ballast for keeping the mind steady on its keel, and sav�ing it from all risk of crankiness, than business.”
Quite so. The mind, however, particularly the mind of a citizen in a de�mocratic society, is not a boat. Ballast is not what it needs, and steadiness, alas, can be a synonym for stupidity, as our current administration has so am�ply demonstrated. No, what the democratic mind requires, above all, is time; time to consider its options. Time to develop the democratic virtues of independence, orneriness, objectivity, and fairness. Time, perhaps (to sail along with Lowell’s leaky metaphor for a moment), to ponder the course our unelected captains have so generously set for us, and to consider mutiny when the iceberg looms.
Which is precisely why we need to be kept busy. If we have no time to think, to mull, if we have no time to piece together the sudden associations and unexpected, mid-shower insights that are the stuff of independent opinion, then we are less citizens than cursors, easily manipulated, vulnerable to the currents of power.
I think that in totalitarian societies there must actually be a lot of sitting around waiting for someone to tell you what to do next. I can imagine Solidarity getting started in the ship building factor in Gdansk one afternoon when the supply chain broke again.