Addresses for correspondence:

• Main Authors: Michael J. Ch, Christopher E. Lalonde, Michael J. Chandler
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: Chandler; First Nations
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.329.7324; http://web.uvic.ca/~lalonde/manuscripts/2004Transformations.pdf

Six years ago the Journal of Transcultural Psychiatry published the results of an epidemiological study (Chandler & Lalonde, 1998) in which the highly variable rates of youth suicide shown to characterize British Columbia’s (BC’s) First Nations were set in relation to a half dozen markers of “cultural continuity”––community level variables meant to document the extent to which each of BC’s almost 200 Aboriginal “bands ” had taken steps to preserve their cultural past and secure future control of their own civic lives. Two key findings emerged from these earlier efforts. The first was that, while the province-wide rate of Aboriginal youth suicide was once again found to be sharply elevated (more than 5 times the national average), this commonly reported summary statistic was demonstrated to be an “actuarial fiction ” that failed to capture the local reality of even one of the province’s First Nations communities. Worse still, counting up all of the dead, and then, as is usually done, simply dividing through by the total number of available Aboriginal youth, works to obscure what is really interesting––the dramatic differences in the incidence of youth suicide that actually do distinguish one band or tribal council from the next. In fact, more than half of