Authors ’ Correspondence:

• Main Authors: Michael J. Chandler, Travis Proulx
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: Chandler; Hallett; First Nations
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.534.6906; http://www2.psych.ubc.ca/~chandlerlab/Chandler %26 Proulx (2006a).pdf

2This article takes up three questions. The first asks, in wonderment, how it could possibly happen that anyone––anyone at all––might willfully choose to end her or his own life? The second concerns why it is that, when they do occur, suicides and suicidal behaviors occur so disproportionately and so inexplicably among the young? Finally, we mean to take up a more localized and culture-bearing version of these same questions by asking how and why it could have come to pass that Canada’s young “First Nations ” persons take their lives in such outlandish numbers––suicide rates said to be the highest of any culturally identifiable group in the world (Kirmayer, 1994)? The broad thesis we intend to unfold in the pages that follow is that all of our best hopes of answering these nagging questions turn on first reversing their usual polarities, all in an effort to get clear about death’s opposite number––about our more mundane reasons for struggling, as we ordinarily do, to cheat death by surviving at almost any costs. Why, it is important to ask, do people have such an abiding commitment to their own persistence––a stake in their future that, as our own research has shown, appears to have regularly gone missing among those that actually do undertake to kill themselves (Chandler, Lalonde, Sokol, & Hallett, 2003)? We do, of course