Combating suicide in Nunavut
Special coroner’s inquest explores high rate of Inuit killing themselves
Rex Uttak liked to laugh, especially when his aunt, Mary Ann Uttak, got him going, as she loved to do, because he could get her right back by cracking a joke or doing something silly. Then they would both start laughing until their eyes watered, and they would try to choke back their giggles until the next joke flew.
That was Rex, says his aunt, an 11- year- old boy full of laughter and light. Mary Ann remembers coming home on Aug. 10, 2013, and seeing her nephew and one of his cousins asleep on a living- room couch.
She touched his cheek and whispered good night. By the next morning he was dead. The boy who liked to laugh had hanged himself.
Rex Uttak was one of 45 Nunavut Inuit to kill themselves in 2013, a cascade of tragedies that triggered a special coroner’s inquest into the high rate of suicide in the North that convened in Iqaluit on Sept. 14 and concluded last Friday.
Since 1999, 479 Inuit have killed themselves in the territory — by hanging, gun, overdose and stabbing — out of a population of about 28,000.
To put the numbers in perspective: An Inuit age 15 and older is 9.8 times more likely to commit suicide than a Canadian living in the south, while the suicide rate among Inuit children, aged 11- 14, is about 50 times the national average. Of the 45 suicides in 2013, 12 were women and 33 were men, mostly aged 15- 25.
Rex Uttak was the youngest, the oldest was 72.
“Rex was such a happy boy,” his aunt says. “We wanted to tell our family’s story to try and help others.”
Padma Suramala, the territory’s coroner, originally hoped five families affected by the 2013 suicides would come forward, but only two did in the end.
Dr. Allison Crawford, a psychiatrist who has been working with Nunavut’s mental health system for the past decade, testified during week one of the inquest. She explains in an environment where suicide has, in essence, become a cultural norm, it is sometimes described as a “contagion.”
“I think the word ‘ contagion’ scares people, because people do start to be worried about young people in their family catching suicide — or it to be an epidemic in that way — but suicide doesn’t work that way,” Crawford says.
“But what we do have evidence of is exposure. Where, if you are a young person and you know someone that has ended their life by suicide, there is an elevated risk that you will, in turn, end your life by suicide.”
This holds true for young people, north and south. A student, say, at a Calgary high school where someone has committed suicide is at greater risk, statistically, of doing the same. Meanwhile many of the factors associated with a young person’s suicide — depression, substance abuse, overwhelming feelings of hopelessness and despair — are also common, north and south.
But the difference is the magnitude of the problem. Understanding it in a northern context requires digging into the past. Suicide was virtually unheard of among the Inuit historically. RCMP records for 1920- 45 documented just 27 suicides throughout the Northwest Territories. Of that number, only one was a youth.
Most of the cases involved adults with acute physical or mental distress. As one elder explained to the Igoolik Oral History Project, suicide happened “once in a long while ... when a person was ill for so long that they got tired of living.”
Jack Anawak, 64, hails from Repulse Bay, the same community as Rex Uttak.
Anawak grew up hunting and trapping. By age 17, he had a family and a sled dog team and a traditional male role to fill, where the food his wife and children ate was the food he went out and killed.
But in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, the wild, untamed North became a Canadian colonial laboratory. By strokes of the pen, the federal government transformed a society of hunters and gatherers into one of people living in isolated permanent settlements, shopping for groceries at a store.
Anawak draws a straight line between the rapid societal transformation and the muddying of traditional male roles to the suicides of his two brothers, who killed themselves in the span of a few months in 1977.
Many in Anawak’s generation spent time in residential schools. Few talked about it. Instead, they drank, took drugs and raged as their families and cultural traditions fell apart, dissolving in a haze of substance, physical and sexual abuse.
The cycle of abuse and despair became self- perpetuating, passing from one generation to the next. Children suffered. Suicide rates soared. Here we are today.
“Look, we have the highest suicide rate in Canada,” says Anawak, a former Liberal MP turned NDP candidate in the upcoming election.
“Let’s make suicide prevention our No. 1 issue.”
Anawak isn’t merely playing politics. One critical aspect in the continuing suicide epidemic has been the Nunavut government’s colossal failure to deal with the problem.
Several community stakeholders, including the government, the Nunavut land claims organization, the RCMP and a suicide prevention group, came together in 2008 to develop an official suicide prevention strategy for the region.
The strategy was made public two years later. It called for: Better access to beefed- up mental health services; suicide- intervention training for those on the front lines of the crisis — police, teachers, community leaders, parents; improving maternal health and childhood opportunities; and mobilizing government departments to “transform the way suicide prevention happens in Nunavut.”
But there was a catch: The plan was not specifically funded. Five years later, much of the strategy remains to be implemented.
“The government deserves to be shamed for this,” Crawford says.
Mary Ann Uttak returned to Repulse Bay after appearing at the inquest. The 27- year- old has three children, aged nine, five and two. She worries about them constantly. Sometimes she will speak to her eldest child about life, and how hard it can seem at times, but that things always get better.
When she thinks of her nephew, Rex, she hears his laugh.
“We are trying to be happy,” she says. “We are trying to be strong. I don’t know how many people we have lost. We think of the ones who are gone.”