‘The deepest silences’: what lies behind the Arctic’s Indigenous suicide crisis – The Guardian
For years I lived with the Inuit community in Canada’s far north. But it was only later, when the suicides began, that I learned of the epidemic of abuse that had unfolded during that time
Looking back on it now, I have to be careful about reconstructing or selecting memories in the light of all that transpired. In 1970, as part of my work for a research group within the Canadian Department of Indian and Northern Affairs, I moved to the Arctic and began learning the Inuit language, Inuktitut. My girlfriend, Christine, and I ended up living in a settlement named Sanikiluaq, located on the Belcher Islands, some 90 miles from the Hudson Bay coast of Arctic Quebec.
The Canadian government had established this settlement in the 1960s, the result of a postwar policy to incorporate all of the country, even its remotest edges, into the Canadian nation. Such policies came with a new conviction that the far north had vast economic potential. Although life in Sanikiluaq was now based on the new government settlement, this was an Inuit world, where language, culture and links to the land continued to be very strong.
