Colonialism on Indigenous Culture and Community-Led Healing
Colonialism on Indigenous Culture and Community-Led Healing
Inuit culture in the Canadian Arctic was not weak, disorganized, or waiting to be replaced by outside institutions. For about 1,000 years, Inuit built a way of life suited to the land, the weather, the animals, and the needs of families. Before them, the Dorset or Tuniit culture had lived in the region for about 3,000 years, showing that Arctic life required deep knowledge, adaptation, and social cooperation. Inuit society depended on kinship, hunting, food sharing, teaching by parents and elders, and strong expectations about how people should treat one another. Although whalers from Scotland and America brought disease and trade goods during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Inuit culture itself remained largely intact because Inuit continued to live in family camps, move with animal migration patterns, and teach children through everyday life on the land. The most damaging changes came later, when the Canadian government took control of Inuit lives during the tuberculosis crisis and replaced Inuit social systems with settlements, schools, wage labour, and outside health programs. This essay argues that the decline in Inuit well-being and the rise in suicide are best understood as consequences of colonial disruption to family, land-based life, and community authority, and that the most promising solutions come from Inuit communities rebuilding their own relationships and taking responsibility for prevention themselves.
Before heavy government involvement, Inuit culture was organized around family and collective survival. Inuit lived in camps on the land and moved seasonally, usually at least twice a year, according to hunting needs and animal migration. In winter, snow houses brought more people together, strengthening cooperation and communication. The division of labour connected children directly to adults: men hunted, women sewed skin clothing, prepared food, and cared for the home, while boys learned from fathers and girls learned from mothers. Parents and elders were therefore not separate from education; they were education. This gave children a clear place in the family and a direct path into adulthood. Food sharing, or ningiq, also showed that survival was collective rather than individual. Hunting was not simply an economic activity but a social and moral one, because people depended on one another and shared what they had. Spiritual life, including the work of angakuit, or shamans, also connected people to animals, weather, healing, and the unseen world. These practices created belonging, responsibility, and identity.
Because family was the centre of Inuit well-being, damage to family relationships became damage to the whole culture. Kral, Idlout, Minore, Dyck, and Kirmayer (2011) emphasize that family life remains central to Inuit ideas of happiness and health. In the older system, children were surrounded by relatives, learned by watching adults, and grew into responsibilities that had already been modelled for them. Social rules also shaped relationships. Marriages were often arranged before or shortly after birth, and across the Arctic there were practices such as spouse exchange that made sense within Inuit social systems, even if they appear unfamiliar from a Western point of view. These customs helped structure kinship, sexuality, and obligation. Respect and affection were linked through ideas such as naalaktuq and ungajuq, and people’s sense of belonging was strengthened by daily interaction with relatives. In this setting, the self was relational: a person was not understood mainly as an isolated individual, but as someone connected to family, community, land, and culture.
The major turning point came after 1957, during the tuberculosis epidemic, when the Canadian government began to take over more and more of Inuit life. Wenzel (1991) calls this period the “government era,” a phrase that captures the shift from Inuit control to outside administration. Tuberculosis itself was devastating. Government sources note that tuberculosis peaked among Inuit between the 1940s and 1960s, that at least one-third of the Inuit population was infected during the 1950s, and that many Inuit were sent far from home for long medical treatment, sometimes without families receiving clear information about where loved ones were or whether they had died. This health crisis became a doorway for wider government control. Inuit were moved off the land and into crowded settlements run by Qallunaat (White) Northern Service Officers. Instead of family camps and seasonal movement, people were placed in fixed communities shaped by government housing, schooling, welfare, and administration.
These changes weakened the cultural systems that had protected Inuit well-being. Damas (1996) describes how centralization, housing, education, and welfare policies transformed settlement patterns in the Arctic. Small houses broke up extended families that had once lived and worked closely together. Children were sent to day schools or residential schools, where they were separated from parents and elders and taught through outside institutions rather than through land-based family life. A wage economy was introduced, but because there were few jobs, many families experienced poverty rather than stability. Hunting, once central to male responsibility and community sharing, became more sporadic. This was especially hard for men, whose identity and role had been tied to providing food and teaching boys on the land. When hunting was reduced and wage work was scarce, many men were left without the same respected place in family and community life. The result was not progress but dislocation.
The damage was also emotional and intergenerational. By the early 1980s, conflict between parents and children had increased, and many youth began relying more on peers than on parents for support. Some children and parents avoided one another. This was a major cultural break because Inuit childrearing had depended on close observation, shared work, and guidance from adults. Romantic relationships also changed. Arranged marriages began to decline after children were sent to schools in the 1960s and 1970s, and by the 1990s they had nearly disappeared. Young people were left to form romantic and sexual relationships without the old structures and without strong new models. The references describe young men and women in the 1980s as not knowing what to do, and many romantic relationships among Inuit youth today as troubled. These problems were not simply private failures; they were symptoms of a social system that had been interrupted before another secure system could replace it.
The rise in suicide among Inuit must be understood within this history of disruption. In 2009, Canada’s suicide rate was 11.7 per 100,000, while Nunavut’s was 83.9 per 100,000. In Nunavut, suicides began escalating in the mid-1980s, after decades of settlement life, schooling, poverty, and weakened family structures. Research on Inuit suicide has found that it is closely related to poor family ties, not spending time on the land, not attending school, romantic problems, loneliness, and anger. These causes point back to the central argument: when family, land, identity, and belonging are damaged, people suffer. Joiner’s idea that belonging is a key protective factor helps explain why feeling included and connected, matters so much. Many Inuit youth are not experiencing that belonging because communication across generations has weakened and kin relationships have changed. Suicide is therefore not only an individual psychological issue; it is also a social, spiritual, and cultural crisis.
This is why outside suicide prevention programs have often failed. The Western perspective usually treats suicide as psychological, individual, private, and connected to mental illness or psychiatric disorder. From that perspective, prevention means professional help, clinical services, and expert-designed programs. Those services can be useful in some situations, but they do not fully match Inuit understandings of selfhood and suffering. In Indigenous communities, the self is relationally defined, so suicide is connected to family, community, spirituality, and culture. If the problem is social disconnection, then a purely individual treatment model cannot be enough. The references show that in the late 1990s the federal government spent significant money on suicide prevention from a Western perspective, yet suicide rates continued to climb. Suicide prevention programs and training introduced by the Canadian government in the 1990s did not lower the rate in Inuit communities. This failure suggests that the problem was not a lack of programs, but a lack of community ownership, cultural fit, and local responsibility.
In contrast, when Inuit communities have acted for themselves, the results have been more hopeful. During research on Inuit suicide and well-being in the 1990s, members of an Inuit steering committee explained that one community with one of the highest suicide rates in the Canadian Arctic had gone several years without a suicide. They insisted that the change had not come from an outside program but from Inuit in the community doing something themselves. The deputy mayor and Hamlet Council had organized weekly gatherings where community members talked openly about suicide, why it was happening, and what they could do about it. They agreed to watch for people who looked sad, stayed alone, or seemed disconnected, and to engage with them. In another account, community meetings, youth meetings, and practical action by the housing committee sent a powerful message that people were watching out for one another. These actions rebuilt the very thing colonial disruption had weakened: collective responsibility.
Community-led suicide prevention works better because it restores Inuit authority over Inuit life. When a community gathers, talks, watches over vulnerable people, and decides what action to take, it rebuilds collective efficacy. People begin to believe that they can solve problems together. This is the opposite of the government era, when decisions were made by outside officials and Inuit were treated as objects of policy rather than as leaders of their own future. Community-based approaches also fit Inuit values because they focus on relationships, family, land, youth, and belonging. They do not reduce suffering to a diagnosis or ask a struggling person to solve everything alone. Instead, they ask the community to notice, speak, care, and act. Given that there are no simple evidence-based suicide prevention programs that have solved the crisis, the evidence from Inuit communities themselves is important. It suggests that the most effective prevention is not imported; it is built locally through participation, cultural knowledge, and self-determination.
In conclusion, Inuit culture changed for the worse not because it was unable to adapt, but because government programs disrupted the foundations that had long supported Inuit life. Before the government era, Inuit society was organized around family, land, teaching by elders, food sharing, hunting, and collective responsibility. Whalers brought disease and trade, but Inuit culture remained strong because Inuit still controlled their own lives. The deeper rupture came when tuberculosis policy, settlement life, schools, housing, welfare, and wage labour separated generations, weakened kinship, reduced hunting, and damaged young people’s sense of belonging. The rise in suicide in Nunavut must be read in this context. It reflects loneliness, poor family ties, troubled relationships, and loss of connection to land and community. Western-style prevention programs have not been enough because they treat suicide mainly as an individual mental health problem, while Inuit experience it as a social and spiritual problem rooted in family and community life. The strongest hope lies in Inuit communities solving the crisis through their own collective action. When communities talk openly, watch over one another, support youth, rebuild family ties, and take responsibility for prevention, they begin to repair the damage caused by colonial control. Healing, therefore, requires more than services; it requires returning power, belonging, and responsibility to Inuit communities themselves.
Source:
Critical Suicidology
Jennifer White, Ian Marsh, Michael J. Kral, and Jonathan Morris