CANADA: Despair and Suicide at Davis Inlet: When Ancient Folkways Collide with the 20th Century

▪ 1994

      The Canadian public was jolted into the reality of a festering social problem in January 1993 by the televised videotape of six 12- to 14-year-old Innu children at Davis Inlet attempting suicide by inhaling gasoline fumes from plastic bags. When discovered, the youths fought off attempts to be rescued and screamed that they wanted to die. In fact, suicidal activity was not uncommon among the Innu of Davis Inlet, which had become a virtual primer in communal self-destruction, with rampant solvent inhaling and alcoholism amid unseemly poverty and squalor. One local source estimated that some 25% of the community's 500 residents had attempted suicide.

      The publicizing of the suicide incident brought long overdue attention to the settlement off the coast of Labrador. In 1967 the Newfoundland government had convinced the Mushuau Innu (“the people of the barrens”) to move from their traditional home on the Labrador mainland to a Davis Inlet island in the hope that they could establish a fishing industry there. The Innu had been nomadic caribou hunters for some 6,000 years—with their pride, traditions, and spirituality tied to the land of their ancestors—and on Davis Inlet their social fabric soon fell apart.

      The difficulties of transition were complicated even more by failed government promises to provide fresh water and sewerage systems. The government built houses, but they were tiny shacks that housed 15 to 20 members of an extended family. Most dwellings had only wood stoves for heat and were without plumbing. Still the government provided cable television, snowmobiles, and plastic-wrapped packaged goods, which only emphasized the cultural clash between aboriginal nomad and 20th-century mass society. The results were those that sometimes accompany attempts to reorder traditional societies: unemployment, poverty, alcoholism, drug addiction, domestic violence, suicide, and child abuse.

      After the suicide attempt brought Davis Inlet into the spotlight, journalists flocked there from Canada, the U.S., and elsewhere. It was pointed out, however, that the conditions at Davis Inlet were representative of problems among native communities across Canada and elsewhere. The six youths and other inhalant users, some as young as eight, were airlifted to a treatment centre in Alberta. After six months they were released and placed temporarily in a wilderness camp at Sango Bay, near the traditional Innu hunting grounds, where the entire community hoped to relocate. In the meantime, outside counselors and government aid brought some improvements to Davis Inlet. Nevertheless, the village leaders, headed by Chief Katie Rich, remained adamant on moving to Sango Bay, where they felt they would be closer to their spiritual roots. Frustrations and tempers were still running high at the end of the year.

      (MARVIN MARTIN)

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