Personal Persistence, Identity Development, and Suicide: a Study of Native and Non-Native North-American Adolescents

This book explores the relationship between suicide & young people’s developing conceptions of personal or cultural persistence. Grounded in five studies indicating that Aboriginal & non-Aboriginal Canadian youth ordinarily follow distinctive pathways of identity development, the findings here demonstrate that those who fail to own their personal past are at an especially heightened risk of suicide, and that at the level of whole communities, the efforts of Aboriginal groups to reclaim their cultural past & direct the course of their civic lives are similarly associated with dramatically lower youth suicide rates.