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1. Introduction
According to the World Health Organization, there are close to 800,000 people who take their own life every year around the world [1]. For each suicide, it is estimated that approximately 20 individuals attempt suicide [2]. With such a prevalence, suicide is recognized as an important public health issue that has major consequences for families, communities, and nations [2]. In Canada, 4054 suicides occurred in 2013, making it the 9th leading cause of death in the country [3]. Studies show that Aboriginal communities have significantly higher rates of suicide than the general population of many countries, including Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and the United States [4,5,6]. From 2003 to 2007, the suicide rate among Canadian Aboriginal people was 30.4 per 100,000-three times higher than the rate in the general population for the same period [7]. This rate is even higher for Aboriginal youth, who have one of the highest suicide rates in the world [8]. In Canada, Aboriginal youth commit suicide at a rate 5 to 6 times higher than the general population [9].
Suicides are particularly high amongst the Canadian Inuit. This population has one of the highest rates of suicide around the world. In 2011, the suicide rate for Inuit living in Nunavut was 99.4 per 100,000, compared with 11.3 per 100,000 in the general Canadian population [9,10]. The suicide rate in Nunavut rose to 127.1 per 100,000 in 2013-ten times the Canadian average [10,11]. The suicide rate among the Inuit populations has grown alarmingly over the past 30 years, beginning in the mid-1980s [12]. This increase has been led by suicide of Inuit youth under the age of 25, a trend that is consistent with other Aboriginal populations around the world [13,14].
A number of prominent explanations have been offered for the dramatic rise in suicide amongst the Canadian Inuit. On a structural and environmental level, studies report that the high rate of suicide could be explained, at least in part, by historical traumas experienced by these populations and transmitted across generations. The colonization and discrimination faced by the Inuit in the past have led to many social problems and have undermined the integrity of communities, resulting in a cultural confusion [12,15,16,17,18,19]. Many Aboriginal communities, including the Inuit, have an...