Thank you for the question.
If you look at the map that I have, you'll see there are many isolated communities in Nunavut with not very elevated rates compared to other parts of Nunavut, so I don't think it's isolation in and of itself. There's a general pattern that northern first nations people have lower rates than Inuit. Dene in the Northwest Territories have a lower rate than Inuvialuit. In northern Quebec, the Cree have a lower rate than the Inuit, and they share a land claim.
There are larger factors at work. I can't claim to have come up with an explanation for all of them, but I don't think there's any evidence that isolation, per se, is a factor. However, across the north, for Inuit, we are seeing that the rates for suicide of young men are falling in the cities and that it's in some of the more traditional—which is a strange term—communities where they are the highest, which is kind of the reverse of the way some people might think it would be. From a cultural continuity perspective, Inuit, generally speaking, have very high levels of cultural continuity, as do Dene, but if it's only about cultural continuity, then how come some of these smaller communities have higher rates than Iqaluit? In Greenland and in Alaska, it's very much the case.
I think a lot of it has to do with the realities of being a young man in today's world and how you see the future—how you've grown up, whether your family was happy, what your peers are like, whether you can see a future that makes sense for you. Can you see a path to being happy and healthy? Can you see graduating from high school, getting a job, getting an apartment, getting a girlfriend, getting a boat? You're still an Inuk and you still speak Inuktitut. You still go hunting.
There are communities where there is just a lot less hope, and I think in part it's because of weaker services and more trauma from the past, but isolation, in and of itself.... I'm not sure how we would wrap our heads around that.