Thank you for the question.
Inuit had to have been—this is subjective as well—some of the most resilient people on the planet. The experiences that many Inuit had to go through to survive on the land is extraordinary. There are many accounts of Inuit who went through starvation, or the Spanish flu epidemics in the 1918-1919 period when whole communities were wiped out, except for some small children. The stories our elders tell us about what they had to go through to survive are powerful and uplifting in so many different ways. We need to harness that kind of resilience, try to understand the power of that resilience, and transfer that to those who live today. Elders have that key knowledge about why they responded to incredibly difficult situations in the way they did. Their wisdom and their life experience need to inform the way we think about this issue.
The very tenets of Inuit society, the foundation we live in—our people are saying we want to return to those ways. Our culture, our language, and our history are essential for our well-being. We need to ensure that we give our children and we give our societies our teachings and our perspective on the world. That sometimes is in relation to suicide prevention and sometimes is in relation to community development. It's getting back to the place where we were as a society, and to feeling as though we are fulfilled in the way we interact with all of our elders and fulfilled in the way our communities function.
I would say that Inuit history and our elders have a great role to play in informing Inuit society about how to be resilient, in informing us about how we can be healthy again, and, in relation to suicide prevention specifically, in supporting our society to heal from what it has gone through.