The settler colonial suicide: Deanna Zantingh, Brandon Hey, Jeffrey Ansloos, ‘Unsettling Settler-Colonial Suicidology: Indigenous Theories of Justice in Indigenous Suicide Research’, in Alvin Dueck, Louise Sundararajan (eds), Values and Indigenous Psychology in the Age of the Machine and Market, Palgrave, 2024, pp 103-130 | settler colonial studies blog

The settler colonial suicide: Deanna Zantingh, Brandon Hey, Jeffrey Ansloos, ‘Unsettling Settler-Colonial Suicidology: Indigenous Theories of Justice in Indigenous Suicide Research’, in Alvin Dueck, Louise Sundararajan (eds), Values and Indigenous Psychology in the Age of the Machine and Market, Palgrave, 2024, pp 103-130

13Aug24

Abstract: This paper reflects on suicide research from a critical Indigenous studies perspective, drawing on pluralistic epistemologies of Indigenous peoples in settler-colonial contexts. It argues that suicide prevention research must center on Indigenous knowledge systems to address the complex, interconnected nature of suicide and the broader ecological, cultural, and spiritual harms of neoliberal capitalism and settler colonialism. Indigenous scholars suggest contemporary suicide research is often based on binary-anthropocentric Western epistemologies and insufficiently attentive to holistic, communal, and land-based dimensions of Indigenous life-promoting relations. To unsettle settler-colonial suicidology is to reconceptualize prevention as the process of communal, environmental, social, and cultural healing that emphasizes the importance of harmony in the interconnectedness of all life. This more expansive and contextualized approach recognizes the structural entrenchment of suicide and system factors contributing to suicidal distress. Justice in suicide research involves co-creating meaning and relationally evolving to support all beings’ conditions for life. Indigenous studies of care, life promotion, and healing offer promising frameworks to reorient suicide research from individual responses toward collective healing-justice that is generative and supportive of interdependent communities. Thus, resisting narrow definitions of health and justice operative within the state’s normative desires; re-centering Indigenous communities’ fights to address the structures that thwart life.

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