This is The Guardian.

The deepest silences. What lies behind the Arctic's indigenous suicide crisis?

Written and read by Hugh Brody.

Looking back on it now, I have to be careful about reconstructing or selecting memories and the light of all that transpired.

In 1970, a part of my work for a research group within the Canadian Department of Indian and Northern Affairs, I moved to the Arctic and began learning the Indo-It language in Uttitoot.

My girlfriend Christine and I ended up living in a settlement named Sanikilouk, located on the Belcher Islands, some 90 miles from the Hudson Bay coast of Arctic Quebec.

The Canadian government had established this settlement in the 1960s, the result of a post-war policy to incorporate all of the country, even its remotest edges, into the Canadian nation.

Such policies came with a new conviction that the far north had vast economic potential.

Although life in Sanikilouk was now based on the new government settlement, this was an in-weat world, where language, culture and links to the land continued to be very strong.

During my career as an anthropologist, I have written much about my work with and for in-weat, but I have written very little about Sanikilouk.

The beauty of those islands and of the people for whom this was their home were clear to me then, and also now as I bring them to mind.

But there is a thread of darkness running through these memories.

Intimation's embedded in the stories that the people of Sanikilouk shared with me.

There was also a shocking reality that I failed to see. These stories raise questions of life and death that have been central to the in-weat experience and are turning out to be of urgent importance for us all.

At the time I arrived, white people from the south, who the in-weat called Hudlunat, had overwhelming influence and authority.

Most were there either to transform the in-weat and supposedly help them through the confusions of that transformation, or to take over possession and management of the land on behalf of the Canadian government in the south.

The in-weat were expected to adopt a new religion, learn about the world of the south in schools, run by southerners, and live more like other Canadians.

When describing to me their feelings about these white people, in-weat in Sanikilouk often also use the in-weat word illa to express awe as in relation to ghosts and intimidation, as in relation to powerful elders or shamans.

Christine and I lived as much as we could outside the norms and attitudes of most Hudlunat. This did not make for very easy relations with other southerners living there.

The one Hudlunat who did like to visit us was a man named Ed Horn. Of the three schoolteachers in Sanikilouk, Horn had responsibility for the younger children.

He ignored the Hudlunat disdain for our small shack at the edge of the community. By spending time there, he had dissociated himself from the settlement manager and the other teachers, a married couple, with whom he had had a serious falling out.

In-defying the Hudlunat's disapproval of us, Horn was suggesting that he was not really one of them, an implication reinforced by his saying to me as I recall that he was part indigenous.

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