In 1955, Carl Barks drew an Unlce Scrooge adventure comic with the title: The Lemming with the Locket. The myth of lemming mass suicide is long-standing and has been popularized by a number of factors. Lemmings are also often pushed into the sea as more and more lemmings arrive at the shore. They will stop until the urge to press on causes them to jump off the cliff and start swimming, sometimes to exhaustion and death. On occasion, and particularly in the case of the Norway lemmings in Scandinavia, large migrating groups will reach a cliff overlooking the ocean. Lemmings can and do swim and may choose to cross a body of water in search of a new habitat. Driven by strong biological urges, they will migrate in large groups when population density becomes too great. While many people believe that lemmings commit mass suicide when they migrate, this is not the case. It is unknown why lemming populations en mass fluctuate, roughly every four years, before plummeting almost to extinction. Lemmings of northern Norway are one of the few vertebrates who reproduce so quickly that their population fluctuations are chaotic, rather than following linear growth to a carrying capacity or regular oscillations. Mass Lemming Suicides a Common Misconception: There’s a much longer article about Inuit people, a culturally similar indigenous peoples inhabiting the Arctic regions of Alaska, Greenland, and Canada. For further informatio, I urge you take a look at the official Innu website. You can read an overview about the Innu people on Wikipedia. These conditions are reflected in the appalling health and mortality statistics for Davis Inlet, where family breakdown, sexual abuse, drunkenness and alcohol-related disease, violence, accidents and self-harm become endemic.»Īccording to the Toronto Star newspaper, there are two main causes:ġ) Incompetent, paternal, racist government policies under the guise of benevolent progress, andĢ) The sexual and physical abuse of Innu children at the hands of a small minority of Roman Catholic priests over a period of generations. They described wooden shacks with no running water, poor roads and scant health care. The report states that «Utshimassits is a community living in almost unimaginable squalor and disarray. That the Innu people in Canada’s northeastern regions have the highest suicide rate in the world: 178 per 100,000 persons per year. «…their social fabric soon fell apart.» The provincial government reneged on its promises of fresh water and sewage systems. Unfortunately, nobody in the government appears to have taken into account that centuries of their «pride, traditions, and spirituality tied to the land of their ancestors…» They were resettled on the Davis Inlet where they were expected to establish a fishery. The Innu consist of «a grouping of the Montagnais, Naskapi and Atikamekw aboriginal peoples of northeastern Quebec, and another group in Labrador in the province of Newfoundland.» In 1967, the Newfoundland government convinced the Mushuau Innu (the people of the barrens) to abandon their traditional location on the mainland of Labrador where they had been nomadic hunters of caribou for about six millennia. But the real focus of this article is that some human cultures and communities are more prone to suicide than others, especially when entire societies are relocated. I will speculate about this further in future articles. I can almost guarantee that I’ll get more exposure by tying this sad story in with Lemmings, if only because «Lemming Suicide» is a much more popular search term than «Innu people of Nitassinan, Davis Inlet in the Labrador-Quebec peninsula, eastern Canada». It’s not helped by lemming cartoons such as the one shown here. In fact, the popular notion of that «Lemming commit mass suicide» is a misconception. On the contrary, I’m attempting to highlight this afflictive social dilemma, thereby drawing attention to it. Before I continue with this story, I wish to make it perfectly clear that I am in no way humouring this subject.
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