Examining and Addressing Men's Boating Safety Behaviours in Inuvik, Northwest Territories

Abstract

Injuries are one of the leading causes of death for individuals in Canada. Most injuries are predictable and preventable events that may be reduced by health promotion and injury prevention strategies. In particular, boating fatalities are a leading cause of injury death for men, particularly Aboriginal men, in northern Canada. Despite decades of water safety campaigns, Aboriginal men remain overrepresented in boating fatality statistics. Elevated rates of boating fatalities for Aboriginal men in northern Canada indicate that current water safety messages and initiatives may not be reaching those most vulnerable to boating incidents. My thesis, which is written in the publishable paper format and is comprised of two papers, investigates Aboriginal men’s boating incidents in Inuvik, Northwest Territories, Canada. In paper one, I use a community-based participatory research methodology informed by postcolonial feminist theory to investigate the risk factors that Aboriginal male residents identified as contributing to boating incidents in Inuvik, Northwest Territories. Together, we found that sex and gender, age, place, and lack of boating safety education are the most prominent risk factors for boating incidents. In paper two, I argue that community members are key holders of local knowledge and their expertise should thus be drawn upon by academic researchers and health programmers for the co-creation of injury prevention programs. In it, I provide an overview of the process that led to the co-creation of a boating education poster campaign in Inuvik. Together, the two papers in this thesis demonstrate that community-based strategies should be employed to address health inequities in boating incidents faced by Aboriginal men in the Northwest Territories.