There’s something unspeakably creepy about this whole thing.

Aboriginal teenagers in Canada are perhaps six times more likely to kill themselves than non-aboriginal youth. Among the Inuit, youth suicide is 11 times the national average. Between 2005 and 2010, Health Canada spent $65 million on a National Aboriginal Youth Suicide Prevention Strategy. The kids kept on killing themselves, and in 2011 the Ontario Chief Coroner’s Office released a 215-page report on aboriginal suicides in Northern Ontario. One of the report’s key recommendations: the creation of a national suicide prevention strategy.

Then along comes Theresa Spence, the elected chief of the forlorn and remote Northern Ontario community of Attawapiskat. Since Dec. 11, Spence has been camped in a teepee on an island in the Ottawa River, threatening to starve herself to death — to kill herself — unless the prime minister and the Governor General accede to her variously contradictory and ambiguous demands.

“Activist” opinion in Canada is actually cheering her on. We are all expected to be moved by Spence’s hunger strike, to be humbled, and to be ashamed of ourselves as Canadians. Out of empathy, you understand.

In the remote Ontario community of Pikangikum, an Ojibwa reserve about 300 kilometres northeast of Winnipeg, the suicide rate is roughly 20 times the Canadian average. Kids kill themselves there all the time. It’s a grim place of drug addicts and adolescent gas-sniffers and random violence where only one in five of the houses has any indoor plumbing and hardly anybody has a job. About 2,400 people live there, but in 2011 Pikangikum generated almost 5,000 calls to the police that resulted in roughly 3,600 “lockups.” Over the past 20 years, 96 Pikangikum residents, mostly kids, have killed themselves.

Empathy, I get. If I were a 14-year-old boy living in Pikangikum with no prospect of getting out, I’d probably want to kill myself too. What is far more difficult to get one’s head around is just what possible good might come from Idle No More, the recently erupted viral craze that has attached itself to Chief Spence specifically, and to aboriginal grievances in Canada more amorphously.

So far, it’s shaping up to look a lot like last year’s Occupy Wall Street conniption, the thing the activist avant-garde insisted was going to be the great anti-corporate insurrection that counterculture icon Naomi Klein always wanted. Our very own Arab Spring! It ended up more like the Tanganyika Laughter Epidemic of 1962, and so far, Idle No More appears headed in exactly the same direction.

In place of the Occupists’ elaborate sign language and call-and-response rituals, Idlers specialize in flash-mob round dances in shopping malls. The erstwhile leadership relies on a lexicon that combines trippy references to Mother Earth with paranoid claims about the hidden contents of Bill C-45, the vulgar means by which Prime Minister Stephen Harper forced his 2012 legislative agenda though Parliament.

The Idlers say they want “a revolution which honours and fulfils Indigenous sovereignty which protects the land and water.” They say the Harper government treats Canada’s aboriginal leadership with contempt, but they also say they aren’t accountable to the elected chiefs either. They say a lot of things, and a lot of excitement this might well prove to be, but a revolutionary movement it most certainly is not.