A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:
A warning for our listeners - this next story addresses suicide and a new approach to preventing it from Indigenous researchers in Alaska. Rather than solely relying on treatment and counseling, they're harnessing Alaska Native traditions. Brandon Kapelow from member station KYUK reports.
BRANDON KAPELOW, BYLINE: Hooper Bay is in Alaska's Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta, a huge swath of tundra and coastal wetlands along the Bering Sea. It's one of the country's most remote regions, with no roads connecting its 50 villages to the national road system. It's also home to the nation's highest rates of suicide.
GIDEON GREEN: Suicide hurts. It took me three years to get over that grief of losing a close friend.
KAPELOW: Gideon Green is 28 years old and has lived in Hooper Bay his whole life. Mental health experts say that high suicide rates can't be reduced to a single cause. But researchers think a lack of behavioral health resources, social isolation, access to guns and generational trauma from colonialism all play a role in this region.
GREEN: Back in, I guess it was 2015, that's when we had three suicides in less than a week.
KAPELOW: That year, Green decided to volunteer with an innovative program from the University of Alaska Fairbanks. It's called Qungasvik, a Yup'ik word meaning toolkit. The program aims to reduce suicide risk by providing young people with activities and learning that draws on their Alaska Native traditions.
GREEN: They started helping us get started on activities. They got us some stuff so we could start a youth group Eskimo dance practice.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
UNIDENTIFIED SINGER: (Singing) Come, they told me, pa rum, pum, pum, pum.
KAPELOW: Every week in Hooper Bay, a dance group gets together in the tribal council building. Tables have been swept to the side, and rows of folding chairs are laid out facing a small stage, where a group of about 20 locals are gathered.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
UNIDENTIFIED SINGERS: (Singing in non-English language).
KAPELOW: A row of drummers plays in the front while elders teach young people to dance. Gideon Green is one of the drummers.
GREEN: Doing our Eskimo dances and drumming takes your stress away. It takes my depression away. We're hitting the drum, it just takes out, like, all the anger.
KAPELOW: This is one of many activities, like beadwork or seal hunting, that have been supported by the program. The thinking is that you look for aspects within a community that lift people up - things that provide a sense of purpose, identity or connection - and you make them easier to access. Rather than a more typical approach, which is focused on helping individuals manage risks with treatment and counseling, this model provides resources to help build on a community's strengths.
STACY RASMUS: In a Yup'ik worldview, suicide is not a mental health disorder, and it's not an individual affliction. It's a disruption of the collective.
KAPELOW: Stacy Rasmus helps oversee Qungasvik as the director of the university's Center for Alaska Native Health Research - or CANHR.
RASMUS: And so, the solution to suicide needs to be at the community level.
KAPELOW: Over nearly three decades, they've tested about a dozen such programs. Rasmus and her colleagues worked with village elders and leadership to design each one. Studies show that the programs did help improve factors that reduce suicide risk. And Rasmus and her colleagues felt optimistic their approach could be applied in other contexts.
RASMUS: Every community and culture has a real strong foundation and set of protective factors that have, you know, allowed us to survive and thrive. We all have that.
KAPELOW: CANHR recently secured a grant from the Department of Defense to adapt their model for Alaska's military population, where suicide rates are more than triple the military average.
JOE GASKIN: I think about it every day, every time my phone rings. We're devastated every time these things happen.
KAPELOW: Joe Gaskin is a senior leader in the 11th Airborne Division at Fort Wainwright in Fairbanks. A spike in suicides there that peaked in 2021 led to more prevention funding and laid the foundation for the partnership. CAHNR researchers co-produced a new program with their military counterparts, including Gaskin. They invested in building the division's identity around its arctic culture through activities like lessons in preparing wild salmon and polar plunges.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: Go, go, go, go.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: All right. Turn around. Come back to the edge.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: Kick your legs. Kick your legs. Kick your legs.
KAPELOW: In a video provided by the U.S. Army, junior officers motivate their soldiers to jump fully clothed through a hole in the ice into the freezing cold water. The goal of these activities is to help soldiers connect with their peers and leaders and to build a sense of shared purpose.
GASKIN: Why did I come in the Army? What is my purpose? Is being part of the 11th Airborne Division, does that make me special in some way? And when people can hitch their wagon to that, all those negatives start to melt away.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: Final question. Why did y'all join the Army?
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #4: I wanted to become a stronger person, mentally.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: Oh, they going to teach you (laughter).
KAPELOW: During a recent community outing, soldiers learned to make smoked salmon while volunteer leaders encouraged the participants to get to know one another. Part of the thinking behind these activities is to create opportunities for conversations around topics like identity or the deeper meaning of serving in the armed forces.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: What about you?
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #5: Mostly because of, like, family and also to expand my reach as well.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: That's nice.
KAPELOW: Sergeant Major Gaskin says he thinks it's making a difference.
GASKIN: I lose sleep every night thinking about these kids that, you know, we've lost along the way. I think about their parents, their families. I'm tearing up, you know, thinking about it. We've got to protect what's left.
KAPELOW: This shift towards approaches that try to build up a community's protective qualities is starting to get a lot more attention in the field. In the latest national suicide prevention strategy put out in April by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services...
HOLLY WILCOX: Community-based suicide prevention is strategy No. 1.
KAPELOW: Holly Wilcox is a national suicide prevention researcher and a professor at Johns Hopkins University. She says the federal government's emphasis on community prevention feels like the signal of a new paradigm.
WILCOX: I actually think it's been long overdue. We really need to be focusing more upstream, community-based on a public health approach to this major and leading cause of death.
KAPELOW: Wilcox wants to see more groups around the country seize the opportunity to deliver programs that follow this approach. With the increased attention and funding from the federal government, she's feeling more hopeful that they might.
For NPR News, I'm Brandon Kapelow in Hooper Bay.
(SOUNDBITE OF GOGO PENGUIN'S "HOPOPONO")
MARTÍNEZ: Support for this reporting was provided by Stanford University's Bill Lane Center for the American West. And if you or someone you know may be considering suicide or is in crisis, call or text 988 - that's 988 - to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.
(SOUNDBITE OF GOGO PENGUIN'S "HOPOPONO") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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