Alaska’s Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta is one of the nation’s most remote regions, stretching across 75,000 square miles of mountains, tundra and coastal wetlands along the Bering Sea. The U.S. Census counts the population at roughly 27,000 – the majority of whom are Alaska Natives of Yup’ik and Athabascan descent – placing the region among the most sparsely populated areas in the United States. There are no roads connecting the Delta’s 50 villages to the national system. It’s also home to the nation’s highest rates of suicide.
Since the 1950s, mental health experts say that suicide prevention models have largely been designed to identify and mitigate risk through an individualized approach, treating symptoms like anxiety or suicidal ideation through therapy or counseling. But as suicide rates have steadily risen over the past few decades, a group of Indigenous researchers at the Center for Alaska Native Health Research (CANHR) have been developing a new approach across the villages of the Y-K Delta.
For decades, it’s been common to see headlines that highlight the wide spectrum of challenges confronting the Y-K Delta: the lingering psychological impacts of residential boarding schools; high rates of substance use and sexual violence stemming from generational trauma; dwindling salmon runs that limit food and livelihood; and a changing climate that is threatening low-lying village communities along the coast with flooding and erosion.
But the researchers at CANHR, who work out of the University of Alaska Fairbanks, believe that all this focus on risks might actually be part of the problem. They say that as a result, these communities are often viewed solely through the prism of their challenges, while funders and research groups across the field of suicide prevention have dedicated too little attention and resources towards approaches that emphasize their inherent strengths. “We’ve been trying risk reduction approaches for nearly half a century,” says Stacy Rasmus, the director at CANHR. “And we are not moving the needle with those approaches.”
The origins of CANHR’s innovative prevention efforts can be traced, in part, to the conversations that emerged in response to intense media coverage of the problems confronting the communities of the Y-K Delta. In the 1980s, the Anchorage Daily News published a Pulitzer Prize-winning series called “A People in Peril,” which described a burgeoning crisis of suicide and substance use in Alaska’s Bush villages. “The Alaska Federation of Natives came out after that and said, ‘yes, that’s a reality, but that’s not who we are,’” says Rasmus.