Since the 1950s, the primary approach to suicide prevention in the United States has been designed to identify and mitigate risk factors like depression or drug and alcohol use.
“I think traditionally things have been more focused on a reactive approach, and that’s waiting for somebody to already be in crisis before intervening because it’s most clear and easy to recognize them,” said Holly Wilcox, a national suicide prevention researcher and professor at Johns Hopkins University.
Wilcox has been working in the field of suicide prevention since the early 1990s. “Around that time, Indigenous and Native American communities for the first time were seeing problems in clusters of suicides and young people dying by suicide,” she said. “And it became apparent that this is an issue that we couldn't really avoid.”
This trend was reflected in rural Alaska, where suicide rates for young Alaska Native men had reached roughly 10 times the national average.
In 1988, the Anchorage Daily News published a Pulitzer Prize-winning series called “A People in Peril,” which detailed the compounding challenges of alcohol and suicide in Alaska Native villages.
Stacy Rasmus, the director of the Center for Alaska Native Health Research (CANHR), located at the University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF), was a graduate student at the time.“ The Alaska Federation of Natives came out a year or two after that [series] and said, ‘Yes that’s a reality, but that’s not who we are,'” Rasmus said.
As suicide rates continued to rise, a growing chorus of voices across the United States started to call for a new paradigm in suicide prevention. In the wake of the “People in Peril” series, a group of leaders from the lower Yukon village of Alakanuk approached CANHR to partner on an action plan that focused on the strengths of the local Yup’ik culture, rather than risks alone.
Rasmus – who is Indigenous – said that those articles failed to capture the positives that also exist in village communities.
"We need our young people to know that they're not vanishing, they're not all drowning in 'a river of booze'. That was literally the title of one of the 'People in Peril' articles," Rasmus said. "Actually, the large majority of Alaska Native people are living their ancestral ways of life. Indigenous people are here and have these strengths."
In direct response to the series’ title, researchers and village leaders called their new program “The People Awakening Project.” They began with a focus on alcohol use, but in the years that followed, Rasmus and her colleagues began using what they had learned to develop a new and more ambitious prevention program that more directly addressed suicide.
They called it Qungasvik, a Yup’ik word meaning “toolkit.”
“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,” said Rasmus. “And so the solution to suicide needs to be at the community level.”
As a former village clinician, Rasmus saw firsthand the need for a different approach. “We were, of course, identifying that what’s really healing, what’s really preventative is taking young people out on the land,” she said.
Since its beginnings in 2012, Qungasvik has used cultural activities to teach youth in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta survival skills, both physically and emotionally.
“I lost four friends to suicide,” said Jerome Nukusuk, a teenager in the coastal village of Hooper Bay who participated in the program. “When my closest friend passed in 2020, I didn’t eat for three days and I didn’t go to school for two weeks.”
Nukusuk was only 13 at the time. When he saw staff from UAF recruiting for Qungasvik at school, he signed up. “It really opened my eyes to a lot of opportunities,” he said. “That really helped me a lot through my suicide problems, just keeping my hands busy.”
During activities, students practice Yup’ik survival skills and discuss the related community values. Researchers at UAF work with village Elders and leadership to design each aspect of the program.
![Simeon John, 66, speaks about Qungasvik with a group of students at the Lower Kuskokwim Dance Festival in Tununak, Alaska. “I don’t like to think of it as a program. A program is something that has an ending,” he explains. “I want to say Yuuyaraq [a Yup’ik way of life].”](https://npr.brightspotcdn.com/dims4/default/76b7f94/2147483647/strip/true/crop/3000x2400+0+0/resize/840x672!/format/webp/quality/90/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fnpr-brightspot.s3.amazonaws.com%2F84%2Fb7%2F7641272a4be7811e6a30b76e8a1c%2Fkyuk-v1-31.jpg)
One of those leaders is Simeon John. “Our Elders tell us that nature is our medicine,” John said. He’s one of the local program coordinators with CANHR based in Toksook Bay. “We’re spiritually connected to everything – the land, air, water, the plants. When you’re out berry picking or hunting, you can let go of what’s bothering you.”
Participants like Nukusuk found that spending time on the tundra helped. “I feel at peace,” he said. “You know, just hearing a lot of birds and enjoying nature.”
While the Qungasvik program has seen success from its roots in Yup’ik culture, suicide rates in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta have remained high and the program still faces obstacles. In the next part of this series, we’ll explore how the team has adapted to meet these challenges and worked to secure a more sustainable future for the program.
If you or someone you know may be considering suicide or is in crisis, call or text 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.
This story is part of a series from KYUK focused on community-based suicide prevention. Find the rest of the series here. Support for this reporting was provided by Stanford University’s Bill Lane Center for the American West.