Native American teens and 20-somethings kill themselves at a rate least 3.5 times higher than other population groups in this country, according to the Indian Health Service (IHS). Tribes have declared states of emergency, and the federal government gave nearly half of a recent round of major suicide-prevention grants to tribal organizations. For four stories written in 2013, I spoke to Native people working on the issue on reservations around the country, reported on a meeting of policymakers in Washington, D.C, sponsored by the Center for Native American Youth, and covered the publication of groundbreaking legal research on the school-to-prison pipeline on Montana reservations and its connection to suicide and other negative outcomes for Native children.
As suicide has quietly moved to the nation’s front burner, the silence on reservations surrounding suicide is broken, and Native youth are making life-saving connections—to peers, family, community and culture. One intriguing discovery I made was that, for Native people, traditional culture is one of the most powerful suicide preventatives. After more than a century of forced assimilation, in notoriously violent boarding schools and via out-adoption of about one-third of Indian kids by the mid-20th century, American Indians are finally being not just allowed, but encouraged, to practice their spiritualities, speak their languages and revive their traditional relationships. Some tribes have already seen inroads in their suicide rates, which, if left unchecked, would have imperiled the very existence of their communities. The Fund for Investigative Journalism and the George Polk Center for Investigative Reporting supported aspects of the project, as did the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School of Journalism, in the form of a National Health Journalism Fellowship.