$1.4 million project funds suicide prevention efforts
December 19, 2011
Originally posted by Diana Campbell
The Center for Alaska Native Health Research at the University of Alaska Fairbanks
has received $1.4 million to support rural Southwestern Alaska Yup’ik communities
in their suicide and substance abuse prevention efforts.
The award will supplement a CANHR research program exploring how Alaska Native people
are using ancestral knowledge and cultural traditions to promote well-being in young
people and their families.
“It’s been working for thousands of years,” said Ray Oney, acting city manager for
the City of Alakanuk, referring to traditional Yup’ik ways. “People would come together
and work it out. We’re using that method in keeping our community members in tune
with one another.”
Alakanuk, a Yup’ik community on the Yukon River, was one of two villages that collaborated
with CANHR to design their own prevention program, grounded in the idea that communities
can solve their own problems using their indigenous heritage. This approach was developed
as part of CANHR research funded by the National Institute of Minority Health and
Health Disparities. It has become a model for other community prevention efforts.
Alakanuk has recently celebrated four years since the last suicide, Oney said. “It’s
time to go out and teach other villages.”
The award will not directly support research, but will instead be used to hire additional
rural project staff, to develop a training center to bring the project to new communities
and to sustain and expand prevention project activities over the next three years,
according to Stacy Rasmus, the project’s co-principal investigator and an assistant
research professor at UAF’s Institute of Arctic Biology.
The program is based on the qasgiq, or the men’s house, which was a place for Yup’ik
people to gather for educational, spiritual and entertainment purposes, said Billy
Charles, the prevention trial research coordinator and co-investigator for the CANHR
project. Using the concept of qasgiq, people come together, discuss an issue and decide
which traditional activities, such as ice safety, seal hunting or berry picking, to
use to teach Yup’ik values.
“It’s better than sitting and listening to a lecture,” Charles said. “What a person
gets out of a story becomes their own.”
The Yukon-Kuskokwim Health Corporation received the funding from the state of Alaska
and passed the funds through to UAF for the three-year project.
“The state has become another resource for these local efforts,” Rasmus said. “It’s
about reviving culture and tradition in the ways that used to keep families and children
safe and healthy.”
ADDITIONAL CONTACTS: Billy Charles, prevention trial research coordinator, 907-949-6222 or bacydfda@yahoo.com; Stacy Rasmus, assistant research professor, 907-474-7352 or smrasmus@alaska.edu; Jim Allen, CANHR associate director, 474-6132 or jrallen@alaska.edu
ON THE WEB:Center for Alaska Native Health Research
DC/12-19-11/126-12