“Ensure that the voices of tribal communities are at the various decision-making tables so that we can promote suicide prevention, intervention and post-intervention efforts.”
“The cultural people have knowledge and are the knowledge-keeper of our communities. And those knowledge-keepers need to be involved in your project.”
“In order to bring suicide prevention awareness and crisis services into focus within tribal nations and communities, suicide must be addressed as a public health concern that affects everyone across the US and worldwide.”
“There’s a lot of cultural teaching around belonging, identity, connection, and circles, that we can incorporate into our suicide prevention programming.”
“Centering community and culture at the heart of interventions that we're doing is really important, because that can support resistance. It can give young people language to better explain what they're experiencing, can give both families, individuals within them, and tribal communities more control over their futures”
“All tribes are different. We share our thoughts, what has worked. Some have not worked, but we have the ability, leadership throughout the country and tribal communities have the ability to look at how these resources can help our people.”
“We need to be promoting social connectedness, and having counseling that could be using the best of modern methods, but also our traditional healers have training in culturally based counseling methodologies that need to be incorporated to ensure that we have an equitable approach.”
“We need to acknowledge that trauma is real, that intergenerational trauma is in the blood. It is blood memory of our people and we need to understand that trauma-informed ways to treat indigenous people.”
“We know that there is stigma related to suicide. That was the same when we first started working on the suicide prevention efforts within our own community.”
“People in Indigenous communities really want more research to be led and conducted by Indigenous people themselves.”
“Bring forth culturally informed models of care that are tailored to each individual indigenous community, because we’re so diverse in our beliefs, our practices, in our stories, and in our healing interventions.”
“Our people need to be in leadership, whether it’s in the context of research, education, teaching, any interventions and preventions”
“We do have a gold standard for improving the quality of the data that we can use, by creating data linkages that crosslink the vital statistics data. With these linkages we can build a much better sense of where we have health equity concerns.”
“Indigenous peoples need de-colonized, indigenized dis-aggregated data for decision-making that shifts the narrative from deficits and deficiencies to wellbeing research. At the same time, tribes are enacting relational responsibilities for their data, governing their data in ways that align with their values and interests.”
“[Researchers should] gain awareness of past research projects in communities and work with the community to find out how to treat collected data and specimens. Each community has stories of research that has happened in their community, some of which went well and some of which are not perceived as going well.”
“We identify an intervention first and then get tribal leaders’ approval to culturally adapt the intervention to ensure that it is, in fact, in alignment in some fundamental way with the community values and priorities.”
1 This page is a factual summary of what occurred at the workshop. Statements, recommendations, and opinions expressed are those of individual presenters and participants. These views are not necessarily endorsed or verified by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, and they should not be construed as reflecting any group consensus.
