Using Alaska Native Culture to Prevent Suicide

• Prize
  Honorable Mention
• Photographer
  Brandon Kapelow, United States
• Studio
  NPR

Alaska’s Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta - where village communities are facing overlapping threats from climate change, substance abuse and domestic violence - is home to the highest rates of suicide in the U.S. Indigenous researchers have taken a unique approach to this issue by studying a Yup’ik culturally-based model to suicide prevention in Alaska Native villages that focuses on community strengths, rather than risks alone. Their initial data were so promising that the Department of Defense recently awarded them a multi-million dollar grant to try and replicate their study on remote military bases.