Stripped of their culture, their way of life, and even their very identity, for many Alaskan natives suicide represents a sweet release from constant emotional pain.

The following is an excerpt from testimony provided by Evon Peter a former Neetsaii Gwich’in chief, and submitted to the U.S. Senate Committee on Indian Affairs, which I found over at the Alaska Dispatch.

This is only an excerpt and I strongly urge you to read the rest by clicking the link.

I should also warn you that this may be difficult for some to read this early in the day, and I apologize ahead of time for your emotional discomfort. However I believe that if you truly want to understand the complicated situation facing the Native people of Alaska that you must hear what Chief Peter bravely shared with the Senate.

Within my culture, we speak from personal experience because that is the story we know best. Our stories shape who we are and reflect the learnings we have garnered about life. They also enable us to identify our relationships to one another. Additionally, in order to fully address the complexity of suicide in Alaska Native communities, time must be taken to briefly detail a history of colonization. This history may not initially seem relevant, yet is inextricably connected to the breakdown of the cultural, political, spiritual, and social fabric that sustained Alaska Native peoples for thousands of years prior to western colonization. 

Research has shown that colonization is one of the single largest factors driving the abnormally high suicide rates within an Indigenous population.1 Therefore, in order to fully engage in the battle against suicide in Alaska Native communities it is crucial to ask a couple questions: Just what is colonization? And how has the colonization of Alaska impacted Alaska Native populations historically and in the current time? I will attempt to answer parts of these questions through sharing with you part of my story, how I am here before you today. 

I was born to a Gwich’in and Koyukon mother and a Jewish father. I lost my father to divorce when I was five and I did not see him again before he died, for these reasons I was raised as a Gwich’in person from my earliest memories. But my story begins further back; my grandmother was adopted at a young age after losing her parents to disease -- one of several diseases that had caused a great number of deaths among Alaska Native people between 1870 and 1950. As a child, following the adoption, my grandmother was sexually abused by men in her new community, and she did not realize until adulthood that this was not a normal part of what childhood was supposed to be. This later weighed heavily on her relationship with my grandfather and their ability to raise my aunts, uncles, and mother in a secure and openly loving way. 

Like many Alaska Native people of my grandmother and mother’s generation, my mother endured the emotional, psychological, spiritual, cultural, and physical duress of a rapid transition from a traditional way of life on the land to the 21st-century “city life.” Federal policy and practices, implemented through schools and some churches, enforced the assimilation of Native peoples through the direct and indirect eradication of rights, language, culture, and philosophy. My mother’s generation was born into a world that immediately told her, both in popular culture and in government policies, that she must change. 

The policies and practices of colonization brought with them the social illnesses of sexual abuse, alcoholism, and neglect, which can be passed from one generation to the next. This is often referred to as intergenerational trauma, which equates to an experience of post-traumatic stress disorder among many Alaska Native people. In many ways, my mother’s generation was born with the scars of assaults carried out in previous generations of our ancestry as the colonizing culture attempted the eradication of who we are and the undermining of our control over our destiny as a people. 

These multiple layers of stress and pain associated with generations of assault, abuse, and loss are all too easily numbed with alcohol and drugs. Yet drugs and alcohol do not heal the pains, they amplify it. Alaska Native communities have seen an epidemic of drug and alcohol abuse, which has resulted in continuations of the cycles of social illness and suicides. My family has not been immune to this; my story, until recently, was not an exception to this cycle.

As I stated before there is much, much more and if you have been moved by what you read so far, I urge you to continue reading over at Alaska Dispatch.

Now as many of you may, or may not, know I have written about the shameful history of how the Alaskan natives were treated before, as well as the racism that many of them face on the streets of Anchorage today.

As a Caucasian living in Alaska, this topic brings me great shame, and through my job I have found myself dealing with the fallout that has resulted from this complete lack of respect for our indigenous people more times than I can count.

Chief Peter is absolutely correct in identifying the forced assimilation of the native people as the key factor in understanding why they are taking their lives in such overwhelming numbers today.

This started with the missionaries who came to Alaska to teach the "savages" the loving message of Jesus Christ, and in so doing gave the children in their care Biblical names because their native names felt pagan and wrong to the ears of the nuns and missionaries who ran the schools.

Later these schools would be replaced with more secular schools, but the abuse continued.

When American style schools were started in Alaskan communities, the idea was to wipe out Native culture - to undermine connections with spiritual worlds, lands and waters, and to break the feelings of individuals and groups that are the essence of a culture. The agenda was to "civilize the Natives" and to make them more like the white settlers. Any beliefs that Natives had that involved understanding the world differently, or defining their place in the world as separate and apart from the white settlers was not allowed in school. English only language policies were strictly enforced, and punished anyone speaking in a Native language. Those policies erased Native languages from schools and from some communities as well. Schools disparaged Native language, food, dress and customs. At the same time the curriculum of the schools and the teachers taught students to view the world from a Western point of view. Policies were aimed at the hearts of students. Feelings of inferiority and shame were associated with things Native. Good grades and rewards were associated with things Western. This was a tough message delivered by a powerful system. 

I don't know how anybody can read that last paragraph and not feel incredible pain for the way these amazing human beings  were treated. We owe the indigenous people of my state more than we can ever repay, and I believe the suggestion that Evon Peter made at the end of his written testimony was more than fair.

I would like to suggest that an equal, if not greater, scale of investment that was put into eradicating our cultures and assimilating Alaska Native peoples into western ways be invested into healing, wellness, and leadership development to help us recover.

Considering how wealthy the state of Alaska has become off of the oil retrieved from the land these proud people once called home, and how inhumane they were treated in the not too distant past, don't you think we owe them at least this much?