World Indigenous Suicide Prevention Conference
Reprint from Buffalo News | By Scott Scanlon | Jul 22, 2024
Pictured above: WISPC Committee Members L-R Corbett Seneca, Councillor Arlene Bova, Elissa Parker, Natalie Stahlman
Presley Redeye has seen a lot of tragedy in his 18 years with the Seneca Nation Fire Department.
Medical emergencies. Serious motor vehicle crashes. Drug overdoses.
Those rescue calls sometimes end in death, but another kind of call often leaves a more lasting impact: suicides.
Redeye recently recalled the aftermath of a domestic dispute several years ago that ended in the kitchen of a home on Seneca territory.
The husband had died a few minutes earlier from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
“Those things you don’t forget,” said the former fire chief, who continues to handle emergency calls on the Seneca Nation and has also served the last eight years on the Tribal Council.
“Suicide still is somewhat of a taboo subject here,” he said.
That needs to change, Redeye and other leaders say. They aren’t sure what the suicide rate may be for the Seneca people, but strongly suspect it reflects U.S. and international trends.
Elissa Parker helped the Seneca Nation bring the fourth World Indigenous Suicide Prevention Conference to Niagara Falls. She lost two friends and a classmate to suicide while in her teens.
Native Americans and Pacific Islanders have the highest suicide rates in the world.
It is why the Senecas have worked so hard to bring the fourth World Indigenous Suicide Prevention Conference to Niagara Falls this week.
More than 800 Indigenous people, and allies who support them, will come together to better understand the causes of these losses, as well as strategies to support those at risk and who grieve for lost loved ones.
Conference organizers aim to address ways to cut through the shame, stigma and cultural challenges, as well as share ideas with openness, understanding and a will to advance more effective ways to save lives.
“Westernized medicine and approaches, they don’t work for us anymore,” Redeye said. “Suicide rates continue to rise, and they’re astonishing, and what we have to do is figure out why.”
Troubling numbers: Suicide death rates 2011 to 2021
The U.S. suicide rate climbed 33% from 1999 to 2019.
Indigenous people had highest rate by race. It soared 139% for American and Alaska Native women and 71% for men, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Age-adjusted suicide rates among American Indian or Alaska Native people in 2021, the latest year for which data is available, was 28.1 per 100,000 population, a 26% jump from 2018, and the greatest percentage change of any race for that period, according to a CDC report.
Age-adjusted rates also jumped significantly among Blacks – from 7.3 to 8.7; a 19.2% increase – and Hispanics, from 7.4 to 7.9; a 6.8% increase.
Non-Hispanic whites showed a 3.9% decline, from 18.1 to 17.4 per 100,000.
“Research indicates that suicide is preventable,” the report concludes, “through a comprehensive public health approach that relies on data to drive decision-making, multisectoral partnerships to expand reach, and implementation and evaluation of multiple culturally relevant prevention strategies.”
“Too many of our people, especially young people with so much light ahead of them, have fallen victim to darkness,” Seneca Nation President Rickey Armstrong Sr. said. “Too many families and communities have been forever scarred by unexpected and unexplained loss. We want to join our Indigenous brothers and sisters from across the United States and around the globe to help each other heal and to find solutions to prevent further tragedies.”
Traditional practices will help Indigenous people heal from centuries of forced assimilation and intergenerational trauma, says Nicole “Nicky” Thompson, a Seneca spiritual leader who works both on and off the Allegany and Cattaraugus territories.
The challenges
There is no word or phrase for “suicide” in Seneca and many other Native languages.
That begins to explain the way many Indigenous people react to related attempts and deaths, said Arlene Bova, a tribal councilor who co-chairs the latest conference with Redeye.
Native tradition frowns on autopsies, which can lead to incomplete data on suicides as a cause of death in Indigenous communities, the two said.
Data sovereignty – the belief that health, population and other information gathered to address community needs could be misused – clouds the true extent of the damage.
So, too, Redeye said, does “white coat syndrome,” a mistrust of the medical community borne by many racial and religious minorities who have endured centuries of institutional bias.
Seneca healing circle to focus on generations of boarding school trauma
J.C. Seneca, owner of Native Pride Travel Plaza in Irving, will host a health and healing expo Saturday, which starts with a talking/healing circle to explore healthy ways to address addiction, mental illness and race-based intergenerational trauma.
During the last century, Native life has transformed from the Longhouse, where family generations lived together, to “HUD boxes,” where they became separated from their traditional support systems, Bova said.
Social isolation grew as a result, intensified during the Internet Age and hit a critical stage during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Drug abuse, violence and mental illness – piled atop generational trauma that has long burdened Native communities – helped set the stage for the growing suicide crisis, she said.
The latest conference aims to build on joint work that started in 2016 in Rotorua, New Zealand, and continued two years later in Perth, Australia. The last conference operated virtually in 2022 from the Canadian city of Winnipeg, Manitoba, two years later than planned because of the pandemic, said Nicole “Nicky” Thompson, who lives on the Seneca Allegany Territory and has been on the conference board for all four events.
The majority of conference attendees have come from those four countries and have been affected in some way by suicide, said Thompson, an Indigenous spiritual leader.
“The thing that we have in common, oddly enough, is British colonization,” she said.
That has included population removal from traditional lands – as recently as the 1960s to make way for the Kinzua Dam in northwestern Pennsylvania and New York Power Project in Lewiston – and forced assimilation in boarding schools, which didn’t all close until the mid-1990s.
“What’s happening through this conference is the sharing of knowledge as we reclaim the ancestral knowledge that’s in our DNA,” Thompson said. “Waking it up to those teachings is what’s going to save us.”
Elissa Parker wears an Indigenous-made skirt sewn with the symbol of the Seneca Bear Clan depicted in a fabric of strawberries, which Parker said are considered medicine in her culture. She sees a holistic approach to life as critical to Indigenous well-being.
The personal toll
Elissa Parker, 31, lost two friends and a classmate to suicide during her time at Lake Shore and Silver Creek high schools, and in the months after she graduated in 2011. Her father has been mostly absent in her life, she said. Her mother and stepfather have done their best to help keep her on a good path.
Parker began to struggle with depression and anxiety at age 15.
A weekend retreat in 2016 at the Buffalo Native Resource Center reawakened Elissa Parker to her Native roots and toward healing from childhood and intergenerational trauma.
“I had thoughts about cutting myself and doing harm to myself a lot,” she said. “There were multiple times where I was feeling very hopeless. I feel like we don’t discuss when people feel like that, because we’re so ashamed of having to get that low to realize that we don’t actually want to die.”
Her journey toward healing started in 2016, during a weekend retreat at the Buffalo Native Resource Center. By then, Parker said, she had also weathered domestic and sexual violence and recently landed a job as a Seneca marshal.
“I needed to heal my traumas and the things that I had been through before I brought it to the job,” she said, “because there were things that I knew I was going to witness that I wanted to be able to handle emotionally.”
An awakening involved a return to traditional values that included exercise, healthier eating and a more spiritual approach toward understanding life.
“Something that we’ve talked a lot about within Haudenosaunee culture is having a good mind,” Parker said, “and realizing that having a good mind means accepting decisions and accepting that you may make mistakes, but being able to see past them and know that good things are going to come. You just have to continue to work on it.”
Her culture’s Gano:nyok, or Thanksgiving Address, is among tools she uses to feel gratitude and part of a greater whole.
“I think it’s extremely important as Indigenous people that we remember who we were prior to colonization,” she said. “A very large part of our culture was honoring our ancestors and knowing that decisions we made here were going to continue the bloodline.”
“I’ve been able to learn about my Native identity. That’s something that I didn’t have growing up,” says Corbett Seneca, an organizer of this week’s World Indigenous Suicide Prevention Conference in Niagara Falls.
Corbett Seneca, another conference organizer, looks forward to sharing his lived experience.
“I have a Ph.D. in life,” he said.
Seneca was born in Buffalo and spent much of his first decade there. He smoked crack cocaine the first time at age 8, with a babysitter.
“I can remember a lot of sexual assaults,” he said. “There was a sex trafficking. We were in and out of domestic violence shelters in various parts of the country when I was a child.”
WISPC Committee member
At 11, his family moved to Talaqua, a city in Cherokee County, Oklahoma, in a Bible Belt state with which he was unfamiliar and began to understand that he was gay.
He made his first suicide attempt at age 16 as he struggled to find acceptance. Seneca and his family moved to Seneca territory in 2008. He weighed 600 pounds when he arrived and discovered Zumba at the Cattaraugus Territory community center.
He’s lost 200 pounds since.
“I’ve always been a dancer,” he said. “I’ve always been this eccentric character. And when I started becoming more comfortable with myself, and as soon as I came out to my mom, is when everything else kind of started to fall into place. And I started to have these conversations with her about what it was like growing up, and the things that I faced growing up. I started working on myself and I had to take accountability for what part I actually played.”
Now 34, Seneca has spent most of the last three years working in the nation’s Crime Victims Services Program. He recently took a job in the Seneca Visitors and Economic Management Office.
“I’ve been able to learn about my Native identity,” he said. “That’s something that I didn’t have growing up. I’m learning the language more. I’m learning our traditions and our culture. Whenever I hear somebody speak, I get really emotional, and I know that’s, like, my spirit just feeling safe…
“I get to create my life going forward,” he said, “so I take the good and the bad.”
Holistic gathering
The first conference in the U.S. will include more than 60 speakers, 30 panel discussions and five keynote programs from Tuesday to Thursday at Seneca Niagara Resort & Casino.
“Reclaiming Resiliency and Hope” is the theme.
It will focus on traditional practices that provide tools for wellness that emphasize prevention of unhealthy habits.
“As we’ve been traveling Indian country, one of the things I find interesting is wherever we go, we’re similar,” said Natalie Stahlman, a projects facilitator for the Seneca Tribal Council who has led conference logistics. “Same sense of humor, all have trauma. A lot of the approaches that are starting to be formed are based on not just the individual who’s suffering from suicide, but anything that’s going on with family based approaches.”
“Unfortunately,” Bova added, “we’ve had to learn some of this from dealing with the opioid crisis.”
Conference participants can start each morning with yoga or Zumba classes.
Activation rooms – for those who get overwhelmed and need to talk to someone trained in “safe talk” – will be available throughout the conference, Stahlman said.
A wellness room and exhibitor and artisan market also are part of the conference. Registration and other information can be found at TheWISPC.com.
Panel topics:
- Decolonising Public Health
- Storytelling Is Teaching; Storytelling is Healing
- Creating a Tribal Boarding School Toolkit for Healing
- Circle of Strength: Diversity, Inclusion and Fostering Resiliency
- Addressing Mental Health Care for Indigenous Military Veterans and their Families
- Supporting the Well-Being of the First Nations Mental Wellness Workforce
- The Medicine Wheel of Growth and Understanding
- Nothing is more cherished than our children
The conference is part of a larger effort the Senecas and other Indigenous nations in the Americas have undertaken during the last two decades to advocate for more federal resources to help strengthen health and well-being on their territories.
Funds from the Seneca Gaming Compact – which allows the nation to operate casinos in Buffalo, Niagara Falls and Salamanca – have helped support a diabetes center, a growing number of health services, an indoor lacrosse and wellness facility, and food is medicine garden.
The efforts matter among a people who also struggle with higher rates of chronic conditions that endanger their health and stem from the same forces that raise their suicide risk, conference organizers said.
It is why the Senecas were among nations several weeks ago to advocate before Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to recognize and reimburse Indigenous holistic health efforts.
“Western medicine isn’t working for us,” Stahlman said, “and we’re noticing that traditional ways are.”
If you or someone you know may be experiencing a mental health crisis, contact the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline by dialing or texting “988.” To reach the Native and Strong Lifeline, call “988” and press 4.
