Suicide is a pressing issue for many Indigenous peoples in North America. There is significant mental health research on this topic. However, community authorities and scientific studies have questioned the relevance of this literature. To examine questions of relevance, we conducted a systematic review of how Indigeneity and suicide have been represented in mental health publications on suicide among American Indians and Alaska Natives (AIAN). PsycINFO, Ovid Medline, CINAHL, ERIC, Bibliography of Native North Americans, Sociological Abstracts, and Academic Search Premier were searched for scientific articles published between 2010 and June 5, 2020 that focused on AIAN suicide. The search yielded 937 citations; 240 full text articles were screened, and 72 articles were included in this review. Findings indicate self identification was the most common indicator of research participants’ Indigeneity, and that Indigeneity was typically treated as a census-based ethnoracial minority group or a cultural group. Few publications represented Indigeneity as political. Suicide was primarily framed as a product of individual level factors (e.g., mental illness), however, social factors were frequently mentioned (e.g., poverty). History was rarely treated as relevant to understanding AIAN suicide today. Recommendations for tribal leaders evaluating this literature and future research will be offered.

Native Americans have dealt with complex aspects of cultural identity and forced assimilation, trauma, and impacts on well being for generations. Yet there is a lack of culturally competent therapeutic care for Native Americans, a gap fellow Indigenous scholars are also working to address with work like the Indigenous American Psychological Paradigm (Blume, 2022). My goal for this study was to provide these Indigenous women and men the opportunity to share their stories and to learn how their experiences and proximity to the Missing & Murdered Indigenous Women crisis, impacts of invisibility and acculturation, and propensity for community kinship have affected their cultural identity and well being. This study was conducted to record this valuable information and to contribute to better informed interventions and mental health services for Native Americans that will resonate on a deeper cultural level. Twenty three Indigenous individuals were interviewed from 13 tribes including Euchee, Choctaw, Lakota, and Standing Rock Sioux. Using Grounded Theory thematic analysis, we identified the following themes: mental health & wellness, cultural identity, understanding of MMIW and its history, distrust of the police, and community. Completed thematic analysis including theme frequencies, further discussion of each theme, and illustrative quotes will be presented.

According to Dr. Dolores Bigfoot (2022), American Indian/Alaska Native (AI/AN) families are honor-based and have origins in societies grounded in respect. In contrast, research based in western paradigms generally focuses on the deficits in the AI/AN population. Until recently, research in AI/AN communities has been conducted “on” the Native American population and a majority of the research is not in alignment with holistic AI/AN traditional beliefs, collectivistic orientation, and ecopsychological values. Contemporarily, as more AI/AN scholars are emerging and conducting research through a significantly disparate lens, these Native researchers are capitalizing on the strengths of Pueblos, tribes, and nations, refuting the stereotypes, deficits, and generally negative results that have existed in dominant society research banks for centuries. “Not about Us without Us,” an excerpt of a title in a book authored by the presenters, addresses the transformation of the discipline of psychology into relevant, real world understanding and applications that provide a preview of child health and well-being from an Indigenous feminist perspective.

As scholars begin to recognize the historical, political, and cultural nature of research and explore partnership-based approaches to support this recognition, there remains a persistent need to build infrastructure to support this work. As an example, across a range of tribal and community research partnerships, our Institutional Review Board (IRB) heavily shapes what is possible across collaborative research approaches and with community partners. We will invite attendees to consider how the IRB can serve as a partner in conducting ethical research with community partners. Simply, if we take the value of centering the needs of our community partners seriously, then we must also take seriously the infrastructures (e.g., IRB) that hold us accountable to that. Thus, as a team of University researchers and IRB staff, we share our story of our own journey navigating the nuances and tensions of building infrastructure to support ethical research and how this journey led us to collaboratively develop a free, publicly available research ethics training, Integrity in Partnership Advancement, to support community partnerships. With this invitation to attendees, we propose a paradigm shift in response to ethical questions such as, “do we need IRB?”, “what is research?”, and “who is a researcher?”.