Contemporary dynamics of rapid social change have dramatically affected the political, cultural, and economic systems of circumpolar Indigenous people. In line with three of the International Polar Year (IPY) priority areas, this project intends to (1) increase international collaboration between circumpolar institutions, (2) leave a legacy of infrastructure and data, and (3) increase Indigenous capacity for research and action. The Pathways study is a comparative, collaborative, and participatory circumpolar research project. Its aims are to explore responses to rapid social transition through the life experiences of circumpolar youth. The proposed study will examine 80 youth life history narratives. These narratives will come from an Alaska Inupiat, Alaska Yup?ik, Canadian Inuit, and Siberian Eveny community. In addition, the research team is developing collaborations using additional funding sources to examine the narratives of an additional 40 youth from a Norwegian Samì and Greenlandic community. In this study, the team intends to identify shared and divergent stressors and patterns of resilience in the transition to adulthood across these different circumpolar settings. Youth resilience is defined as the ability to overcome acute and on-going difficulties in the pathway to adulthood. The investigators seek to identify cultural strategies and resources that characterize resiliency across two age groups, ages 11-14 and 15-18, and across gender.
The impact of a shared colonial history and contemporary social suffering among indigenous communities in the Arctic has been extensively documented through decades of Arctic social science research. The issue of healthy adaptation and resilience among Indigenous youth has not been adequately considered, leaving developmental trajectories of healthy adaptation and resilience relatively unexplored. This research aims to build on Indigenous categories to describe the social experiences and resources shaping culturally patterned resilience strategies of young people responding to challenges distinct from those of their parents and grandparents. This will provide insights into the family, community, and cultural contexts that support healthy youth development, and identify key ingredients to successful prevention and intervention health strategies for Indigenous young people. Study across six circumpolar communities will also provide unprecedented insights into the effect of diverse social, political, cultural, and economic systems on youth development, and inform effective social policy for circumpolar youth.
This project builds on and sustains long-term participatory research relationships between local community institutions, community co-researchers, and a multidisciplinary team of international university researchers. Indigenous community co-researcher involvement and direction is emphasized throughout all phases of this project, whose aims respond to strong local interest in youth resilience and wellbeing. Development of interview schedules, data collection procedures, and the analysis will be in collaboration with Local Steering Committees (LSC) to ensure their cultural grounding. A representative from each LSC will be actively involved in the cross-site work through membership in an international Circumpolar Steering Committee. Dissemination with communities and regional Indigenous organizations will contribute to a developing network of circumpolar communities engaged in suicide prevention, promotion of collective wellbeing, and development of a circumpolar Indigenous identity. The study will also establish tracking procedures, participatory research infrastructure, and international circumpolar collaboration for future longitudinal, prospective study of safe passage into adulthood.
Negotiating Pathways to Adulthood: Social Change and Indigenous Culture in Five Circumpolar Communities Michael J. Kral, PhD University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign This has been an interdisciplinary, international, participatory study in five circumpolar Indigenous communities. Researchers from the Universities of Alaska Fairbanks, Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Massachusetts Amherst, Cambridge, Oslo, and Sami University collaborated with Indigenous community members in these five communities. Each community organized a local Steering Committee, which included youth and elders, who were part of the research team and helped organize local awareness of the study, data collection, interpretation, co-authorship of final papers, and local dissemination. We all met together at the University of Cambridge in 2010 to collaboratively design the study, form the primary research questions, and to agree on methodology. Twenty youth from each community would be interviewed. We met again in 2012 to finalize the study at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC. We have written seven papers for a special issue of the journal Transcultural Psychiatry, and most papers are in press at the time of this writing. My research site was the community of Igloolik, Nunavut, Canada, so I will write about what we did there and what we found. I have been conducting research with Inuit in Nunavut since 1994, including Inuit in Igloolik. The primary goal of the study was to learn about the stressors that youth experience, but primarily the ways they came through those stressors; what worked for them, what were their sources of resilience. We had four interviewers, two younger Inuit from the Steering Committee, plus a Chinese graduate student and Michael Kral. We interviewed 21 youth between the ages of 13-19. Colonialism especially since the 1950s and 1960s has significantly effected Inuit lives. Inuit were moved from their family land camps to crowded settlements run by White government workers, children were removed and placed in residential/boarding or day schools, and a wage economy was begun but with few jobs poverty was created. The most negative effect of this has been on Inuit relationships, primarily family relationships. An intergenerational segregation began for a family-based culture where bonds across generations were central. Parenting has changed, and many parents and children now avoid each other. A suicide epidemic began in the 1980s among youth and continues. This is in spite of Inuit of Nunavut having made a major land claim in 1993 and establishing a political Inuit territory of Canada in 1999. We found in this study that some youth were doing very well, while others were not. School was identified by youth as the most significant stressor in their lives. The stresses included bullying, poor attendance, boredom, and disliking teachers. School attendance is a problem in the community, especially the high school. Fewer than 25% of youth graduate from high school. Other stressors the youth spoke of were domestic violence and substance abuse. When asked about resilience, how youth made it through the stressors, the primary resilience strategy was talking to someone. This was primarily a friend, and then talking with parents. Spending time with family was also important. Youth also reported that participating in cultural activities helped them, such as camping with their family, hunting for the boys, often with their fathers or grandfathers, and being on the land, usually with family. In other research I have conducted we have found that family is the primary factor in Inuit well-being. Talking with family members and spending time with them, or just talking with other Inuit, is also important. Cultural activities also accounted for the experience of well-being. The results of this study confirm this earlier research, showing how important family and communication/talking is, and how important Inuit culture is for well-being and resilience. We have been discussing with the Steering Committee plans to develop activities for parents and their children in the community, to try to bring them closer together. We found that most of the youth avoided their parents, even though they indicated how important their parents were to them. A Community Wellness Committee in Igloolik, who we have been speaking with, is also planning on putting together programs for parents and their children. We thus see that some community action will develop from our findings that will benefit the community. This study is an example of community-based participatory action research, a methodology that is growing in importance in fields such as community psychology, public health, social work, nursing, and applied anthropology. When communities are directly involved in research, when the research is also theirs, outcomes of these studies are being reported as being successful.
