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What is it like to grow up Yup’ik and come of age today in a traditional hunting-gathering community setting located in a remote region of Alaska? Current research describes a contemporary experience often laden with trauma and crisis. Youth in Yup’ik communities today face threats to their very survival as they encounter, early on, things that their ancestors never faced—including alcohol-related deaths, violence in many forms, and high rates of suicide among their young peers. Yet all is not despair for the youth growing up in these remote indigenous communities. Many youth grow-up to become skilled hunters, strong leaders, and able parents. This paper reports findings from the Alaskan Yup’ik site of the Circumpolar Indigenous Pathways to Adulthood (CIPA) study. The goal of this study is to identify strengths and resilience in youth living in a Yup’ik community in southwest Alaska. Interviews were conducted with 25 youth age 11–18, currently residing in a southwest Alaska community. Qualitative analysis revealed important connections between local stressors, community-level protective resources, and youth-driven, solution-focused strategies for overcoming hardship and learning the “ways how to live.” Findings from this study contribute critical information on indigenous youth protection and resilience, including community and cultural resilience processes beyond the individual level, and enhance our understanding of the types of resources that can lead to improved outcomes for Alaska Native youth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research has established connection between indigenous culture—often described in terms of cultural identity, enculturation, and participation in traditional activities—and resilience, the process by which people overcome acute and ongoing challenges. Despite correlations between culture and resilience, research has seldom described the ways these concepts are linked in indigenous people’s narratives. Furthermore, little attention has been paid to the affect of historical trauma on different generations’ understanding and deployment of “culture” in the context of hardship. This project, conducted in the summer of 2008 in an indigenous Arctic community, focuses on narratives from three generations who have experienced different degrees of cultural suppression in their lifetimes. From this starting point, the study explores how individuals make meaning and take strength from particular notions of culture, and illuminates the ways each generation accesses and deploys their cultural understandings in the face of hardship. By identifying the similarities and differences in both the challenges and sources of strength for each generation, the paper highlights how understandings of culture are shaped by historical experiences and modified through time. The differing ways that culture fosters strength, purpose, and fortitude (or does not) in indigenous young people’s, adults’ and Elders’ life stories provide clues for enhancing indigenous youth resilience. Findings suggest that “culture” can galvanize Inupiaq people’s sense of identity, feeling of commitment, and purpose, all of which are protective. However, young people need support in developing particular ideas around cultural identity and group membership that can contribute to resilience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Indigenous circumpolar youth are experiencing challenges of growing up in a context much different from that of their parents and their grandparents due to rapid and imposed social change. Our study is interested in community resilience: the meaning systems, resources, and relationships that structure how youth go about overcoming difficulties. The research reflects an understanding that social and cultural ecologies influence people’s available and meaningful options. The in-depth, qualitative study of 20 youth from the same Arctic community shows Inupiat (Alaska Native) youth are navigating challenges. Findings from this research suggest that Inupiat youth reflect more flexible patterns of resilience when they are culturally grounded. This cultural foundation involves kinship networks that mediate young people’s access to cultural and material assets. Our participants emphasized the importance of taking care of others and “giving back to the community.” Being “in the country” linked youth to traditional ontology that profoundly shifted how youth felt in relation to themselves, to others, and the world. The vast majority of participants’ “fulfillment narratives” centered on doing subsistence and/or cultural activities. In relation to this, young people were more likely to demonstrate versatility in their resilience strategies when deploying coherent self-narratives that reflected novel yet culturally resonant styles. Young women were more likely to demonstrate this by reconfiguring notions of culture and gender identity in ways that helped them meet challenges in their lives. Lastly, generational differences in understandings signal particular ways that young people’s historical and political positioning influences their access to cultural resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]