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Youth suicide is a significant health disparity in circumpolar indigenous communities, with devastating impacts at individual, family, and community levels. This study draws on structured interviews and ethnographic work with health professionals in the Alaskan Arctic to examine the meanings assigned to Alaska Native youth suicide, as well as the health systems that shape clinicians' practices of care. By defining suicide as psychogenic on the one hand, and as an index of social suffering on the other, its solutions are brought into focus and circumscribed in particular and patterned ways. We contrast psychiatric and social explanatory models, bureaucratic and relational forms of care, and biomedical and biosocial models for care delivery. Within the broader context of global mental health, this study suggests steps for linking caregiving to the health and social equity agenda of social medicine and for operationalizing commitments to health as a human right., Competing Interests: Competing interests: None declared., (Copyright © 2020 Trout and Wexler.)

The Arctic Council, a collaborative forum among governments and Arctic communities, has highlighted the problem of suicide and potential solutions. The mental health initiative during the United States chairmanship, Reducing the Incidence of Suicide in Indigenous Groups: Strengths United Through Networks (RISING SUN), used a Delphi methodology complemented by face-to-face stakeholder discussions to identify outcomes to evaluate suicide prevention interventions. RISING SUN underscored that multilevel suicide prevention initiatives require mobilizing resources and enacting policies that promote the capacity for wellness, for example, by reducing adverse childhood experiences, increasing social equity, and mitigating the effects of colonization and poverty.

Indigenous communities across the Alaskan Arctic have experienced profound revisions of livelihood, culture, and autonomy over the past century of colonization, creating radical discontinuities between the lives of young people and those of their parents and Elders. The disrupted processes of identity development, access to livelihoods, and cross-generational mentorship associated with colonialism have created complex challenges for youth as they envision and enact viable paths forward in the context of a rapidly changing Arctic home. In this study, we consider the meanings associated with different constructions of culture and selfhood, and the ways in which these identity narratives position Inupiaq Alaskan Native youth in relation to their personal and collective futures. Through an intergenerational and participatory inquiry process, this study explores how representations of shared heritage, present-day struggles, resilience, and hope can expand possibilities for youth and thus impact individual and community health.

This introduction to the Special Issue Indigenous Youth Resilience in the Arctic reviews relevant resilience theory and research, with particular attention to Arctic Indigenous youth. Current perspectives on resilience, as well as the role of social determinants, and community resilience processes in understanding resilience in Indigenous circumpolar settings are reviewed. The distinctive role for qualitative inquiry in understanding these frameworks is emphasized, as is the uniquely informative lens youth narratives can offer in understanding Indigenous, cultural, and community resilience processes during times of social transition. We then describe key shared cross-site methodological elements of the Circumpolar Indigenous Pathways to Adulthood study, including sampling, research design, procedures, and analytic strategies. The site-specific papers further elaborate on methods, focusing on those elements unique to each site, and describe in considerable detail locally salient stressors and culturally patterned resilience strategies operating in each community. The concluding paper considers these across sites, exploring continuities and discontinuities, and the influence of cross-national social policies., (© The Author(s) 2013 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav.)

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., (© The Author(s) 2013 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav.)

Arctic peoples today find themselves on the front line of rapid environmental change brought about by globalizing forces, shifting climates, and destabilizing physical conditions. The weather is not the only thing undergoing rapid change here. Social climates are intrinsically connected to physical climates, and changes within each have profound effects on the daily life, health, and well-being of circumpolar indigenous peoples. This paper describes a collaborative effort between university researchers and community members from five indigenous communities in the circumpolar north aimed at comparing the experiences of indigenous Arctic youth in order to come up with a shared model of indigenous youth resilience. The discussion introduces a sliding scale model that emerged from the comparative data analysis. It illustrates how a "sliding scale" of resilience captures the inherent dynamism of youth strategies for "doing well" and what forces represent positive and negative influences that slide towards either personal and communal resilience or vulnerability. The model of the sliding scale is designed to reflect the contingency and interdependence of resilience and vulnerability and their fluctuations between lowest and highest points based on timing, local situation, larger context, and meaning., (© The Author(s) 2014 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav.)