(Fort Belknap) The VA is opening a new suicide prevention office in Harlem early next month in Fort Belknap. Native Americans face increased rates of suicide according to a report by KFF Health News, which says that Natives die by suicide more than any other racial or ethnic group.
New Media Broadcasters spoke with Joeseph Gone, who is a Professor of Anthropology and of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard University and a Fort Belknap native, to ask about why Natives face this burden.
“The vulnerability of Native American people to suicide and other forms of psychiatric and psychological distress, really finds it’s origin in a long history of colonial subjugation here in the United States. We are the first people and the original inhabitants of this land, and yet when Europeans and later other immigrants arrived, they enacted forms of domination and of dispossession and of subjugation that left our people and communities bereft of ways of life that have served us well since time immemorial”
