2025 American Indian Suicide Prevention Convening Call for Speakers |
Friday, March 7, 2025
9:00AM-3:00PM
DoubleTree by Hilton Hotel Phoenix-Tempe
2100 South Priest Drive, Tempe, AZ 85282
ABOUT THE EVENT
Each year we hold a convening to bring together community members, behavioral health staff, service providers, school support staff, and youth service organizations to discuss and strategize how to reduce deaths by suicide among urban American Indian youth and adults. Through these convenings, service providers discuss and share areas of service around suicide prevention so that efforts between providers are known and can be better coordinated.
The Annual American Indian Suicide Prevention Convening is seeking workshop proposals for breakout sessions on March 7, 2025. In-person workshop content should be culturally relevant, educational, engaging, and reflect themes borrowed from the Gathering of Native Americans (GONA) curriculum.
- Gathering of Native Americans (GONA) is a culture-based prevention curriculum that utilizes both cultural and western practices and approaches to address community identified issues such as suicide prevention.
- The GONA focuses on four themes: Belonging, Mastery, Interdependence, and Generosity. We ask that speakers center their topics around Mastery or Interdependence.
- The GONA process:
- Generates a holistic approach to wellness as a traditional belief system and practice
- Encourages healthy traditions in the community as key practices to effective prevention
- Recognizes every community member as valuable in empowering the community
- Creates community healing necessary for suicide and substance use prevention, while acknowledging historical intergenerational trauma
BREAKOUT SESSION 1 THEME: MASTERY
The historical impacts of colonization have led to intergenerational trauma in Indigenous communities across the United States, manifesting in ways such as high rates of suicide. By identifying and better understanding this trauma and its effects on contemporary Indigenous people, we can work towards embracing wellness and recognizing the importance of healing ourselves and our relatives. Our experiences in life and connections to culture build the skills we need to strengthen our unity and resilience. Mastery is a time to discuss how to use our knowledge of the past and present to promote positive protective factors and empower Indigenous communities.
The GONA curriculum describes Mastery as “[the concept that] allows participants to take stock of how historical trauma impacts their communities and what fosters their resilience and holds them together”.
SESSION SHOULD ADDRESS TOPICS IN:
The historical impacts of colonization have led to intergenerational trauma in Indigenous communities across the United States, manifesting in ways such as high rates of suicide. By identifying and better understanding this trauma and its effects on contemporary Indigenous people, we can work towards embracing wellness and recognizing the importance of healing ourselves and our relatives. Our experiences in life and connections to culture build the skills we need to strengthen our unity and resilience. Mastery is a time to discuss how to use our knowledge of the past and present to promote positive protective factors and empower Indigenous communities.
The GONA curriculum describes Mastery as “[the concept that] allows participants to take stock of how historical trauma impacts their communities and what fosters their resilience and holds them together”.
SESSION SHOULD ADDRESS TOPICS IN:
- Culturally based resiliency factors and the importance of traditional cultural practices in healing. #CultureIsPrevention
- The trauma transmission process and its relationship to suicide and/or co-occurring disorders.
- Loss of (cultural) identity as a risk factor to suicide.
- A model to promote healing and recovery from historical trauma and a vision for a healthy future of self, family, and community.
- Survivor stories and their testimonies of resilience.
- Population-specific mental health and their unique experiences of trauma (i.e., youth, adult, elder, 2SLBGTQ+, maternal, men’s).
- Individual and community perceptions that hinder needed problem solving (i.e., language and cultural differences, western vs. Indigenous worldviews, etc.).