Grant: Doctoral Research Award - PA: Aboriginal Research Methodologies

In Canada, rates of suicide among Indigenous youth remain higher than non-Indigenous youth. In BC, the Transformative Change Accord: First Nations Health Plan identifies establishing mental health programs to address substance use and youth suicide as a priority action area in health. Studies have found maintaining cultural continuity is fundamental to the prevention of youth suicide in Indigenous communities. There is emerging research to support cultural connectedness as preventative of suicide risk. The Cuystwi: Indigenous Youth Wellness project emerged from conversations with Indigenous communities expressing their frustration at a lack of culturally relevant community based programs to prevent youth suicide. The Cuystwi project is an online training set out in modules of activity and video based interactive learning. The modules address the importance of culture, the history of colonization from an Indigenous perspective, tools to deal with racism and healthy relationships. The training is a paired with existing community youth programming. I propose to test the feasibility, acceptability and knowledge uptake of the training with the youth and facilitators involved in Cuystwi using a combination of appropriate epidemiological, Indigenous and evaluation methods. This will be accomplished by co-creating wellness indicators with Indigenous communities participating in the project to assess the impact of the training on youth and facilitators. The hope is that Cuystwi will be an effective, acceptable and relevant program for Indigenous communities to improve well-being in youth. This research has the potential to add to upstream health promotion programming for Indigenous youth in BC using cost-effective online resources combined with community programming.