Suicide educator working to help American Indians

• Reprints

Updated: August 4, 2011 4:20PM

Last year, a rash of suicides by young people living on a Navajo Indian reservation in New Mexico left members of that community in shock.

Michelle Linn-Gust knows what it’s like to deal with such a devastating loss.

The former Naperville resident has been working as an educator on suicide prevention and grief ever since her 17-year-old sister, Denise, killed herself in 1993. She has written four books on the subject and is working on a fifth. She has a doctorate in family studies and leads workshops and speaks internationally. In April she will become president of the American Association of Suicidology, the first non-clinician survivor so honored.

Because of the high incidence of suicide among American Indians, she has been offering workshops and programs for Navajo and Pueblo Indians for the past seven years. During that time she has developed an appreciation for their beliefs and their culture.

For more information, visit michellelinngust.com.

1. What do you do in your workshops for American Indians?

You go into a community and you have to let them lead you. You can’t go in and tell them what to do. I’m a blue-eyed, blonde white person, and I have been very lucky to have been welcomed into these communities. But I have also had to take a step back to let them guide and lead where we go. They don’t always talk about death and suicide. The cultural issues are huge. You have to really spend time listening to them. It’s through the listening that you understand where they are coming from. ... Just because somebody looks native, you can’t assume they think what you think all Native Americans believe. They may have been raised in a city like Albuquerque, so they’re more integrated into the larger world. Or, they could be somebody who still lives in a hogan with a dirt floor in the Navajo Nation. What you have to do is ask them where do you come from? What do you believe?

2. How do the Navajo and the Pueblo Indians differ?

A lot of the Pueblos are more open about death and suicide. ... But the Navajos traditionally do not talk about death so they do not talk about suicide. You have the very traditional views of the elders, and they are the ones guiding the community. The struggle right now in the Navajo Nation is the younger people. They want to talk about it. It’s not that they want to leave their spiritual beliefs behind. They just know it has not been helpful not to talk about it. I don’t believe everybody has to talk about it. I think there are other ways of coping with it. But I think if somebody wants to, they need that opportunity to do that. And when a community has been devastated by suicide, they need some way to acknowledge that.

3. Why is there a high incidence of suicide among American Indians?

There’s poverty. There’s something called historical trauma — it’s going back on the things that have happened with that family. They think about what happened with their land being taken away, being forced to live on reservations, forced into boarding schools, and those come down through the generations. You see your grandparents’ (situations), be it alcoholism, suicide, poverty, and there’s a hopelessness passed on to the next generation. You can see the lack of hope in their faces.

4. What have you learned from this process?

I think the cultural piece is one of the biggest things. Coming from Naperville and moving to New Mexico, I feel very comfortable in another culture. It’s an opportunity to learn something from somebody about their culture because their culture can teach you something. That’s probably what New Mexico has taught me as a whole, living here for 16 years. (American Indians) have taught me so much about taking a step back, about hope and about these basic things. ...I think even in everything they have been through, and continue to go through, they are people that are still hopeful that they can be productive, happy, hopeful people.

5. Are you making any headway in your work with them?

I think that no matter what we do, we are making headway because to be invited into the (American Indian) community is huge. We have people who want to help. The thing is, it has to be every year. It has to be repeated. If we’re going to help people, we have to keep educating people, ingraining it in their heads — this is what you look for. But the other thing I think is important is what we are seeing because of the economy. People don’t know how to cope with stress. We need to do a better job helping people cope. That is particularly true in finding hope. ... To me, ultimately everything I do is about hope and helping people find hope. Hope is what sustains us.