“Being responsible,respectful,trying to keep the tradition alive:” Cultural resilience and growing up in an Alaska Native community

Abstract

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.

Keywords

Alaska Native community resilience cultural strengths indigenous youth social change

Introduction

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. In our primarily Inupiaq (Alaska Native) study community, typical life styles, economic opportunities, even everyday language changed dramatically over the last three generations. There has been an abrupt transition from the primarily nomadic, subsistence life style of grandparents to largely residing in settlements where day-to-day living relies on store-bought goods and village services. Importantly, young people’s learning is now managed extensively by schooling systems that function outside of the purview of many Inupiaq family members (Chance, 1990; Wexler, 2005). In this context, many older Inupiat people are uncertain about how to support youth in becoming successful and responsible men and women in a modern context (Wexler, 2006). Young Inupiaq people, then, must learn as they go, negotiating various (sometimes competing) value systems, developing strategies for dealing with everyday problems and significant challenges, and figuring out how to find and take advantage of opportunities that were not available to their Elders. In this way, young Inupiaq are “not just recipients of their parents’ culture but the creators of a new version, reflecting the novel conditions in which they are growing up” (Levine, 2011, p. 426). These strategies for action, when taken together, offer us glimpses into the local and everyday contexts that shape indigenous young people’s resilience.

Adhering to a new trend in resilience research (Kirmayer, Dandeneau, Marshall, Phillips, & Williamson, 2011; Ungar, 2011), our study is most interested in how communities structure the ways youth overcome hardship. With an understanding that social and cultural ecologies shape people’s available and meaningful options, we consider how Inupiat youth are demonstrating cultural continuity by improvising their ways through challenges. As Kirmayer, Brass, and Tait (2009) state, “living traditions are always works in progress” (p. 440). Culture shapes children’s pathway into adulthood, meaning that there are public, patterned and historically reproduced symbolic practices which structure young people’s entry into maturity (Gone, Miller, & Rappaport, 1999). By carefully considering these patterns, we hope to contribute to an understanding of community resilience.

Community resilience considers that the ways youth go about overcoming difficulties are profoundly shaped by the meaning systems, resources, and relationships that structure their lives. In reflecting on the meaning of resilience, one older Inupiaq youth offered an image of a willow bending in response to the icy western wind that blows regularly through the coastal study community. With her hands, she showed how the roots of the bush allow it to remain standing even in the face of 40-mile-an-hour gales. In explanation, she said, “our roots, our culture makes us strong. That is resilience.” Our research focuses on that which grounds young Inupiaq people and confers to them the flexibility to remain strong in the face of adversity. More specifically, our inquiry explores the ways that Inupiaq youth resilience—this flexible problem-solving during a complex period of life—takes particular shape locally. Resilience, then, is patterned according to traditional cultural understandings and practices, and reflects innovation, creativity, and adaptation by young people.

Arctic indigenous communities, like the Inupiaq study site, have undergone social disruptions in the last few decades which present unique challenges in structuring young people’s transition to adulthood. With attention to how young Inupiaq narratives reflect this social change, we intend to discover how youth “strategies of action” reveal cultural sources of strength. Aligning our analysis with Ungar’s (2011) four principles of ecological resilience—decentrality, complexity, atypicality, and cultural relativity—(see Allen et al., 2014) we acknowledge the fluidity and contingencies that shape this resilience process, yet still aim to describe the kinds of resources, capabilities, and perspectives that coalesce to make patterns in the ways young Inupiaq people in this community respond to life challenges. We believe that stories of Inupiaq youth resilience, as described by them, will make the models of assistance, shared priorities, and well-trodden routes through hardship discernible. Through the discursive clues that young people present to us, our analysis focuses on how this community is structuring resilience processes of its young people.

Context

The study community has a majority Inupiaq population (approximately 75%) and is located above the Arctic Circle. Between 1890 and 1910, the nomadic, hunting Inupiat population in Northwest Alaska experienced profound changes brought about by Colonial diseases, a surge in Western whaling activity, establishment of Christian mission schools, and the gold rush. Since that time, Native villages were established at the sites of mission schools where mandatory attendance created sedentary communities. These settlements currently exist as “distinct tribes” with sovereign authority (Huhndorf & Huhndorf, 2011). Elders speak Inupiaq as their primary language, whereas the majority of other age groups speak primarily English. Inupiaq young people suffer significant health disparities, including extremely high rates of youth suicide (Wexler, Hill, Bertone-Johnson, & Fenaughty, 2008; Wexler, Silveira, & Bertone-Johnson, 2012), which has been linked to the modern experience of culture “loss” (Wexler, 2006).

The study was conducted in the largest, hub community (population 3,000). Most of the houses (80%) have indoor plumbing (Alaska Department of Commerce Community and Economic Development, 2012). The median age in the large village is 23 and approximately 50% of the population is under the age of 18. The 650 houses of the village are situated very close together on a narrow spit of land. Housing is expensive and very limited, leading to crowded living conditions.

Many Inupiat families in the community engage in some form of subsistence activities, including harvest (or receipt) of berries, and hunting of caribou, musk ox, moose, fish, and large sea mammals. Although several families in the community have dog teams, these are mainly used for racing, not subsistence activities. Participation in traditional activities, therefore, requires capital to pay for gas (at prices at least twice those of urban Alaska) and equipment (snow machines, four-wheelers, and boats) to access “the country.” Most families consume store-bought foods for the majority of their meals.

The largest religious group is the Evangelical Friends. Many Elders are members of this church, and have thus disallowed some traditional practices such as shamanistic rituals and Inupiat dancing. Several years ago, however, the study community formed an “Eskimo dance group” to revitalize Inupiat cultural dancing for young people. The study community is the economic, educational, and political regional hub, and is the only village in the region with air service to Anchorage. The Tribal Council—an active collaborator in the project—is the federally recognized “tribe” that represents the Inupiat residents. Representatives from other tribal agencies that are responsible for cultural continuity, economic growth, and health and social services were part of the study’s Local Steering Committee (LSC), offering guidance, direction, and analytical insights as the research progressed.

Resilience research in cultural context

Research with Native people has often found that the ongoing uses of traditions to assert cultural identities can play an important role in generating resilience (e.g., Armstrong, Birnie-Lefcovitch, & Ungar, 2005; Holleran & Jung, 2005; Lemerle & Stewart, 2005). Identification and involvement with one’s culture can offer avenues to helpful sense-making leading to problem-solving strategies that are both meaningful and deployable. Perhaps, this is why positive cultural identity appears to confer feelings of self-worth, self-efficacy, connectedness, and purpose to indigenous people (e.g., Allen et al., 2006; Kral & Idlout, 2009; Paine, 2005; Whitbeck, Chen, Hoyt, & Adams, 2004). Culture, as we are using it here, provides a framework in which individuals can locate themselves in relation to others, to a larger shared context, and to history. As Kirmayer et al. (2009) write, “Traditional stories and myths are also emblems of identity that circulate among Aboriginal people, providing opportunities for mutual understanding and participation in a shared world” (p. 442).

In the study community, the everyday opportunities for imparting shared, traditional visions and skills have diminished over the last three generations. Traditionally, older people—parents, uncles, aunts, and grandparents—confidently paved the way for Inupiaq youth to enter into adulthood. These roles had stability over time, and older family members had the knowledge, skills, and perspectives that young people needed to know as adults. There were specific contexts—the men’s house (qargi) and specific dwellings for women—in which young people received the instruction, knowledge, and skills they would need as adults from older family members (Burch, 2006). As in many Arctic, indigenous societies, children’s aspirations were typically scripted for both sexes, and appropriate gender roles were learned through observation and eventual emulation of same-sex parents and relatives.

With the rapid social change experienced in this community, many older Inupiaq feel that they are not well prepared to support young people in becoming adults (Wexler, 2006). For example, imposed social changes resulted in literal communication gaps between generations. Grandparents speak primary Inupiaq and were brought up doing primarily subsistence to survive. Parents of today’s youth were sent far away (e.g., Oklahoma or Southeast Alaska) to boarding schools for high school, speak primarily English, and participate in a wage-based economy. Young Inupiaq, in contrast, were schooled in their home communities, and the vast majority of them speak only English. The Inupiaq generations of today speak different languages, and have had to respond to very different tensions and pressures of growing up. These historically situated experiences structured each generation’s ideas about and pathways to becoming adults, and there is little continuity between them. Young Inupiaq people are thus navigating issues that arise from village schooling, balancing the (sometimes conflicting) demands of Western and family life, and participating in a global youth culture, all of which are challenges that are quite distinct from those faced by their Elders.

The divide that separates the lived experiences of Inupiaq generations has been identified as a contributor to youth problems, stress, and health disparities such as suicide (Wexler, 2006, 2009a). As early as the 1980s, the Regional Elders Council acknowledged the breakdown in socialization practices, and so created the Inupiat Ilitqusiat (II) with the explicit goal of passing down the Inupiaq heritage to younger generations. The Inupiat Ilitqusiat (II) were intended to establish a social and cultural agenda that would be flexible enough to be shaped individually and locally, but broad enough to represent key Inupiaq ideals (McNabb, 1991). Codified and disseminated to combat what was perceived as an increasing lack of adequate role modeling for youth, Inupiat Ilitqusiat (II) aimed at helping parents hand down cultural values to their children through “living better lives.” However, due to daily pressures and time spent in schools and other Western institutions (according to our Inupiaq research partners), today’s adults may not have had the opportunity to learn the meaning and intended implementation of the Inupiaq values. Today, Inupiat Ilitqusiat (II) are found on posters in virtually every public building in the study community, but the root of meaning may be obscure to some. This investigation is intended, in part, to describe the ways in which culture is maintained and recreated by Inupiat young people as they navigate difficulties in their lives while growing up.

Methods

The development of our cross-site research protocol has been described in detail elsewhere (Ulturgasheva et al., 2011), and the shared analytic strategy is articulated in the introductory article (Allen et al., 2014). Here, we describe the methods of inquiry, data analysis, and interpretative strategies undertaken by the local research team in collaboration with the Northwest Alaskan Inupiaq Local Steering Committee (LSC). The LSC was integral in formulating interview questions, identifying potential respondents, and analyzing the results. Participants were chosen to represent a range of expected or actual success on their pathways to adulthood; 19 out of the 20 interviews were done by a non-Native woman who is a long-term resident of the community. All preliminary findings were shared with the LSC to get guidance about our interpretations and about future directions of our analysis. Insights were incorporated into the final analyses. The active involvement of LSC members (Joule and Garoutte, in particular) provides a more local and historically situated lens through which we interpret our findings.

Interviews were done with 20 young people total. Five boys and five girls in younger (11–14) and older (15–18) age categories were interviewed so that both gender and age comparisons could be made. The semistructured interview schedule included questions about how youth spent their time, what challenges they encountered and how they handled them, and their relationships. Questions also focused specifically on school, culture, family, and their future. Several questions asked young people about their community and their perceptions of other young people. To allow for full exploration of interview questions, the interviews were split over the course of three, 1-hour sessions. All but three participants provided three interviews for a total of 57 1-hour long interviews, which were audio-recorded and transcribed verbatim. Each participant also created a life timeline to show the important events that had occurred from the time they were born until the present. Participants decided what kinds of things to include in this, and therefore offer us glimpses into their values and priorities.

Three separate approaches were used to analyze the interview narratives: (a) grounded theory coding (Charmaz, 2006), (b) narrative analysis, and (c) data analysis in response to theory (as described in Allen et al., 2014). To maximize consistency of code interpretation over time, operational definitions were constructed, as were contraindications for code use. ATLAS.ti software (Muhr, 2004) was used as a tool to record the coding process, track coding density, and help identify emerging concepts among coded material. Additional codes were also developed to document general themes that were less directly articulated by youth, but ran across many interviews. For instance, deaths of significant family members or stories of friends moving away were coded as “losing relationships” no matter the idiosyncratic phrasing that youth may have used to describe these experiences.

Since our codebook had over 50 codes, each of the three members of the research team was assigned a set of similar codes she used for coding. For instance, one person had the codes “family dynamics,” “parenting,” and “being there for me,” and focused on the social and kinship patterns found in the narratives. At the beginning of this process, the PI (Wexler) coded two complete transcripts using the whole codebook, and compared this to the transcripts coded by three separate research assistants. There was a high rate of agreement (87%). To continue to check the accuracy of this coding process, the PI (Wexler) supervised the coding process by reading the transcripts and holding team meetings about each to resolve any areas of ambiguity. Once all transcripts were coded, we were able to identify themes across all youth by examining coded sections in relation to resilience patterns and practices. Frequencies within and across transcripts were noted to gauge prevalence of the themes.

In addition to the modified grounded theory analysis, a narrative description of each interviewee was constructed based on the research team’s combined understanding of each youth’s described perspectives, experiences, and support. Such a narrative provided a summary of the youth’s overall narrative story as well as a synthesis of the researchers’ impressions of that participant’s patterns of resilience. As an example, the coded excerpts from a transcript might identify several people whom the interviewee has sought out for guidance. The narrative of that participant could consider the ways in which s/he accessed help and the kinds of relationships and situations that seemed to support that person’s capacity for maintaining and developing these connections. The narrative, then, provided a way for researchers to document their “reading” of participants’ narratives in a more fluid and comprehensive way.

In combination, the narrative representations of each youth and the examination of aggregate data across young people through the coding process allowed for a two-pronged approach, with the former providing possible exemplar cases that represent themes that emerged from the latter. The life timelines were utilized to better understand the value young people placed on particular events as defining moments. To hone our interpretive tools and sensitize us to conceptualizations in the resilience literature, we considered theories and concepts that could help us better understand our narrative and code-driven findings. Findings that resonated with the ecological resilience literature are highlighted. Gender and age differences are described only if there were noteworthy and relevant distinctions in the findings.

Findings: Personal and community resilience

Common challenges and personal resilience strategies

The most common difficulty, mentioned by all but one of our participants (often repeatedly), was regret, sadness or longing for someone who is no longer a part of their daily life. These absences are attributed to people moving away for employment or other opportunities, divorce or other family problems, and death. Many considered this kind of difficulty as the biggest problem for kids in the village. Mostly, participants longed for family members, but several girls and a couple boys talked about friends moving away. Youth—more often in the older group—told us about how families or older friends left the village to be able to access more opportunities (better schools or boarding school, more varied experiences, or better jobs).

As these accounts imply, for many young people, the community represented a lack of possibilities that contributed to people’s departure. Most young people (17 of 20) associated “having nothing to do” with their hometown. Only three participants did not mention boredom in their interviews, and all three had more access to outdoor activities (hunting, fishing) by having their own (or use of a) bike, snow-go, four wheeler, or boat. Access to “the country” and skills to do subsistence activities greatly widened the scope of possibilities for action. None of our participants associated boredom, a common town experience, with time spent at camp or “going out on the land.”

The country invited youth to enter a different way of being. According to youth, ideals of interaction, handed down for generations, are realized in the context of “the country” in contrast to town. Young people talked about how people rely on each other more, are more apt to share, and have meaningful ways to contribute in the country. Being on the land not only contributed to a collective sense of purpose for many kids, but it connected them with a sense of “how it used to be.” Many youth talked about how subsistence requires everyone to act selflessly, clarifies what is essential versus trivial, and invites respect between people. Town versus country environments created two distinct ways of being for young people. One older boy explains:

Interviewer: I remember your Ana (grandmother) talking about how important it was to get the kids out to camp.

Older boy: Yes.

Interviewer: Yes, that’s pretty neat.

Older boy: That’s where we [siblings] don’t fight much and we just like pretend with each other [that] we’re friends and stuff.

Interviewer: Pretend?

Older boy: Yes, so for like family members over here in [town], we fight a lot over toys and stuff. Toys like Xbox 360 and games and videos and candy and snacks.

Interviewer: Yes, but you don’t do that out at camp or out in the country?

Older boy: No.

Interviewer: Why do you suppose that is? What’s the difference?

Older boy: We savor [appreciate] our stuff [when we are in the country] and most likely share everything.

Several of the youth narratives reflect a significant difference in how people act and feel in town versus in the country. An older girl described her vision of traditional versus modern life, saying:

There is a big difference. I was actually thinking about that last week before I went to bed. What if we still lived in igloos and sod houses and wore fur clothes? It would be really different. We wouldn’t have electronics and stuff. We probably wouldn’t get bored ever.

Living in town is associated with boredom, pettiness, and interpersonal strife. Many of our participants told us that having “nothing to do” was the reason “why most of [the kids] get into trouble.”

Another aspect of town is captured in our second most common stressor, “being mean to me.” Fifteen participants described multiple instances in which the young person experienced others as hostile or deliberately nonsupportive. “Being mean,” for girls who mentioned this stressor twice as often as boys, was likely to be peer-to-peer conflict. Most often described by younger girls, these stories depict tension between “cliques” or former friends, deliberate exclusion, or spreading rumors. Girls were more likely to describe working out conflicts by talking and repairing the relationship and younger ones often sought support from their mothers. A younger girl who was experiencing bullying at school described her mom’s active role in solving it, “She [mom] said the next time she sees [the bully] that she was going to have a talk with her parents.” Mothers of young girls intervened by speaking to a parent of the offender, defending their daughters directly (or on Facebook), or encouraging their daughter to solve the problem. When the stepfather was the source of the conflict or bullying, there seemed to be limited options to address the dynamics. Relationships with stepfathers were often a point of stress to our female participants. Mothers were less likely to intervene and counseled their children to “not start anything” or “ignore him” or move into a different house, which is largely what they did.

For males “being mean to me” incidents all involved some kind of physical confrontation either in the form of being bullied or acting in reaction to being bullied. Bullying, especially in school, was noted by several youth as one of the biggest problems kids face. Adults, especially school staff, are consistently perceived as doing virtually nothing to address the problem. Youth are largely left to work it out amongst themselves. In some ways, physical confrontation was accepted as a necessary part of growing into manhood, which required that boys become strong and able to withstand trials. One older boy explained how he was involved in this toughening-up process for a younger cousin:

He asked me, “why do you keep picking on me?” and I’m like, “to make you strong” and he’s like, “I already am trying to get stronger. I joined basketball team, see that…” [and I said], “I’m trying to make you stronger in your mind and physically.”

Being physically challenged also gave young men opportunities to prove themselves and to gain respect from others in the process. An older boy explains how this worked for him:

Interviewer: Okay. So I’m wondering how did you get through that. Everybody’s picking on you and teasing you and wanting to fight.

Older boy: Fight back.

Interviewer: You fight back, okay.

Older boy: Tease back.

Interviewer: Fight back and tease back.

Older boy: Then through the middle I made friends.

In another case, a young boy (who is physically large) did not want to fight back even though his uncle and grandparents suggested it. Boys in the community continually picked on him until he fought back. After that, the bullying lessened greatly.

Across virtually all of the youth narratives, participants responded to hardship through self-reliance. An older girl describes how she would handle a personal challenge saying, “if something [bad] really did happen, I’d have to wait until it did to figure out what I would do, but I think my first reaction would be to just snap back.” This ability to respond and not be damaged by hardship was often associated with the survival or subsistence skills of Inupiaq who have demonstrated such capacity for generations.

Social ecology creates specific patterns of youth resilience

When faced with difficulties, several kinds of resources seemed to be important for young Inupiat people to feel capable and to enact resilient strategies. Peer relationships are primary sites to test one’s character, be dependable and develop awareness of others, and in so doing, become more resilient. Connections with older people who could serve as mentors (or just background supporters) gave our young participants clear ideas that they could get through difficulties, while also presenting them with examples of how to do so. In these ways, strong social networks increased youth adaptability by expanding young people’s opportunities to maneuver when facing challenges. Lastly, positioning oneself as cultural, as having a meaningful claim to Inupiaq culture, was a way to evoke a sense of strength and capability in youth narratives. As in the metaphor of resilience as a willow in the wind, cultural rootedness, several participants believe, enables youth to have strength to withstand difficulty in versatile ways. Each of these structural sources will be described as a facet of the local, social ecology that facilitates youth resilience.

Friendships with peers give young people opportunities to, among other things, be responsible and responsive to others. Young people’s narratives featured these relationships and through them, our participants learned about themselves. One youth leader described how she likes “being somebody people look up to.” By describing themselves in relation to their peers, they reflected a situated sense of self and their capabilities. Parents and other adult family members often stayed outside of these relationships (with the exception of mothers actively intervening among younger girls). This freedom allowed children to take on increasingly more responsibilities for others, and to ask for something similar in return. In several cases, participants said that they make sure that their siblings or good friends/cousins have money, get up in time for school, do their homework, or are protected from others. In the following example, an older male participant describes his relationship with his good friend and cousin,

I go there every day, it’s like my home … . So whenever I get money, it’s all about [name of friend] and his younger brother; I took care of him as much as possible. They’re like brothers to me. I take care of them no matter what, fight for them and ask him if he could help me out on something. He won’t really want to do it, but he’ll still do it anyway because he knows that I’d do the same for him.

Building reciprocal bonds, being responsible to others and sustaining support, young people find new capacity through their friendships. Good friends are talked about in terms of adopted kin, people who are close enough to be considered family.

Families (with homes that provide space to be out of harm’s way) enabled participants to offer different forms of support to their friends. Several youth talked about either going to a friend’s house to escape home when a parent was drinking or offering their friends a place they could go to when their homes were unsafe. A younger boy explains, “Whenever his dad’s not doing good [drinking], he comes to our house and we take care of him.” This household mobility enabled young people to leave difficult situations with minimal or no negative repercussions. In fact, “living somewhere else for a while” was common strategy for dealing with interpersonal conflict. As one older boy explains, “… so I stayed there [with my cousins] for a while. I lived there because I often move out and then in with my mom because me and her don’t get along so great. So we take breaks.” Having a place to go to avoid interpersonal strife increased young people’s ability to navigate hardship in a way that felt independent. A younger boy explains, “Every time my mom leaves, he [dad] goes and drinks, but I promised myself every time he gets drunk, I’m just going to go over to [best friend and cousin] and see if I can stay at his house.” As this quote illustrates, our young participants position themselves as actively working around problems they cannot solve, utilizing resources made available through social networks. This kind of perceived self-reliance—a characteristic that was reflected and lauded in many youth narratives—is made possible by the openness of many homes.

Developing and sustaining connections with others can, as our participants’ stories suggest, expand one’s opportunities for escape, for travel, and for skill-building. Young people described visiting adopted kin in the lower 48 states because they were missed, learning how to fix engines because of a relationship with a mechanic, and getting to go out on the land with other families because they had developed strong, social ties. Beyond this, the variety and kinds of adult support seems to matter greatly for youth in terms of gaining facility with diverse “strategies for action” they can deploy in response to difficulties. A few of our participants had large adoptive and biological kin networks that offered them support in being self-reliant, responsible, and extremely capable.

For example, one younger girl we interviewed has many layers of social support, and confidently handles a myriad of difficulties. When identifying a challenge, she talks about being harassed by several of her teachers in school. One of the teachers physically grabbed her in class. When asked how she dealt with it, she details how she told her mom, and then brought it up again during a parent–teacher conference. Although supportive, her mother did not feel like she could influence the situation. Instead, her mom “would just tell me to be strong with it and just try to avoid her as much as I can.” Although the participant reported that, “I tried [to follow this advice], but she would just keep hitting and she was a very abusive teacher. I didn’t want to go to school though. After she choked me, I didn’t want to go to school.” Even in this terrible situation, the participant was still able to get good grades. She did so by reclaiming (albeit not overtly) some power in the situation. She explains, “I gave her a nickname… the big fat evil meatloaf because she had these giant craters in her face, yuck.” When she got As on her report card despite this treatment, her aunt sent her a care package, and her parents let her use their snow-go. Although the adult support—evident in this case—was not enough to change the school situation for this participant, she felt supported enough to endure it, find a semblance of control (over what she called her teacher), and accomplish her goal (good grades).

A child’s autonomy is sometimes clearly honed purposefully by family members. For example, one of our younger male participants talked about how his dad taught him how to be on the land, keep himself safe, and hunt by giving him incrementally more responsibility. When he was little, he was given a BB gun to hunt rabbits outside of town. Later he got a 22-gage, and now has a rifle for hunting caribou (all milestones he noted on his life timeline, a requested drawing done during the interview depicting important life events). Before being allowed to hunt alone with his 15-year-old cousin, our 12-year-old participant had to pass a hunter safety course and be able to work on small engines. In a story about getting his snow-go stuck in powdery snow 30 miles from town, he described how he and his cousin had thoughtfully covered the snow machine to protect it from possible looters in case they had to leave it behind. The participant described how they “just sat there for a couple of hours thinking it would be hard” before figuring out they could handle the situation. He said that he was not worried because he had a backpack full of supplies needed to survive, just like his father carried. Strong intergenerational ties prepared this participant (and others) to stay calm and thoughtfully handle a difficult situation.

“Being cultural,” in many youth narratives, was illustrated by participating in subsistence activities with parents or other family members, and young people associated these experiences with a sense of being special, living right, and showing cultural continuity by their subsistence skills. When the interviewer asks a younger boy what “being Inupiaq means” to him, he says: “It means a lot because I get to hunt and do lots of stuff that most people don’t get to do.” Youth narratives reflected doing and therefore being Inupiaq. More than any other kind of activity, young people talked about their parents actively teaching them how to do subsistence and through this, how to be in the world. One younger boy explains, “My dad taught me how to gut [a caribou]…. [as a teacher,] he’s very patient.” This participant demonstrated patience while waiting for ducks and even when not reacting to mean peers. Hunting and butchering were the skills most often taught to young people by their parents or other older family members. Young people had many stories of learning particular ways to cut fish, smell a rutting moose, hunt beluga, or act around bear. These skills and experiences imbued youth with a particular ontology, and signified “culture as lived” in virtually all the narratives. One older girl explains: “My papa. He taught me when I was like 4 years old how to clean out seal intestines. So I’ve always lived with that.”

Not only does the act of doing subsistence provide an opportunity for traditional learning, it also gives a sense of wellbeing. In troubling times, several participants described being taken out on the land and feeling better as a consequence. In the following example, a participant describes a time when he felt hopeless and unable to change the interpersonal problems he faced. His Ana (grandmother) came to his aid.

Interviewer: How did she help you?

Older boy: She took me out camping for over the weekend.

Interviewer: Tell me what that was like.

Older boy: I went hunting, boating, went to [another village], fishing and basically that’s all we did, swimming.

Interviewer: Did that help you?

Older boy: Yes.

Interviewer: How did it help you?

Older boy: Calmed my nerves down to stop thinking about everything.

Bringing this sense of wellbeing back to everyday, village life can be challenging to young people. Some older youth (particularly older girls), are actively finding meaningful ways to “do culture” outside of traditional, subsistence-based activities. In the following excerpt, an older girl accomplishes this by broadening her conception of what is cultural.

To me [culture] means having hunting skills that shows up a lot and like picking berries and like harvest skills and teaching kids how to do stuff. It doesn’t matter like what you’re teaching, but as long as it’s positive and you’re making a good impression on the next generation then I think that’s an Inupiat thing that we all do.

This particular way to be (and do) Inupiaq was evident in some young people’s narratives, and provided them with a sense of purpose that guided their actions and resilience strategies. A different older girl described, “I want to give back to my community. I want to give back to my people.” This cultural obligation to give back was mentioned by several young people as a means to “do culture.” In this way, young people (mostly women) in our study consciously claimed their cultural identities by shifting the focus from subsistence to the values underlying traditional activities. This kind of interpretation can widen the scope of what is considered “cultural,” and can therefore offer young people a larger cultural repertoire to use as they face difficulties on their pathways to adulthood.

Discussion

As the focal point of this study, Inupiaq youth narratives of resilience signify culturally salient understandings, values, and practices which are available and meaningful to our participants (Gone et al., 1999) and which they employ to overcome challenges. When we consider these across Inupiat youth narratives, we begin to understand how local culture influences the “general way of organizing action” (Swidler, 1986, p. 277; see also Bourdieu, 1977). In the study community, the intensity, variety, and relative health of participants’ social ties seem to be a context for developing more robust resilience strategies. These cherished relationships provided young people with a platform for securing reciprocal relations, feeling supported, gaining access to a host of resources, and for seeing and trying out new ways to be in the world. Importantly, having a variety of relationships offered youth opportunities to develop a sense that they mattered to others (and vice versa) in a myriad of ways. In many stories, young people actively fostered their connection to others in their family and/or community, and through this, established for themselves meaningful ways to contribute (Baskin, Wampold, Quintana, & Enright, 2010; Baumeister & Leary, 1995). Being important to others seems to be a common way for young people in the study community to articulate how they (and their actions) exemplify important shared principles—like commitment to others—and do so in a way that is culturally and socially consonant (Theron et al., 2011).

Building and maintaining relationships with others, then, seem to be the scaffolding upon which young people construct their identities and, in turn, their resilience. This process is shaped by social interaction and social practice (Hammack, 2008). Young people’s narratives emphasize their self-reliance and capabilities to protect and “be there for” others. The kinds of support received from others was less explicit, but was nonetheless central to many resilience stories. Relationships with others in the community establish the bounds of possibilities, in material and affective terms. For instance, a youth could leave a troubling household if welcome in other homes. Escaping into the country was a viable option when someone included a young person. Effective strategies for handling problems were clear if an adult showed young people how to do so. Without this guidance, and back-up resources enlisted through their agency, young people’s narratives were less certain about how to be strong and capable in the face of hardship.

This kind of certainty is also engendered through a sense of cultural continuity. A recurring narrative links participants’ sense of cultural affiliation with their safe passage into adulthood. The cultural tropes deployed by youth provide glimpses into how they are building cultural resonance into their autobiographical identity narratives (McAdams, 1996). Research supports the importance of cultural identity associations for indigenous youth wellness (e.g., Alderson, 2000; Kirmayer et al., 2011; Lehti, Niemelä, Hoven, Mandell, & Sourander, 2009; Wexler, 2009b), but has not yet articulated how the conception of culture is deployed in ways that contribute to these processes. This study shows that it is important for youth to be able to flexibly construct and utilize cultural and personal identity narratives to respond to diverse situations.

This form of resilience was more readily available and accessible to girls (Geldens & Bourke, 2008). Girls and young women shared stories of hunting caribou and taking on public leadership roles that would have traditionally been occupied by males. Several young women talked about needing to support their families, and younger girls were finding creative ways to be allowed to go seal hunting, formally an exclusively male activity. Resilience narratives of female participants did not consistently follow their prescribed gender roles. Girls and young women actively and creatively reworked the socially prescribed gender identities to fit their priorities and their lives. For boys and young men, notions of manhood were more strictly regulated and tightly bound, conforming to local cultural expectations of strength and stoicism. All the boys in our study reflected these attributes or expressed stress because they did not. Boys and young men who fit snugly within their community’s gendered expectations, demonstrated robust resilience strategies and an unwavering belief in their capacity to withstand hardship.

This finding raises the question: What is it about the social ecology that facilitates this creative endeavor for girls and forecloses it for boys? From our participants, we understand that girls are often encouraged to broaden their aptitudes in multiple settings by taking on new tasks, even those not traditionally done by girls and women. Girls in our study were taught how to hunt large game, for instance, and participated in sharing rituals associated with the distribution of one’s first catch. Their “gender transgressions” were thus publically acknowledged and lauded. In contrast, boys in our study, talked about having a limited number of options for handling their problems, which seemed to be shaped by gender roles. For instance, to prevent further bullying, boys needed to “prove their mettle” by fighting back. Other means seemed to be ineffective, and sometimes made bullying worse. As this suggests, young Inupiat are differently drawing—in structurally positioned ways—from the situated, cultural scripts or master narratives that are circulating in their particular social ecology (Hammack, 2010; Thorne & McLean, 2003; Thorne & Nam, 2007). The larger context shapes young people’s understanding of their communities, and in so doing, frames and provisions their opportunities for resilience.

The community-level scripting of youth experiences shapes more than gender roles, and influences young people’s characterization of their everyday lives. For instance, boredom was the most often used descriptor of the study community by youth. The modern experience of having too much empty time “to be bored” introduces an ontological state that marks village life, in general, and that is associated with social ills such as substance abuse and “getting into trouble.” Jervis, Spicer, Manson, and Team (2003) found similar associations in an American Indian reservation community. Here, the village is linked to a lack of opportunity, pettiness, bullying and interpersonal strife: all of which were framed as antithetical to more traditional ways of being. This “existential boredom” can be understood to reflect a “deeper crisis of meaning” (Musharbash, 2007, p. 312). In her study of boredom in an Aboriginal community, Musharbash writes:

[B]oredom is generated at the intersection of “the old ways” and (post)colonial (time) disciplines, but for it to be experienced, a lack in meaning needs to be felt. This happens when the values underlying [local, indigenous] ways of being in the world and the world, encountered through settlement realities, are recognized as coming together in a “meaningless fit.” (p. 315)

The existential boredom associated with town in this study was explicitly contrasted with traditional living both in the past and present, while in the country. The “not bored” narratives reflected meaningful engagement with mainly subsistence and cultural activities, and were associated with fulfillment: a sense of calm, wellbeing, strength, survival, and continuity with one’s heritage. Young people described being better people, acting more responsible and less petty, and feeling more self-efficacious by “doing culture” and being cultural on the land. These kinds of “fulfillment narratives” were markedly absent from those depicting village experiences.

Interestingly, young people described their reduced access to cultural pursuits as an unintended consequence of maturation. Growing up, as our participants portrayed, involved competing interests (upward bound, sports, peer engagements), which became more pronounced as teenagers, and often times replaced time spent at camp or doing subsistence activities. These narratives described how after elementary school, they no longer had “Inupiaq Days,” or were too old to go to the largest cultural camp in the region. For some, they no longer had grandparents who were able to take them to the country, and so no longer went. Such accounts reflected a sense of inevitability, of growing out of “doing culture.” This rendering of “the problem” stands in stark contrast to how adults and Elders describe “culture loss” (Wexler, 2006), and this difference suggests one way that culture change is manifested at this historic moment (Arnett, 2002).

The “relationship between a ‘master narrative’ and a personal narrative of identity provides direct access to the process of social reproduction and change” (Hammack, 2008, p. 224) because it occurs at the intersection of personal, cultural, and social meaning-making (Chase, 2005). Our analysis of Inupiaq youth narratives offers insight into young people’s historic positioning (Arnett, 2002; Hammack, 2008) because it contextualizes some dominant influences shaping this generation’s priorities and sense-making processes. For instance, Inupiat young people were taught to appreciate the advantage of attending school in their home community, being encouraged to learn Inupiaq dancing and language, and receiving cultural programs in school, experiences their Elders never got. Inupiaq youth, then, consider access to cultural practices as a privilege, one that other Americans do not have. This conception portrays cultural opportunities as valued offerings, instead of indispensible fundamentals. As they mature, youth dedicated more time to pursuits they believe have more relevance to their future. Thus, young people themselves are “losing culture” to make time for more pressing, modern demands of growing up.

Young people's narratives of cultural forfeiture are very different from those reflected in adult narratives of forced culture loss (Wexler, 2006), and signal tension related to the competing value systems youth must navigate. The narrative of older generations considers the role of discrimination and institutional oppression as the real harbinger of culture loss. The LSC members talked about how “Western” ideas have infiltrated young people’s perspectives of the world, and in so doing, have fostered confusion and irregular (sometimes wrong) cultural understandings. For instance, youth narratives do not acknowledge how historical injustice contributes to their need for explicit “cultural activities.” A male member stated, “We don’t control our education system which is why it is even more important that we provide youth the knowledge, skills, and training to navigate their true reality.” This reality would include an awareness of ongoing colonialism and could help youth develop nuanced ways to find their way into adulthood.

Conclusion

Like willows that bend in the Arctic wind and remain standing, Inupiat youth describe more flexible patterns of resilience when they are culturally grounded. As one young women captured her idea of resilience as “being responsible, respectful, trying to keep the tradition alive.” This process involves adopted kin or family members who 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 ways of being 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. Similarly, 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 reconfigure notions of culture and gender identity in ways that helped them meet challenges in their lives. Lastly, generational differences, described in our discussion of culture loss, signal particular ways that this generation’s historical and political positioning influences their understanding and access to cultural resources. This perspective also suggests potentially fruitful ways for older generations to guide young people on their path to adulthood.

Footnotes

Biography

Lisa M. Wexler, PhD, MSW, is an associate professor in the Department of Public Health at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Dr. Wexler's collaborative research aims to deepen our understanding of indigenous youth suicide and resilience in ways that offer possibilities for local action. She is currently the Principal Investigator of one site in a National Science Foundation study—Circumpolar Indigenous Pathways to Adulthood—featured here, which focused on youth resilience in five northern communities, and a dissemination grant focused on digital and participatory methods. Dr. Wexler is lead evaluator for three locally driven wellness programs in Northwest Alaska, and is the Co-Principal Investigator of a small exploratory study focused on depictions and narratives of wellness for urban men of color. Her published works focus on the intersection of heritage and health (particularly suicide and resilience), cross-cultural issues in mental health services, and collaborative and digital research methods.

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