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Review Article

Transcultural Psychiatry 0(0) 1–31 ! The Author(s) 2013

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DOI: 10.1177/1363461513497232 tps.sagepub.com

Mapping resilience pathways ofIndigenous youth in five circumpolarcommunities

James AllenUniversity of Minnesota Medical School and University of Alaska Fairbanks

Kim HopperColumbia University and Nathan Kline Institute

Lisa WexlerUniversity of Massachusetts Amherst

Michael KralUniversity of Illinois at Urbana Champaign

Stacy RasmusUniversity of Alaska Fairbanks

Kristine NystadSami University College

Abstract

This introduction to the Special Issue Indigenous Youth Resilience in the Arctic reviews

relevant resilience theory and research, with particular attention to Arctic Indigenous

youth. Current perspectives on resilience, as well as the role of social determinants, and

community resilience processes in understanding resilience in Indigenous circumpolar

settings are reviewed. The distinctive role for qualitative inquiry in understanding these

frameworks is emphasized, as is the uniquely informative lens youth narratives can offer

in understanding Indigenous, cultural, and community resilience processes during times

of social transition. We then describe key shared cross-site methodological elements of

the Circumpolar Indigenous Pathways to Adulthood study, including sampling, research

design, procedures, and analytic strategies. The site-specific papers further elaborate on

methods, focusing on those elements unique to each site, and describe in considerable

Corresponding author:

James Allen, Department of Biobehavioral Health & Population Sciences, University of Minnesota Medical

School, Duluth Campus, 1035 University Drive, Duluth, MN 55812, USA.

Email: jallen@d.umn.edu

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detail locally salient stressors and culturally patterned resilience strategies operating in

each community. The concluding paper considers these across sites, exploring conti-

nuities and discontinuities, and the influence of cross-national social policies.

Keywords

adolescence, Arctic, Indigenous, qualitative, resilience

Cultural change and social transformation occur in any society, but their pace andreach can vary considerably. Circumpolar Indigenous people are responding torapid changes affecting their core political, economic, and cultural systems. Thisstudy looks at young people growing up in five such communities, seeking toidentify the stressors that make for difficult passages and the resilience processesthat safeguard transition into adulthood. Using collaborative and interdisciplinarymethods of inquiry, the Circumpolar Indigenous Pathways to Adulthood (CIPA)project seeks to analyze qualitative life history narratives of youth fromNortheastern Siberian Eveny, Northern Norwegian Sami, Northeastern CanadaInuit, Northwestern Alaska Inupiat, and Southwestern Alaska Yup’ik commu-nities. The study aims to explore how sweeping transitions and globalization areaffecting young people’s lives, and the ways these communities shape youth resili-ence as they face and overcome these unique challenges (Kirmayer, 2006). Study ofresilience processes in adolescence can also provide keys to understanding broadersociocultural tensions that often come into focus during many of the developmen-tal tasks young people navigate on the pathway to adulthood. In this way, thenarratives of youth coming of age in circumpolar communities hold potential toalso tell a still-evolving story of cultural continuity wrested from disruptive coloniallegacies. Youth experience can provide a lens through which to explore ways cer-tain resilience processes might remain deeply patterned within traditional culturalpractices, alongside with new emergent strategies representing innovations.

In addition to its developmental emphasis and international, interdisciplinaryscope, the current study is distinguished by a commitment to principles of commu-nity-based participatory research (CBPR; Minkler & Wallerstein, 2008). The workat each study site is rooted in long-standing research relationships that span a decadeor longer, and that predate this current project. This time invested in the researchrelationship positions our research group to tap multilevel understandings of localresilience processes, brought into sharp relief through young people’s stories ofchallenge and accomplishment. Familial and community resources are defined andbound together in these accounts, along with the improvisations of inventive youngpeople and their allies. This allows exploration of both culture-specific elements ofresilience processes, as well as commonalities and divergences across sites.

Indigenous participants, local institutions, and community coresearchers func-tioned as collaborative partners with our interdisciplinary, international team ofuniversity researchers throughout all phases of this project. The research was

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initiated through a local process at each site, culminating in a circumpolar consen-sus meeting with youth and adult community representatives that arrived at ashared core set of cross-site research questions (Ulturgasheva et al., 2011).Interviewing, data collection, and analytic procedures at each site involvedshared university and community coresearcher direction. Provisional local findingswere disseminated back to each community, where community coresearchers pro-vided interpretive guidance. With an eye to sustainability, this project is alsointended to build local community research capacity, and to gather baseline datafor future prospective inquiry that will follow this group of research participantsthrough adulthood.

This Introduction to the Special Issue Indigenous Youth Resilience in the Arcticreviews relevant resilience theory and research, with an emphasis on recent devel-opments in the resilience literature, recent work in resilience theory and researchacross cultures and in Indigenous communities, and research in circumpolar set-tings and with Arctic Indigenous youth. It then describes elements of the cross-sitemethodology shared across the sites of the Circumpolar Indigenous Pathways toAdulthood (CIPA) study. The five papers that follow each makes use of flexibilityalso built into this shared methodology, allowing distinct, site-specific, and highlylocalized portraits of resilience processes in each international community. Theseportraits afford views of the stressors and resources shaping culturally patternedresilience processes emergent through life histories of Indigenous young people,analyzed by age group (early and late adolescence) and gender. A sixth papercompares stressors and resilience strategies across sites, tracing the influence ofdiverse cross-national educational and social policies. We believe the series canbe usefully drawn upon to guide future collaborative, interdisciplinary, inter-national research, to inform Arctic social policy, and to support Indigenous effortspromoting youth resilience across the circumpolar north.

Contemporary perspectives on circumpolar Indigenousyouth resilience

Rapid social change, attended by colonial and disenfranchising intrusions, hasresulted in significant social problems across the circumpolar Arctic. These profoundchanges have occurred largely in the past 50 years, and have resulted in significantbehavioral health disparities for Indigenous young people, and especially youngmen, along with widespread social concern, associated with substance abuse, vio-lence, and youth suicide as profiled through a broadly interdisciplinary literature.1

Yet, despite these mounting disparities and inequities in health outcomes when con-trasted to majority national populations, large numbers of Indigenous circumpolaryouth successfully navigate the passage into adulthood. Understanding how com-munities across the circumpolar north make such passages feasible has immenseimplications for prevention, treatment, and social policy in the Arctic.

Coinciding with these disruptive changes in the Arctic, over these same 50 years,an important body of interdisciplinary work has emerged to examine what

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contributes to healthy development and well-being in the face of adversity (Luthar,2006; Luthar & Brown, 2007; Masten, 2007). A common definition of the phenom-enon, termed resilience, was established a decade ago as a “dynamic processencompassing positive adaptation within the context of significant adversity”(Luthar, Cicchetti, & Becker, 2000, p. 543). This approach to understanding resili-ence distinguishes between risk, vulnerability, and protection (Luthar & Cicchetti,2000; Luthar et al., 2000): risk refers broadly to adverse circumstances experiencedby a collective; vulnerability to features of history, practice, or circumstance thatintensify risk; and protection describes factors that reduce risk or buffer its effects.

In contrast to psychiatry and its allied disciplines, resilience is construed differ-ently by systems biology and ecology through a usage predating its appearance inthe human development literature. In ecology, resilience is more broadly under-stood as “the capacity of a social-ecological system to maintain similar structure,functioning, and feedbacks [emphasis added] despite shocks and perturbations”(Chapin, Matson, & Vitousek, 2011, p. 192). These broad interdisciplinary physicalscience roots influenced the development of an ecological-transactional model ofhuman resilience (Cicchetti & Lynch, 1993), which views the human context (cul-ture, community, kinship, and family) as nested levels of influence that shape resili-ence processes. The ecological model underscores the significance of thesecontextual factors operating at varying levels of proximity to the individual.These multilevel understandings of the role of contextual influences challengeresearchers to conceive of resilience beyond the individual level, and beyond earlierresilience research’s focus on such phenomenon as personality traits or life events.That these types of multilevel understandings of resilience are necessary becomesclear when we note that focusing on the individual level alone typically accounts forless than half the variance in studies of the mental health and well-being outcomesof youth (e.g., Beckett et al., 2006; Sroufe, Egeland, Carlson, & Collins, 2005).Accordingly, ecological approaches stress how both ontogenetic development andadaptation on the individual level are shaped by contextual factors operating atmultiple levels. One of the many implications of this emphasis on context isacknowledgement that more complete understandings of the strategies thatdefine resilience entail the application of local resources to meet specific local chal-lenges. Because resource utility depends not only on their local availability andaccessibility, but also on the ways in which these resources are freighted with localmeaning, resilience as a process can vary significantly across different culturalsettings as a function of differences in value systems and worldviews (Kirmayer,Sehdev, Whitely, Dandeneau, & Issac, 2009; S. White & Ellison, 2007).

Ungar (2011) notes that “study of resilience should involve context first and thechild second” because “positive outcomes are mostly the result of facilitative envir-onments that provide children with the potential to do well” (p. 4). He describesfour principles implicit in ecological understandings of resilience—decentrality,complexity, atypicality, and cultural relativity—that can guide a study of context.Decentrality reinforces the shift in focus from the individual to broader socialecological levels of understanding. Decentrality is congruent with Masten’s

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(2001) distinction between “resiliency” as individual internal trait and “resilience”as multilevel process (Cicchetti & Curtis, 2007). Mindful of this distinction, ourgaze shifts to seek out the processes and practices—their timing, triggering mech-anisms, titrating of intensity and duration, ability to adjust—by means of whichenvironments provide resources for strategic use. With complexity, Ungar (2011)underscores what it takes to make resources useable—available, accessible, andmeaningful to the actors in question—and that their effective uptake requiresmeshing with the actors’ aptitudes and capacities, as well as those of associatesor peers. Complexity also recognizes that effective assemblies of actors are notfixed, but instead change “as individuals move between contexts and throughtime” (2011, p. 7). Stated differently, we must attend to interactive functions andtheir ripple effects across complex systems. Complexity reinforces the organizingprinciple of decentrality, that environmental factors beyond the individual level areoverriding determinants in resilience. The implicit relational perspective in bothprinciples is both expressed and magnified within the tight, kinship-based organ-izational structures of many Indigenous communities (Allen, Mohatt, Markstrom,Novins, & Byers, 2011).

Atypicality recognizes what can appear as unusual behavior judged from out-side, may instead prove contextually relevant and adaptive within certain settings.This can be of particular relevance in the unique physical and social environmentalcontexts in the Arctic. Understanding how “unusual” behavior patterns may belocally functional in a distinctively configured cultural ecology, when alternativeand more conventional pathways to development are blocked, may be critical tounderstanding resilience in circumpolar contexts. Other researchers have describedways childhood and adolescence is at times reconfigured around achievement of themeans to survive in contemporary inner-city communities in New York and Brazil(Bourgois, 2002; Scheper-Hughes & Sargent, 1999). Young people in these com-munities engage in activities that to the majority, mainstream would appear riskyand adverse, activities like drug-dealing and defense-training. For youth in thesecommunities though, there are few other paths to protection of self, family, andcommunity. The long-term costs of such pathways, through penalties exacted whencertain development milestones are bypassed, may need to be assessed.

Finally, cultural relativity recognizes that ontological development beyond basicbiopsychosocial events, such as the timing of secondary sexual characteristics inpuberty, varies culturally. Relativity takes the atypicality principle—“when thebenchmarks for . . . development are defined locally”—and complicates it furtherin multicultural settings, where “competing truth claims of . . . intersecting cultures”contend (Ungar, 2011, p. 9). Relativity folds in on itself when globalization’s“homogenizing effects” intersect with once-unquestioned local cultural practice(Appadurai, 1996). Relativity, along with the principle of complexity, suggeststhe very appreciation of resilience may be a function of the social location fromwhich it is viewed. Thus, resilience in specific cultural groups may involve a choiceto resist dominant cultural norms in favor of Indigenous coping strategies, asIndigenous communities invoke acts of opposition in response to colonial

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domination (Tousignant & Sioui, 2009; Wexler, DiFulvio, & Burke, 2009). Theseacts of resistance may be practiced subtly, through deliberate cultivation of culturalcontinuity, or directly, through organized efforts of opposition.

Social determinants of health and resilience in Indigenouscircumpolar settings

Ecological inquiry also leads to a consideration of the social determinants ofhealth (Marmot & Commission on Social Determinants of Health, 2007), andthese take distinctive shape in the circumpolar north. With respect to Indigenouspeoples’ health (Gracey & King, 2009; King, Smith, & Gracey, 2009), any exam-ination of social determinants must begin with the ongoing and lingering impactsof colonization. This experience includes historical and contemporary examplesof marginalization, exclusion, cultural suppression, forced assimilation (e.g.,removal of children to residential boarding schools), and outright extermination.Coupled with this legacy are practices of racism, discrimination, and demeaningportrayals of Indigenous people in popular media and social discourse. Myriadsocial policies have widespread impact on Indigenous peoples’ sense of connec-tion to their land and its coinhabitants, historically a crucial component ofindividual and collective identity. These policies foster dependency on the state,mandate schooling and year-round settlements, and marginalize traditional rolesand livelihoods, and their cumulative effect is to erode health (Wexler, 2009). Theshared and particular set of social determinants associated with this coloniallegacy constitutes a central consideration in multilevel ecological understandingsof resilience in Indigenous circumpolar settings. The historical process associatedwith colonization and its accompanying oppression has created patterns of unre-lenting and persistent health inequalities (Kirmayer, Dandeneau, Marshall,Phillips, & Williamson, 2011).

Numerous studies identify an association between cultural disruption, accultur-ation stress, identity struggle, and the health disparities in circumpolar commu-nities (Berry, 1985; Bjerregaard, 2001; Chance, 1990; Kirmayer, Fletcher, &Boothroyd, 1998; Larsen, 1990; O’Neil, 1986; Stairs, 1992). Other research suggestslinkages between cultural continuity, enculturation, community control and actionas resilience processes fostering well-being for Indigenous populations.2 Whilethese studies identify connections between cultural disruption and negative out-comes, and between cultural continuity and positive outcomes, they have yet toprovide a coherent theoretical framework for understanding their relations. Welack multilevel models of how the navigation of competing Indigenous and dom-inant cultural expectations occurs in adolescence, how this process is supported byfactors both within and beyond the individual, and how it is made sense of locally.These gaps in the existing research underscore the potential contribution of thecurrent study to the knowledge base on Indigenous young people.

Local variations among a common set of social determinants across the circum-polar north direct our attention to specific resilience processes that draw upon

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distinctive bodies of traditional knowledge, values, and practices. The principle ofcultural relativity prepares us to see the deployment of resources as both subtle andpoignant: as the living legacy of tradition on the one hand, and as modes of resist-ance/accommodation to the evolving entanglements of both dominant societies andlarger globalizing forces, on the other.

Community resilience frameworks in Indigenous contexts

Lafrance, Bodor, and Bastien (2008) note striking correspondences betweenIndigenous worldviews and ecological theories of resilience. Their review constructsa resilience framework underscoring the roles of family, identity, and cultural for-mation within a relational worldview in which spirit world, nature, community,family, and individuals are intimately joined, moving understanding of resilience tothe community level. An important element of community resilience in Indigenouscontexts, then, can be comprehended as flexible structures of cultural continuityenacted in innovative ways in response to new demands (Kirmayer et al., 2009). Asnoted earlier, psychiatry, psychology, public health, and the social sciences describeresilience as “adaptation in the face of adversity” (Masten, 2007). In contrast, theseemerging frameworks from Indigenous settings, paralleling the ecological viewwithin systems biology, emphasize the capacity of systems to maintain similarstructure and function, despite assault and perturbations.

Drawing upon emerging resilience literature from collaborative research in Inuit,Metis, Mi’kwaq, and Mohawk communities, Kirmayer and colleagues (Kirmayeret al., 2011; Kirmayer et al., 2009) explore these structural and functional elements incommunity resilience. These descriptions emphasize the dynamic properties of theircontext, suggesting they can be understood as events in systems (Hawe, Shiell, &Riley, 2009). From a systems perspective, resilience processes involve networks ofpeople, events, and settings that share relationships, linkages, interactions, andtransactions, including feedback loops. Resources are the raw materials for the bet-terment of human conditions, and resilience processes are understood through theirability to distribute and transform these resources across these networks.

Examples of community resilience processes in this emergent literature includeformal or structural vehicles of expression in metaphor, ritual, and story-telling.Substantively, a broad range of functional, purposive activity described includechoreographing reconciliation ceremonies, promoting self-regulation throughalignment with larger mythic structures, retelling traumatic histories in ways thatvalorize collective identity, and reclaiming symbolic culture for purposes of healing,life narrative, and the transmission of heritage. The multiple factors these authorsconsidered as resilience processes ranged widely across family relations, oral trad-itions and storytelling, connection to the land, traditional healing practices, andspirituality and ceremony. They also involved cultural identity, knowledge, andcontinuity, and finally, collective and political agency.

Research on the saliency of cultural continuity highlights the utility of commu-nity resilience perspectives. As communities, a formative study by Chandler and

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Lalonde (1998) identified five markers of cultural continuity in CanadianAboriginal communities: (a) bands taking active steps to secure; (b) title to trad-itional lands; (c) self-governance back from government agencies, and some degreeof community control over (d) educational, (e) police/fire, and (f) health services.They established a linear relationship existed between the number of these markerspresent and suicide risk on the community level. This level of analysis is typicallyabsent from characterizations of resilience prominent in the mainstream health andsocial science literature focus on adaptation at the individual level. This particularformulation of cultural continuity can be understood as an agent or event within acomplex system (Schensul, 2009). This emergent literature also encourages explor-ation of the imaginative work and social mechanisms driving complexity in resili-ence processes. Such inputs include new influences such as globalization andhybridization, alongside the creative involvement of youth in determining theirown destinies and futures.

Mapping complexity in circumpolar Indigenous resilience processes

These emerging community resilience frameworks in Indigenous settings parallelrecent developments in mainstream interdisciplinary systems approaches to resili-ence through their shared exploration of multiple domains within and outside thedeveloping person (Cicchetti & Blender, 2004; Curtis &Cicchetti, 2003; Luthar et al.,2000; Masten, 2007). The influence of ecologically informed approaches is unmis-takable in this literature’s growing insistence on viewing resilience as “process orphenomenon . . .not . . . trait” (Schoon, 2006, p. 16); resilience is seen as neither fixednor static, but instead as recurrently activated. Risk or challenge, then, takes twomain forms: staged transitions (culturally prescribed and orchestrated), andunscheduled events and conditions (episodic or chronic stressors). One other import-ant phenomenon in current views of resilience includes the broad influences of devel-opmental cascades, which are “the cumulative consequences for development of themany interactions and transactions occurring in developing systems that result inspreading effects across levels, among domains at the same level, and across differentsystems or generations” (Masten & Cicchetti, 2010, p. 491). Cascade effects broadlyinfluence responses to future challenges, while ripple effects describe the more directcollateral impacts of actions in other life areas.

Recognition of the context-specificity of both risk and protective processesunderscores the need to assess resilience across multiple domains, positions us toexpect cross-cultural variation, and alerts us to “risk modifiers that tend to behighly robust across widely disparate cultural contexts and [emphasis added]those more idiosyncratic to particular settings” (Luthar & Zelazo, 2003, p. 525).Research on social determinants of health reminds us that resources for bufferingstress, navigating transitions, and mobilizing support mimic patterns of socialinequality at large, making for substantial inequities in the distribution ofresilience-relevant assets. Finally, values and context-dependency enter into whatconstitutes good outcome or positive adjustment (Masten, 1999).

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Both historical legacy and social moment figure into contextualizing risk, andinto the strategies through which communities manage risk. In Indigenous settings,if risk is to be properly embedded, then an “overriding” first fact is dislocation fromhistory, cultural continuity, lands, and livelihoods (Kirmayer et al., 2011; Kirmayeret al., 2009). Accordingly, we may expect that the coordinates of significant elem-ents of resilience reside at the collective or community level, and that the tools orresources (material and symbolic) that make for protective factors are distinctivelycolored. Instead of limiting attention exclusively to individual adaptation, thisbroadens our search to include processes enhancing the capacity of systems tomaintain similar structure and function, despite assault and perturbations. Atthe cultural level, the collective nature of many of the important resilience processesin Indigenous communities is clear: revitalized narratives of selfhood and healing,political activism, and reclaimed and revalorized cultural practices adapted forfresh applications to changing times. Our challenge in the current research is todetect such work, and the local variations in and departures from such themes, inthe stories of young people.

Qualitative inquiry permits us to access local understandings of these types oftransaction. Given the logistical challenges and small populations inherent toArctic research, the flux of social transition (Ungar, Clark, Kwong, Makhnach,& Cameron, 2005), the critical importance of capturing local understandings, andour experiences with challenges arising out of cases of incongruity between elem-ents of Western research paradigms and Indigenous forms of knowledge generation(Gone, 2012), this methodological approach seemed best suited to this discoveryphase of our research.

Prior research by members of our group (e.g., Kral & Idlout, 2008; Mohatt &Rasmus, 2005; Wexler, in press; Wexler & Burke, 2011) suggests these culturallybased narratives themselves constitute resilience processes in circumpolar commu-nities. Narratives reinforce cultural continuity by linking generations in the sharedidentity of storytelling. Because they play a central role in circumpolar Indigenouscultures, stories can provide a way of talking about stressors and change; indeed,the process of retelling can inform—and challenge, extend, modify, and refine—local Indigenous community members’ understandings of resilience (MacDonald,Glode, & Wien, 2005). Storytelling connects people to lived experience, spiritualtraditions, and collective history, and positions them as coparticipants in an activeprocess of sharing knowledge about “how we live.”

Local narratives also describe moral ideas, identity tools, and collective experi-ence that resilience draws upon, and express modes of problem solving, socialposition, solidarity, and emotion regulation. They can recast representationsimposed from the dominant society, reworking what are extended as negativesinto fresh tools of self-transformation, and propose metaphors for social changethat challenge and impact many of the prevailing negative social determinants ofhealth (Hall & Lamont, 2009). Though resilience research increasingly emphasizesthe importance of context and process, contemporary understandings of resiliencecan still often reflect Western assumptions such as individualistic values (Olsson,

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Bond, Burns, Vella-Brodrick, & Sawyer, 2003; Ungar, Lee, Callaghan, &Boothroyd, 2005). In contrast, circumpolar Indigenous viewpoints emphasize amore collective or relational self (Briggs, 1998; Stairs, 1992), setting the stage forthe development of social competence in a young person that, among otherthings, values listening over assertive communication (Kendal, 1989). Similarly,historical and social context is often largely ignored in resilience research; ignor-ant of history, it can be clueless to irony. And so, although treated as an unam-biguous “good” in most development studies, education can also symbolizecolonialism in Indigenous communities (Dehyle, 1992; Dumont, 1972; McLean,1997; Ryan, 1989). Thus, whatever the costs incurred with respect to futureemployment prospects, leaving school can demonstrate affiliation with culturalidentity and be an expression of personal strength. Blind to its historical freight,many resilience studies consider high school graduation unquestioningly as anunproblematic positive outcome (Ungar, 2004; Wexler et al., 2009). All theseconsiderations emphasize the need for understanding resilience as situatedwithin categories of interconnection and relatedness that are core to circumpolarIndigenous cultures, based in the experience and meaning systems shapingunderstanding.3

Youth narratives as a lens to understanding

Young people’s stories offer a distinctive lens on unsettled ways of life. Their nar-ratives allow us to put their self-understandings, which themselves are often pro-visional works-in-progress, to work as guides to established rules for behavior andsocial interaction (Erikson, 1959/1980), to the sometimes troubled passage to adult-hood, and to community-level responses/resources young people can draw upon inmaking this passage. Storytelling traditionally represents an important meaning-making activity for Indigenous people (Adam & Fosdick, 1983; Chance, 1990;Fienup-Riordan, 1997; Kendal, 1989; Stairs, 1992), thereby offering the listenerunderstandings into the distinctive logics, values, and consequences guiding con-duct (Baumeister & Newman, 1994; Bruner, 1990; Feldman, 1990; Rosaldo, 1986;Turner & Bruner, 1986). Because these meanings are often local, and because theyprovide symbolic parameters for appropriate situational behavior, they are par-ticularly relevant to study of circumpolar Indigenous resilience. Meaning, there-fore, is contingent upon both sense of self and the action possibilities available.These possibilities in turn are shaped by community structures along with theprevailing cultural scripts associated with characteristics such as gender, age, andethnicity. To negotiate these tensions, particularly during times of transition, youthimprovise upon received meanings, engaging in creative endeavor (Adelson, 2000;Baumeister, 1987). This leads to new synthesis in meaning systems and discourse(Bacigalupo, 2003; Swan & Linehan, 2000). As described above, all this occurs atmultiple levels, including each individual and their peers, family, extended kinshipstructures, community, larger society, and global youth culture (Murray, 2000).Together, these influences put youth at the nexus of at times competing

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expectations aligned with social change, global influence, dominant society, andIndigenous communities.4

In its study of youth narratives, the CIPA project draws upon current trends inmainstream resilience research, along with resilience frameworks described inIndigenous settings and multicultural studies of well-being (Allen, Rivkin, &Lopez, 2013; Bandura, 1997; Diener & Suh, 2000; Kahneman, Diener, &Schwarz, 1999; Snyder & Lopez, 2002). We seek to identify common and distinctiveelements across five circumpolar Indigenous cultures that share a core set of chal-lenges and social determinants, as well as historical, genealogical, and linguisticlinkages. Each collaborating community has a majority Indigenous population.All are located in the circumpolar environment within Arctic climatic zones, andall have shared a colonial history characterized by rapid imposed social transitionand forced acculturation. Colonization was conducted by diverse institutionsacross sites, but resulted in a common legacy of cultural disruption that includesbut is not limited to forced schooling, political domination, and suppression ofIndigenous language (Berry, 1985; Bjerregaard, 2001; Chance, 1990; Kirmayer,Fletcher, et al., 1998; Larsen, 1990; O’Neil, 1986; Stairs, 1992). Each communitynonetheless retains hard-won distinctions of identity, culture, and livelihood.Through comparative life history narrative analysis across sites, this projectseeks to describe ways in which diverse circumpolar social structures influenceIndigenous young people’s stressors, coping strategies, and future prospects,along with the community resilience processes that sustain these youth.

Methods

This Methods section describes the sampling framework and targets, researchdesign, elements of the interview procedures shared across the sites, and organizingstructures of the CIPA collaborative methods. The individual site-specific paperswill describe elements of the methods unique to each community’s research.

This project grew out of long-standing collaborative research relationships ineach of the respective communities between community members and university-based researchers; at two of the community settings, the university researchers werealso Indigenous community members. To ensure local shaping of research ques-tions regarding resilience and successful pathways to adulthood, CIPA engagedcommunity members in the design of the inquiry, data gathering, and interpret-ation of results. CIPA’s aims, together with selective gleanings from the existingliterature on circumpolar Indigenous resilience and our own group’s previous workin this area, were integrated into a heuristic model that guided inquiry.

In this heuristic model, pictured in Figure 1, ecological factors specific to thecontext of youth in Indigenous circumpolar communities are identified. Theseinclude Indigenous traditional culture practices and worldviews, global youth cul-tural influences, national political, social, and economic systems, and the specter ofrapid, imposed social change. These contextual influences are mediated byrelational factors at the family, local community, and institutional levels.

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Relational factors here refer to characteristics of sustained patterns of interactionsbetween people within the family, within the community, and within institutions.Within relational factors, the local institutional level distinguishes externallyimposed relational structures, such as the content and formatting of Westernschooling, from the community level rituals and activities instead formed aroundpractices of local origins, such as the structures that support and nurture trad-itional dance. These contextual and mediating relational factors impact a variety oflife stressors that contemporary Indigenous youth face. Figuring prominentlyamong these stressors are tensions between different contextual and relational fac-tors, for example, tensions between local expectations and external, often imposedexpectations from outside the local community. Out of this mix, circumpolarIndigenous youth improvise passage to a future provisional vision of adulthood.In the course of this passage, they must derive, revise, and enact their own sub-jectivities, including meaning structures, as works in progress. This heuristic modelguided our construction of a shared cross-site life history interview protocol.

Traditional culturalpractices and

worldview

Global youthinfluence

National political,social, andeconomicsystems

Colonial legacy

Rapid imposedsocial transition

Collaborative life history methodology

Key tensionsacross

contextual andrelationalfactors

Life stress orchallenges

Social,symbolic, and

materialresources

Futureadulthoods

Mediated by relational factorsContextual factors

Social ecology of culturally-patterned resilience strategies

Everyday life

Localinstitutions

Family

Community

Youth life history interviews

Youth subjectivities

Resilience strategies

Local steeringcommitteeanalysis

Circumpolar steeringcommitteeanalysis Existing

literature:re-readingresilience

Groundedtheory:

emergentthemes

Narrativeanalysis:resilience

stories

Figure 1. Heuristic model guiding Circumpolar Indigenous Pathways to Adulthood study

methodology.

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Life history interviews were selected to allow our group to construct individua-lized accounts of the ordinary work of local youth at each of the different sites asthey navigate these straits in often-extraordinary ways. Through this method, wesought out accounts that would include both techniques of individual coping and,of even greater interest to our group, the strategic assemblages of social, symbolic,and material resources youth people use to negotiate their ways forward. Weanticipated that these assemblages of resources would include the kinship andcommunity supports constituting community and cultural resilience, and life his-tory methods would provide rich, textured descriptions of local enactments ofresilience in these circumpolar Indigenous settings.

All five CIPA sites shared sampling framework, research design, and interviewprotocol. However, commitment to this common core also allowed considerablelocal flexibility to add elements in the interview protocol to address local needs andinterests unique to each setting. Similarly, the analytic methods for the CIPA lifehistory interviews that are the focus of this Special Issue can be understood as atoolbox of methods. Sites variously drew from these tools with different degrees ofemphasis and focus, in response to unique configurations of local community andresearcher interests.

Sample

The cross-site interview sampling strategy sought to interview 20 young people ages11–19 at each of the five sites, balanced by gender, and two age categories (11–14and 15–19), using nomination and snowball purposive sampling procedures(Maxwell, 2005; Patton, 1990). In this sampling approach, each site used mixturesof local steering committee (described below) nomination of youth, and theseyouth in turn nominated additional participants, until each of the age andgender cells in the sampling design were filled. This sample size representedapproximately 10–25% of youth at these ages in each community.

Design

A cross-sectional design was selected as the most efficient way to generate rich dataabout the transition to adulthood in a limited time-period with capacity for cross-site comparison. The study uses a life history methodology (Cole & Knowles, 2001;R. W. White, 2006) to elicit resilience narratives from youth in order to identifystressors and resilience strategies at multiple levels including individual, family,community, and regional.

Interviewing procedures

As will be described in each site-specific paper, interviews were conducted eitherby the investigator or various configurations of investigator-led interview teams.Interviewing procedures included the core cross-site protocol, with unique

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site-specific interview questions of local interest. All five sites used a core semi-structured interview guide and training protocol that began with a shared open-ing activity for the interview, which asked each youth to recount how they spenttheir time in the previous day. This included where they slept, whom they werewith, what they did, and the time spent on each activity. As another core element,interviewers collaboratively developed a visual life timeline with each youth. Themajor shared element was the life history interview. This was conducted acrosstwo or more sessions, and examined each life in social-historical context.5 Theinterview invited young people to describe their life story from their earliestmemories to present. Follow-up questions served to elaborate the life story byexploring major life challenges, along with how the youth overcame these chal-lenges. Interviews were open-ended, and interviewers drew upon probe questionsfrom the semistructured interview guide to explore past and present resiliencestrategies, including resources, relationships, and coping mechanisms utilized.Probes also explored the family and community histories that make up significantcomponents of life histories with Indigenous people (W. L. White, 2000). Thesemistructured interview also asked specific questions related to personal, rela-tional, and community well-being, and personal and community cultural continu-ity. Special emphasis was also given to youth responses to life stressors, includingcoping mechanisms such as thoughts and cognitive strategies, actions and otherbehavior, relationships accessed, and community structures and resources used.Finally, youth were asked a series of social network questions and completed aconcluding demographic questionnaire. Figure 2 summarizes shared cross-siteelements.6

This four-part strategy of life timeline, interview, sociogram, and daily calendarwas adopted in efforts to address two challenges often arising in interviewing youngadolescents, who may lack insight into their life stories and feelings and may find itdifficult to open up to an adult. These varied data collection strategies, along withthe ongoing input of age-mates from the same communities (see below), weredevised to address these common challenges.

Community and cross-site collaborative procedures

Using previously established relationships with the community, each investigatorgroup first worked with community leaders to establish a local steering committee(LSC) for the CIPA study at each site. The LSC was planned as multigenerational,comprised of Elders, adults, and youth, and was charged with providing localinput, guidance, and joint leadership regarding specific elements of the researchquestion. Each LSC developed local research questions of interest to the commu-nity and, in some cases, adapted data collection methods in order to maximize localrelevance and acceptability. In this way, site-specific components were added to thecommon research question, design, and interview protocol. Each LSC assisted withanalysis, interpretation, and dissemination. Site-specific papers will elaborate onunique elements in the evolution of their own LSC.

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In addition to the LSC in each community, a circumpolar steering committee(CSC) was formed with two youth and one adult representative from each com-munity. The process and outcomes of this CSC meeting are described in greaterdetail in Ulturgasheva et al. (2011). Simultaneous translation accommodated sev-eral languages; written minutes summarizing the prior day’s discussions and deci-sions were circulated each morning, and an iterative process of review anddiscussion was used. This CSC work merged local concerns with common interestsinto a coherent shared vision. The meeting established consensus on cross-siteresearch questions and agreement to use a common core interview protocol, assur-ing comparability across sites. The deliberations of this international CSC alsoinformed our understanding of diverse social, economic, and political systemsimpacting young people in their pathways to adulthood. Following the CSC meet-ing, local interviews were finalized with the LSC in each site.

Analytic approach

We locate our interpretive project within disciplinary and methodological plural-ism. Disciplinary backgrounds of the university researchers include anthropology,education, psychology, and social work. Added to this diversity was an analyticmethodology that allowed each site to select three distinct sets of analytic tools,each used with somewhat different emphases across sites, in response to local com-munity interests, and the interests and disciplinary backgrounds of the site’s

• Compare developmental trajectories

• Analyze through cross-site grounded theory coding and narrative methods

• Describe activities of youth and time spent in activities

• Identify ego networks of material, social, and emotional support

Lifetimeline

In-depthinterview

Dailycalendar

Sociogram

Shared foci: *Contextual *Relational*Challenges *Resources *Future

Figure 2. Cross-site life history interview.

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university researchers. This interpretive strategy was devised at a cross-site analyticplanning meeting of the university researchers in July 2010, and included:

. Review of the resilience literature: This emphasized understandings of resilienceas reconfigured in recent work directed at multilevel understandings, with par-ticular attention to recent approaches to the study of resilience in Indigenoussettings;

. Grounded theory analysis: Intensive qualitative analysis of interview transcriptsusing a modified grounded theory approach to identify both common and site-specific themes that pertain to resilience patterns and practices; and

. Narrative analysis: Identification of general motifs that took shape in recon-structed “resilience stories”: composite, prototypic narratives drawn from thebody of interviews, and elaborated upon through subsequent research teamdiscussions.

Our overall analytic approach represents a structured attempt to bring intoproductive dialogue the yield of three distinctive methods: careful reexaminationof current thinking about resilience, richly textured, context-dependent, and some-times site-specific yield of grounded theory analysis and thematic assays fromresilience stories.

Re-reading resilience

In the year following the analytic planning meeting, we revisited our original reviewof the resilience literature, informed both by the cross-cutting themes identified inour collaborative coding work and by heightened sensitivity to the elective affinitiesbetween ecological and community perspectives on resilience, and how it playedout in circumpolar Indigenous settings. We reread the literature, in effect, to refinethe interpretive tools and analytic constructs we would bring to bear on interviewand ethnographic data.

Grounding theory in the life histories

Prior to the cross-site analytic meeting, the university researchers at each sitecoded local interviews using a modified grounded theory (Strauss & Corbin,1998) approach. Following key elements of procedures described by Charmaz(Bryant & Charmaz, 2007; Charmaz, 2006, 2008), the local university researcheror research team reviewed interview transcripts, engaged in memoing and opencoding, and then developed a local codebook. These five initial local codebooksrepresented provisional coding schemes, which were reviewed in weekly tobiweekly international videoconference meetings over the year preceding the ana-lytic meeting. At the cross-site analytic meeting, several days were devoted to ateam understanding of each local coding system and to development of groupingsof aligned coding categories across the codebooks, melding them into a common

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cross-site coding protocol. For example, 13 separate local coding categories thatincluded codes such as “not to give up,” “staying healthy,” and “avoiding con-flict” were grouped under the cross-site code “getting through things.” Each localcode was assigned to one of 10 cross-site codes, creating groupings of codefamilies using the Atlas.ti (Friese, 2012) software approach to code structure asan organizing algorithm. We sought to develop a cross-site codebook and acoding protocol that preserved local meanings with sufficient flexibility for usein site-specific analyses, yet capable of bridging common elements to allow forcomparative work. During the year following the analytic meeting, the universityresearchers at each site used Atlas.ti software to implement this coding system torecode local interviews. While doing this work, teams further refined their localsite-specific codebooks, and began to identify candidate emergent codingcategories.

Closely read resilience narratives

At the analytical meeting, we had also begun to identify provisional motifs dis-cernible in “resilience stories.” Emergent entities in their own right, these offeredglimpses into the background or subtext behind the extended episodes of trial andtrouble—and routes, resources, backup supports, and inventiveness relied upon tonegotiate them—recounted in the life histories.

These narratives invited us to identify grounding assumptions of Indigenousculture and features of local “social imaginaries” (Taylor, 2004) at a differentlevel than that afforded by grounded theory. To complement the close, textuallydriven microanalysis of grounded theory, investigators assembled these motifsand fragments into brief narratives. Team members composed these compositenarratives from interview fragments, collateral commentary, and ethnographicmaterial collected over time. Here, in sharp contrast to the deconstructive, seg-mented, and “fracturing” approach of grounded theory to develop a stable set ofabstract theoretical concepts, narrative interpretation relies on prior theory, thepreservation of sequence and detail, and careful attention to time and place todevelop a case-centered approach (Riessman, 2008). In narrative analysis(Herman & Vervaeck, 2005; Holstein & Gubrium, 2012; Hurwitz, Greenhalgh,& Skultans, 2004), plot and character rather than excerpt and code are guidingconcerns. Sequence and storyline enable capture of agency, intention, and mean-ing in ways that the crosscutting and amalgamating work of grounded theorydoes not. In this case, the intent was to seed our collective thinking with the livelyassembly of tropes, staging devices, plotlines, characters, and stratagems thatcould be extracted from these reconstructed narratives of adolescent life. Wewere particularly interested in the local capacity for accommodating departuresfrom what might be considered the prescribed or standard version of making thepassage to adulthood—variations in pathways and styles that are either recog-nized and valued as alternatives in their own right, or provided for in ways thatamount to compensatory assistance.

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An iterative analytic process

We variously engaged the perspectives of Elders, grandparents, parents, extendedkin, other community members, and youth through their roles on LSCs. Based inprevious work of the researchers, we involved LSC members in the analysisthrough “briefings” about the preliminary analyses, again locally selectingamong various strategies with varying emphases at each of the sites. For example,one modal strategy variously applied by teams entailed presentations to LSCs ofpreliminary analyses based on memoing (Mohatt et al., 2004). This allowedresearchers to identify initial factors and conceptual orders related to the stressors,and the relationships and resources used by participants to respond to them. In thisapproach, basics of the codes and initial findings were shared orally with the LSCfor feedback. The researchers had already done this kind of iterative analysis inprevious studies (Allen et al., 2006; Kral, 2003; Kral & Idlout, 2006; Kral, Idlout,Minore, Dyck, & Kirmayer, 2011; Mohatt et al., 2004; Mohatt et al., 2008; Wexler,2006, 2009, 2011). These preliminary conceptual groupings were shared with andmodified when necessary by local LSC members. This cultural auditing process(Mohatt, Thomas, & Team, 2006) ensures cultural validity of the findings. Thisprovided insight into the kinds of tensions, resources, and strategies meaningful tolocal people. Investigators used field notes from these meetings to provide context-ual information, and to highlight possible areas to address in the analysis of theinterviews. Using these methods allowed CIPA to describe the stressors faced byIndigenous youth across gender and two age cohorts, the resources shaping theirculturally patterned resilience strategies, and how these stressors and culturallypatterned resilience strategies played out across sites.

Describing gender and developmental factors

Each research team, with guidance from their LSC, considered each youth lifehistory individually, within age cohorts, within gender, and finally across agecohorts and gender. Individual transcripts were coded to highlight areas salientto the main research foci—dominant stressors experienced, social and materialresources accessed, and characteristics of strategies used to respond, grouped byage and gender. The analysis yielded dominant stressors and resilience strategies,by gender, at two distinct developmental stages.

Assuring quality and credibility through collaborative research

Each community has participated in research with one or more of the universityresearchers for at least a decade. We believe these long-term research relationship,along with the involvement of the LSCs, the CSC, and the auditing processdescribed above as a form of respondent validation, allow for more accurateidentification and interpretation of the qualitative data. This increases the likeli-hood of deeper understanding of resilience from local perspectives, potentially

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highlighting elements of Indigenous frameworks heretofore missed by resilienceresearchers.

Mapping the resilience pathways of Indigenous youth in fivecircumpolar communities

In this Special Issue, each community is represented in a paper that highlightslocally salient themes. These five site-specific articles describe how youth partici-pants are growing up, spending time, transgressing or adhering to expectations,building and sustaining relationships, and imagining their futures. The themesemerging in each paper will also sensitize the reader to findings that resonateacross the sites. These cross-site themes are of variable salience in each individualsite, yet the emerging concepts nonetheless seem to capture something vital andrecurring in the resilience work documented in the life histories. In the concludingarticle, we close by considering stressors and culturally patterned resilience strate-gies across sites, searching for continuities and discontinuities, and the influence ofcross-national social policies.

Funding

This research was supported by ARC-0756211, National Science Foundation;R24MD001626, National Center on Minority Health and Health Disparities, PI: StacyRasmus and James Allen; P20RR061430, National Center for Research Resources, PI:

Bert Boyer. We also thank the participants, community coresearchers, steering committees,and project staff for their assistance.

Notes

1. This includes a broad general literature on circumpolar social change and behavioralhealth concerns (Condon, 1990; Doak & Nachmann, 1987; Jilek-Aall, 1988; Kirmayer,Boothroyd, & Hodgins, 1998; Kvernmo & Heyerdahl, 2003; O’Neil, 1986), as well as

literature specific to Eveny in Siberia (Bogoyavlensky, 1997; Pika, 1993, 1999; Rethman,2001; Vitebsky, 2000, 2002, 2006), Sami in Norway (Silviken, Haldorsen, & Kvernmo,2006; Spein, 2008), Inuit in Canada (Damas, 2002; Kral, 2012; Kral et al., 2009; Murry &

Brody, 1999; O’Neil, 1986; Rigby, MacDonald, & Otak, 2000; Tester & McNicoll, 2004),and Inupiaq and Yup’ik in Alaska (Alaska Injury Prevention Center, Critical Illness andTrauma Foundation Inc., & American Society for Suicidology, 2007; Allen, Levintoya,

& Mohatt, 2011; Hendin, Maltsberger, Lipschitz, Haas, & Kyle, 2001; Perkins,Sanddal, Howell, Sanddal, & Berman, 2009; Wexler, 2006, 2009; Wexler, Hill, Bertone-Johnson, & Fenaughty, 2008; Wexler, Silveira, & Bertone-Johnson, 2012). This litera-

ture also includes several reviews of substance abuse, violence, and suicide in theArctic (Allen, Levintoya, et al., 2011; Berry, 1985; Bjerregaard, 2001; Chandler &Proulx, 2006; Condon, 1990; Kettl & Bixler, 1991; Kirmayer, Brass, & Tait, 2000;Kirmayer, Fletcher, & Boothroyd, 1998; Kvernmo & Heyerdahl, 2003; Larsen 1990;

Lynge, 1985; Oosten & Remie, 1999; Sanson-Fisher, Campbell, Perkins, Blunden, &Davis, 2006).

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2. We emphasize this feature from ecology because it materially qualifies and extends ourunderstanding beyond that of adaptation in ways that will prove valuable when consider-ing concepts such as cultural continuity later in this discussion.

3. Numerous studies explore these linkages and review this literature (Adelson, 2000; Berlin,1987; Borowsky, Resnick, Ireland, & Blum, 1999; Chandler & Lalonde, 1998, 2009;EchoHawk, 1997; Fienup-Riordan, 2002; Herbert & McCannell, 1997; Kral & Idlout,

2008; Minore, Boone, Katt, & Kinch, 1991; Paproski, 1997; Phinney, 1991; Roberts &Holmes, 1999; Tatz, 2001; Wang & Burris, 1997; Warry, 1998; Wexler, 2006; Whitbeck,Adams, Hoyt, & Chen, 2004; J. White & Jodoin, 2004).

4. Numerous authors have written extensively on the linkages of resilience to local cate-gories of experience and meaning in the Arctic (Anderson, 2000; Bodenhorn, 1988, 2000;Briggs, 1998; Condon, 1988; DeMallie, 1998; Kerrtula, 2000; J. Miller, 2002; Nuttall,1992; Vitebsky, 2006; Wachovich, 1999).

5. A number of reviews provide extensive discussion of youth in the context of social changeand the need to construct coherent self-narrative during the transition to adulthood in theface of such change (Abu-Lughod, 1986; Cruikshank, 1990, 2000; Finnegan, 1992;

McAdams, 1996; Rosaldo, 1980a, 1980b, 1986; Shieffelin, 1990, 2002; J. A. Singer,2004; M. Singer & Baer, 1995; Tonkin, 1992; Vansina, 1965).

6. The format of these interviews was guided by several previous examples in the

literature (Allen et al., 2006; Caughey, 2006; Cole & Knowles, 2001; Hensel,Haakenson, & Mohatt, 2004; R. L. Miller, 2000; Mohatt, Hazel, et al., 2004; Mohatt,Rasmus, et al., 2004).

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James Allen, PhD, is Professor and Head of the Department of BiobehavioralHealth and Population Sciences at the University of Minnesota Medical School,Duluth campus. He has collaborated on research in well-being, health promotion,and preventive interventions with Yup’ik communities in southwestern Alaska forthe past 15 years on multiple NIAAA and NIMHD projects, including a currentNIMHD CBPR intervention award. He was a principal investigator on the multi-site collaborative NSF Circumpolar Indigenous Pathways to Adulthood projectreported here, working with the Alaska Yup’ik site. His research focuses onAmerican Indian and Alaska Native health, rural health services, culture andhealth, community-based participatory research, and community interventionsfor suicide, substance abuse, and vascular risk prevention.

Kim Hopper is Professor of Sociomedical Sciences, Mailman School of PublicHealth, Columbia University, Research Scientist at the Nathan Kline Institutefor Psychiatric Research, and President’s Professor, University of Alaska-Fairbanks. As an applied anthropologist, he is especially interested in understand-ing the social machinery of recovery from what are often viewed as psychoticepisodes, and is currently involved with interventions to change the publicmental health response to early psychiatric crises and long-term housing for

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persons with psychiatric disabilities. His CBPR work has been primarily with peersin public mental health.

Lisa M. Wexler, Ph.D., MSW, is an associate professor in the Department of PublicHealth at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Dr. Wexler’s collaborativeresearch aims to deepen our understanding of Indigenous youth suicide and resili-ence in ways that offer possibilities for local action. She is currently the principalinvestigator of one site in a National Science Foundation study, the CircumpolarIndigenous Pathways to Adulthood featured here, which focused on youth resili-ence in five northern communities, and a dissemination grant focused on digitaland participatory methods. Dr. Wexler is lead evaluator for three locally drivenwellness programs in Northwest Alaska, and is the coprincipal investigator of asmall exploratory study focused on depictions and narratives of wellness for urbanmen 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.

Michael Kral, PhD, is Associate Professor in the Departments of Psychology andAnthropology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He has beenconducting community-based participatory action research with Inuit inNunavut, Canada since 1994, examining suicide, suicide prevention, colonial cul-ture change, and kinship. He is the PI for the Igloolik, Nunavut site in this project.He has published on Inuit, suicide, and on history, theory and method in psych-ology. Prior to Illinois he has taught at Yale and the universities of Windsor andManitoba.

Stacy Rasmus, PhD, is a Research Assistant Professor in the Institute of ArcticBiology’s Center for Alaska Native Health Research (CANHR) at theUniversity of Alaska Fairbanks. Dr. Rasmus researches Indigenous resilienceand Indigenous methodologies and is currently working towards developing a col-laborative, community-based participatory research (CBPR) program at UAF withthe aims of reducing disparities in suicide and substance abuse among AlaskaNative and American Indian peoples. She is currently a principal investigator ofa National Institutes of Health (NIH) CBPR prevention research study based insouthwest Alaska that has the aims of increasing reasons for life and reducingsubstance abuse among Yup’ik youth using cultural process, practices, and pro-tective factors. She is also PI of the Native Transformations Project, an NIH R01study to determine sources of strength and resilience against drug abuse from thelife histories of 60 Coast Salish tribal community members in the PacificNorthwest. Finally, she is PI of several studies funded by the National ScienceFoundation that examine Indigenous youth resilience in the Arctic from a com-parative, collaborative, and Indigenous researcher perspective.

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Kristine Nystad is a PhD student and Assistant Professor at Sami UniversityCollege in Kautokeino, Norway, where she is engaged in Indigenous teacher edu-cation. Her PhD research focuses on Sami Indigenous adolescents and resilience.She directed the Circumpolar Indigenous Pathways to Adulthood projectNorwegian Sami research site. Her published work focuses on Sami youth andeducation. She is particularly interested in the educational attainment of youngSami men, and the reasons why few Sami men attend higher education.

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