Healing of the Canoe: Preliminary Suicide Prevention Outcomes Among Participating and Non-Participating Youth

Healing of the Canoe (HOC) is a community-derived, culturally grounded, and flexible curriculum for Native youth that builds a connection to culture and community and teaches skills that increase participants' feelings of hope, optimism, and self-efficacy. This exploratory study is the first to examine self-reported survey outcomes after the addition of suicide prevention and intervention modules into the curriculum and includes a comparison group of similar youth. Repeated measures analysis of variance (rANOVA) models examined changes in scores from the Pre-Survey to the Post-Survey for an intervention group and a comparison group of youth in 2018-2019. Survey responses were combined into composite scores for the following categories of interest: hope, mental health, help-seeking and helping, suicide attempts, culture, and resilience. There were 74 youth in the intervention group (IG) and 59 in the non-intervention group (NIG) who completed both Pre- and Post-Surveys. The IG experienced significant positive effects on the hope and resilience scales from Pre- to Post-Survey, while the youth in the NIG saw a decrease in these same scales from Pre- to Post-Survey. The NIG experienced worse outcomes for mental health, while the IG saw a slight improvement. Despite a small number of youth participants and the naturalistic setting, which limited the ability to control for potential confounding variables, the results from this preliminary study are promising. Future studies with larger numbers of youth and more ability to account for additional factors may potentially show even more benefits of the HOC curriculum.