It’s day 4 in the month long walk challenge started by NativeCry Outreach Alliance: At least 1 mile a day each day of the month to raise awareness on native suicide and suicide pprevention.
As a survivor, parent of a survivor, writer and counselor, it is a subject both personally and professionally important to me. As a graduate student at MSU Bozeman in Native American Studies, my research focus is intergenerational historical trauma, native mental health, healing and suicide. I am currently conducting a research study on causal factors, and natives are asked to participate in this anonymous, short survey that can be found HERE. My wish is to try to help strengthen and expand methods, both traditional and appropriate contemporary ones, to lessen and stop suicides, and instead heal.
Join us, you can do this challenge wherever you are, if you have the physical ability. For others, send us and everyone thoughts of love and peace, reach out to help and hold others. “Be kinder than necessary, you never know what someone is going through.”
From my 2014 poetry collection, CORE, a poem about pain, depression and suicide.
BROKEN TOE
Like a fissure beneath the heart,
a sliver of suggestion,
you keep limping on it,
that broken toe.
They suspect something’s wrong,
‘You’re walking funny,’ they say,
and you try to smile,
pressing your hand
to your side as if
you can hold in the pain.
Everyone knows something’s wrong.
They just don’t know what it is,
and perhaps neither do you.
–Red Haircrow
Red Haircrow 
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