At My Grandma’s House, support for Alaskan youth in crisis

In the face of physical and emotional isolation, one Catholic laywoman is helping young adults heal from trauma.

In 2010 a series of deaths by suicide began in the interior Alaskan villages surrounding Tanana, a community of approximately 200 people, most of whom are Athabascan Indians, on the Yukon River. The deaths started in the beginning of October and ran through the week before Thanksgiving, says Cynthia Erickson, a resident of Tanana. Among the deaths were her brother-in-law and a village boy named Cory. “My husband, Dale, and I had to deal with Cory’s body. We were in a state of shock,” says Erickson.

Erickson runs Tanana Commercial, a small general store in the village, along with her husband, who is also a bush pilot. “A customer would come into the store and say, ‘Did you hear Michelle committed suicide?’ or ‘Oh my gosh, did you hear that Joe committed suicide?’ ” she says. It seemed like there was another death every week.

When Erickson and her husband started to look into what was happening, they realized there is indeed a high rate of suicide among youth in many of the small Alaskan villages surrounding their own. Erickson suspects this is due to trauma within their homes, including domestic violence.

In Alaska there are hundreds of small villages with no roads connecting them. This not only leads to a sense of isolation among many Alaskan youth, but it also makes any kind of centralized service or aid difficult to organize.

Erickson, who is also on the board at St. Aloysius Catholic Church in Tanana, decided to take matters into her own hands. She started her own nonprofit, called My Grandma’s House (Setsoo Yeh’ in the Athabascan language), to offer youth and young adults a safe and secure place in her own home.

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