Indian, Indigenous Alaskan Youths Face a Bleak Future, Survey Shows

Thousands of American Indian and indigenous Alaskan teen-agers inhabit a world so filled with alcoholism, violent death and personal despair that by the end of high school 1 out of 5 girls and 1 out of 8 boys have attempted suicide.

Those were among the bleakest statistics of a generally bleak survey of more than 13,000 Indian and indigenous Alaskan teen-agers published Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Assn.

“This is the most devastated group of adolescents in the United States,” Michael D. Resnick, an epidemiologist and one of the authors of the survey, said at a news conference.

Though certain risky behaviors--sexual activity and drinking in the late high school years, for example--are no more common among these groups than among some other racial groups, the total constellation of stresses on the Indian and Alaskan teen-agers seems to be greater, the survey suggested.

“For every risk factor with the exception of homicide, the Native kids are in far worse shape than African-American kids,” said Robert W. Blum, a pediatrician and co-author of the study, citing a population of adolescents thought to be under uncommonly severe stress.

In the study, researchers from the University of Minnesota gave a 162-item questionnaire to Indian and indigenous Alaskan youngsters in the 7th through 12th grades. All the respondents lived on reservations or in communities made up primarily of their ethnic groups in dozens of states. Urban populations were not surveyed, nor were high school dropouts.