Triumph comes out of the ashes of personal tragedy

AARON SELBIG

June 05, 2008 at 9:15AM AKST

Ten years ago, while Barb Franks’ husband lay in a coma, dying of cancer in a Juneau hospital, her son committed suicide.

Two days later, her husband finally succumbed to the disease that had been slowly destroying his body.

Barb Franks found herself suddenly alone in her house, writing obituaries for both of them.

That was the low point, remembers Franks, a full-blooded Tlingit originally from Hoonah.

“Some people used to say, ‘You need to get over this,’” she said of those dark days immediately following her tragedy. “You don’t get over it. … You need help to get through it.”

Franks got through it.

A graduate of the University of Alaska Anchorage, Franks earned her associate’s degree in human services last month. She said she is looking forward to a future doing work that she cares deeply about.

A key part of her life is working as the Alaska liaison for the Suicide Prevention Action Network, an organization that makes recommendations to Congress on issues of suicide prevention.

“That’s why I went to school,” said Franks from her desk at the university’s Native Student Services office, where she has spent the last two semesters helping Alaska Native students navigate the maze of university life.

 “I want to let suicide survivors know that they’re not alone and they have someone to talk to,” she said.

Meanwhile, Aaron Peters, a 29-year-old Koyukon-Athabascan from the Yukon River village of Ruby, has come through similar struggles.

It was 10 years ago, at about the same time Franks was struggling with the sudden loss of her son, that Peters’ sister also took her own life.

“She was really crying out for help in a lot of ways,” said Peters, who will graduate from the university’s nursing program in August. “But there were no trained health professionals out in Ruby. She gave off a lot of signs that she was going to commit suicide, but nobody really knew how to deal with it.”

Peters’ goal is to become one of those health professionals so that he can help prevent suicides in rural Alaska.

It was the spirit of lending a helping hand and a desire to give back to their communities that led Franks and Peters to Native Student Services, where they both work to keep the university’s Alaska Native student population focused on the goal of graduation.

“Coming into the college atmosphere was kind of a shock,” Peters said, recalling his first days at UAA. “Simple things were challenging, like picking out your classes, knowing where the buildings are, what to expect from your instructors, taking notes. I did well out in the Bush, but it’s not even close to what you need in a college setting.

Native Student Services helped a lot.”

The Native Student Services office in the university’s Rasmuson Hall is staffed with people like Franks and Peters — people who are passionate about helping Alaska Native students achieve their goals.

An expansive, warm and inviting place, the NSS office displays hand-woven blankets and other Alaska Native artwork over rows of computers, which are free for students to use.

Potlucks and raffles are often held here as a way for students to socialize and find some solace in their hectic, stressful world of research papers and exams.

Alaska Native students come here to study, to receive tutoring in math and science, or just to hang out with other students who might be experiencing some of the challenges that come with transitioning from life in the village to life at a big-city university.

According to a March study by UAA’s Institute of Social and Economic Research, or ISER, the numbers of Alaska Native students attending the university have increased 40 percent during the last eight years. That’s an increase from 950 students in 2000 to nearly 1,400 in 2008.

Only about 11 percent of the university’s Alaska Native student population, however, goes on to receive a bachelor’s degree, compared with a graduation rate of 24.5 percent for the general student population.

That’s a dismal statistic that advocacy groups like Native Student Services, Alaska Native Science and Engineering Program, and Recruiting and Retaining Alaska Natives in Nursing, or RRANN, are trying to change.

Randi Madison-Jacobs, a coordinator for RRANN, has helped Peters in his successful journey through the intense UAA nursing program. Madison-Jacobs said she believes there are many factors that lead to the abysmally low graduation rates for Alaska Native students.

Some, cited by ISER, involve the lack of financial resources to pay for college and difficulty navigating the bureaucratic red tape of the college admissions process.

One factor that’s often overlooked, according to Madison-Jacobs, is the value placed by academic institutions like UAA on what she calls “Western intelligence.”

“The university has its own culture, different than the general Western society,” she said. “The aspects of the university are weighted very heavily on valuing the written and verbal forms of intelligence, but many of our Native students have other forms of intelligence that aren’t recognized.”

“For instance, a naturalist intelligence is developed if you are living in a natural world and you have to know about the weather and how it affects animal behavior,” she said. “That is not honored at all in Western education.”

Still, Madison-Jacobs encourages young Alaska Natives to come to UAA and pursue their education. There are unique and difficult challenges for Native students, she said, but there are also helpful resources available to them.

Alaska Native students who do finish their education at UAA often face another challenge: The choice of whether to go back to the village once they’ve earned their degree.

“If I get a degree,” said Franks, noting that many students do not return home, “how am I going to use it in a small village that was living by fishing? So why go back, even if you miss your family?”

But going back to the village is just what Franks and Peters intend to do.

According to the Alaska Health and Social Services Department, Alaska leads the country by far in the rate of suicides, and the suicide rate for Alaska Natives is more than triple that of non-Natives.

Franks and Peters, with their experiences forged in the tragic epidemic of suicide in rural Alaska, are now determined to do something about that.

Peters wants to get into the mental health profession. He is on track to earn a bachelor of science degree in psychology in addition to a nursing degree. With the combined degrees, Peters said he feels he then can help rural communities recognize the warning signs that usually come before a suicide.

Franks said she hopes to carve out for herself a full-time job traveling throughout Alaska, talking to kids about suicide prevention.

“I feel God had that path for me,” she said. “The classes that I took, the networking that I did, and the people that I met along the way — all of them opened the doors for me to help me get to where I needed to be.”

Aaron Selbig of Anchorage is a broadcast and print journalist. He can be reached at aaronselbig@gmail.com.