iiyiikǎakimǎan

Today is World Suicide Prevention Day ♥️

For us, suicide prevention work is ongoing, relational, and woven into all of our efforts with young people and families across the Blackfeet Nation.

We also tend to use a slightly different word: reduction.

The distinction reflects a broader philosophy. Reducing suicide requires honest conversations about suicidality, reducing stigma, expanding access to effective and strengths-based clinical support, and ensuring people can receive help when they need it. But we believe this work must also extend far beyond moments of crisis.

It means intentionally strengthening the things that can help make life feel connected, meaningful, creative, and worth showing up for.

On World Suicide Prevention Day, our student-led Noise Collective is sharing a new piece of music that demonstrates what that philosophy can look (and sound) like.

iiyiikǎakimǎan (to try hard, to persevere)

In May, students participating in the Browning Public Schools Heavy Music Symposium class (now dubbed the Noise Collective) collaborated with legendary musician - and proud FKA board member - Steve Von Till to create an original piece of music together.

The project brought students into a genuine artistic collaboration, giving them access to professional equipment, creative mentorship, and the opportunity to build something alongside an artist whose work has influenced generations of heavy and experimental music.

The resulting piece, iiyiikǎakimǎan, is being released through our Firekeeper Alliance Records imprint and represents the first in what we hope will become a continuing series of collaborations between our students and artists from around the world.

The significance of the project extends well beyond the recording itself.

It represents an approach to youth mental wellness that asks a different kind of question: rather than focusing exclusively on what is going wrong in a young person's life, what happens when communities deliberately create more things for young people to belong to?

What happens when they are trusted with real equipment, real responsibilities, and real creative decisions? What happens when artists they admire sit beside them and treat their ideas seriously? What happens when young people have something they are excited to come back to tomorrow?

Those experiences may not look like traditional mental health interventions. We believe they are nevertheless an important part of building healthier communities.

Heavy Music as a Place to Belong

The Noise Collective grew from our work with Browning Public Schools and the Heavy Music Symposium, an educational program exploring the intersection of heavy music, creativity, culture, careers, community, and mental wellness.

The program is grounded in a simple idea: music that is sometimes dismissed as dark, aggressive, strange, or inaccessible can become an extraordinarily meaningful point of connection for young people who may themselves feel misunderstood or outside the mainstream.

Heavy music provides room for difficult emotions without demanding that those emotions be hidden. It can turn isolation into shared experience and give young people ways to create, collaborate, learn technical skills, meet mentors, and become part of a community.

The goal is not to tell our students what music should mean to them. It is to give them the space, tools, relationships, and opportunities to discover that for themselves.

That philosophy has increasingly moved beyond the classroom and into recording, filmmaking, live production, journalism, festival internships, visual art, and direct collaborations with working musicians.

Throughout the process of making this particular song, Steve’s generosity was central to what made the collaboration work. He created a patient, comfortable, and completely nonjudgmental environment where students could experiment without worrying about whether they were “good enough” to participate. Some had musical experience, while others had never considered themselves musicians or artists at all. The invitation was simply to listen, try something, make some noise, and see what happened.

That willingness to meet students exactly where they were transformed the session from a recording project into something much more meaningful. There was no expectation of virtuosity and no pressure to perform. Students were given permission to contribute in whatever way felt authentic to them — and, in doing so, experienced what we hope to create more often: spaces where young people discover that they do not need to arrive already skilled, confident, or accomplished in order to have something valuable to contribute.

World Suicide Prevention Day provides an important opportunity for people around the world to speak openly about suicide and recommit themselves to addressing an issue that has affected far too many families and communities.

iiyiikǎakimǎan is one piece of that work. Check out our bandcamp page to download the track, and head over to our Youtube channel to watch an original video featuring this new song as well.

Special shoutout to Max and River for outfitting us with killer amps for this project. 

And to all our relatives we’ve lost far too soon…..We love you. All of this is for you. kittsiikǎakōmimmō˝ṗo´wǎ.

Keep the fire burning 🔥

https://firekeeperalliancerecords.bandcamp.com/track/iiyiik-akim-an