Photos: Practicing traditional dances in Hooper Bay

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Yup'ik elder Margie Bell dances during traditional dance practice on Wednesday, February 11, 2015 in the youth and elders building in Hooper Bay, AK. Hooper Bay’s Native Survivors are a youth group reviving old traditions and skills, a group born out of a desire to stop teens and young adults from killing themselves and to live healthy. They are organized through AmeriCorps, under the Rural Alaska Community Action Program.

HOOPER BAY — The kids poured into the small white city building in the center of Hooper Bay: middle-schoolers, high-schoolers and fifth-year seniors still working toward graduation.

They came to the youth and elders building one cold February night to dance, sing and drum, to be with each other, to save each other.

They call themselves the Native Survivors.

They are a youth group reviving old traditions and skills, a group born out of a desire to stop teens and young adults from killing themselves, to find peace through sewing and friends through dance. They are organized through AmeriCorps under the Rural Alaska Community Action Program.

The nucleus in Hooper Bay is the village's Wilma Bell-Joe, 35. In this chapter of the nation's 21-year-old AmeriCorps service program, the activists arise from the communities themselves.

Bell-Joe stepped up to launch the group after an unusually bad year for suicide in this Bering Sea village, a stretch of despair in a state where the rate of suicide tops or nearly tops the nation year after year. Among Alaska Native teenage boys and young men, the problem is far more severe, with a rate of suicide more than seven times greater than the state as a whole.

In 2010, Bell-Joe said, at least eight people committed suicide in Hooper Bay, a community of about 1,100 at the time. (The population since has grown slightly to about 1,200.) One was the 15-year-old daughter of her now-husband. Even more attempted it.

Since the formation of Native Survivors in 2013, something remarkable has happened: No one has committed suicide in Hooper Bay.

Read more: Dance, sewing and hunting provide a path to health for Hooper Bay