How teachers on the Blackfeet Reservation are using heavy metal to prevent suicide and process grief
Inside a Browning High School classroom on an afternoon in May, about two dozen students watched a music video by Carcass, a deathgrind band formed in 1985.
Deathgrind, as instructor Charlie Speicher had explained to the class, blends elements of two heavy metal subgenres: death metal, known for its sonic and lyrical brutality, and grindcore, characterized by speed and aggression.
Watching band members scream into the mic, the students nodded their heads and tapped pencils on their desks. Robert Hall, director of Native American studies at Browning Public Schools, shook his head in an exaggerated headbang. Speicher flashed the “rock on” hand gesture before pausing the video.
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“Aw! No!” students yelled, pounding their desks in feigned anger.
“I know, I want to keep going,” Speicher said. “But that was freaking Carcass! … There’s nothing like a musical style that just goes right for your throat, right at the core of that darkness.”
Facing darkness head-on is the guiding principle of a new class offered at Browning High School and Buffalo Hide Academy, public schools on the Blackfeet Reservation. During the 18-week class, students learn about heavy music through a suicide prevention lens.
The students watch and analyze music videos and write their own songs. They hear from professional musicians. They learn to differentiate subgenres like death metal, hardcore, grindcore, doom metal and sludge metal. They also talk about suicide and how to cope with trauma and grief. Speicher encourages students to contend with distress by engaging with art.
“There’s just such power there,” he told Montana Free Press in May. “It provides us with the tools to be able to deal, to face our anguish and not just be a prisoner to it.”
The class’s work will carry over into Fire in the Mountains, a first-of-its-kind heavy music festival on the Blackfeet Reservation July 25-27. The event will feature bands from all over the world alongside panels on topics including historical trauma, grief and healing. Students can earn a stipend and class credit for working with sound crews, bands, vendors and social media teams, and some students designed t-shirts for band members to wear on stage. Festival proceeds will support suicide prevention programs on the reservation.
The word for “doctor” in the Blackfoot language, āissōkinǎkii, translates to “singer of heavy songs.”
“The heaviness in āissōkinǎkii I think is like the power of those songs to doctor people, to heal,” Hall said.
Suicide In Montana
Montana faces one of the highest suicide mortality rates in the nation, and the crisis is even more severe in tribal communities, where residents must often rely on overburdened and underfunded systems of care.
A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study found that suicide rates among American Indians “ consistently surpass those among all other racial and ethnic groups.” From 2015 to 2022, suicide rates nationally increased less than 1%, while rates among American Indians increased nearly 20%. In 2021, according to a different CDC report, the suicide death rate among American Indian girls age 15-19 was more than five times greater than that of their White peers.
Indian Health Service, or IHS, is the federal agency responsible for providing health care to federally recognized tribes including the Blackfeet Nation. Despite calls for investment, the agency has long been underfunded. While President Donald Trump’s fiscal year 2026 budget proposal includes a $7.9 billion appropriation for IHS, a slight increase from the previous year, a workgroup composed of tribal leaders nationwide concluded that for fiscal year 2023 IHS would have needed $49.9 billion to be adequately funded.
Funding shortfalls mean the agency struggles to recruit and retain medical professionals. And patients, who may see a revolving door of providers, often face long wait times for care.
Blackfeet Reservation residents say incidents of suicide seem ubiquitous in the close-knit tribal community. A 2017 survey of 479 reservation residents found that one in three eighth-graders at Browning Middle School reported having attempted suicide, and one in three adults surveyed said they felt depressed or sad most days. Speicher said in May that the tribal community had recently seen several “near misses” related to suicide.
“So many people experience it and have been through it,” he told MTFP. “If you haven’t had a suicidal thought at some point, you’re lucky and rare.”
Karrie Monroe runs Sukapi Lodge Mental Health Center, a new youth substance-use treatment facility on the reservation that aims to help children and families in crisis. The facility is funded, in part, with $1.4 million from the 2021 American Rescue Plan Act. When the lodge first opened in November, providers worked with several young men struggling with depression and suicidal ideation.
“They were having relationship problems, they were being verbally abused, and they were becoming depressed and they didn’t know how to handle it,” Monroe said. “Because men around here are always taught, ‘You don’t cry. You keep it in. You don’t say nothing.’”
Each suicide death in the community sparks new waves of trauma and grief. And with barriers limiting access to quality mental health care, Monroe said, some may “use alcohol to run away from the sadness,” adding another significant risk factor to the suicide-prevention equation.
The cycle of death and grief, she said, “just keeps on repeating. … So where do we start with stopping this?”
Prior to colonization, Native American cultures had different ways of expressing and processing grief. Browning Public Schools Native American Studies Director Robert Hall said the Blackfeet would change their physical appearance — sometimes cutting off a finger, cutting their hair or wearing dirty clothes — to signal they were grieving.
“If I was gone for three weeks on a hunting trip or fasting, and I come back and see my cousin chopped her hair off, I know instantly what’s going on,” Hall explained, imagining himself in a historical context. “I know I’m going to show her some tenderness.”
As those traditions fade and a stigma surrounding suicide spreads, Speicher said, people more often hide their pain.
“We perceive ourselves as a burden and we try to conceal it,” he said. “That’s gotten us here, and it’s such a tragic experience.”
The stigma surrounding suicide is one reason Speicher believes it’s critical to raise awareness and talk openly about the issue. Learning to process grief and trauma in healthy ways, by connecting with others or expressing emotion for example, is an effective form of suicide prevention, studies show.
It’s one reason Speicher founded Firekeeper Alliance, a nonprofit funded by grants and donations that aims to reduce suicide rates in Indian Country by encouraging at-risk groups to embrace new coping mechanisms. It’s also why he encourages students to study music that “goes towards darkness” rather than avoiding it.
He and Hall believe that engaging with music, or art of any kind, can help people identify, process and make meaning of their pain.
“If (students) love themselves, and they have some way to have a group of friends and get together and do some healthy expression, this community is going to be all the better,” Hall said.
So far, the class has been a hit.
Dylan Williams, a student at Browning High School, said heavy metal is “honestly my favorite class.”
“This class, it’s more of a free space,” he said. “We can come in here and experience our likes and everything we love in an open environment where there’s no judging.”
Sophomore Urielle Pollock said she loves the class, but noted one criticism.
“I just hate how it’s only one period,” she said.
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This story was originally published by Montana Free Press and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.