Fostering Well-Being: IREACH's Collaborative Healing Project with Nome Eskimo Community
2025 Catalyst Fund Awardee
Jessica Saniguq Ullrich
Venture
IREACHProgram
Catalyst FundLocation
United States
Year
2025Dr. Jessica Saniguq Ullrich is an Inupiaq scholar, mother, and former frontline child welfare worker who has witnessed and studied the deep harm of systems that separate Native children from their roots. A Tribal citizen of the Nome Eskimo Community, Jessica has spent her career helping communities both tackle the legacy of trauma as well as overturn conventional, trauma-centered narratives. As an Assistant Professor at Washington State University’s IREACH center (The Institute for Research and Education to Advance Community Health), she leads work that centers connectedness, wellbeing, relational healing, and social and environmental justice. This work is achieved through relational healing — in which groups of people affected by similar trauma (or on two sides of a trauma) share their experiences and in doing so help redefine their personal narratives in terms of larger ones — and by lifting up Indigenous knowledge systems, ranging from land management and food systems to histories and religion.
As a Tribal member of Nome Eskimo Community, I share a common history and understanding of the challenges and strengths our families and communities experienced in the wake of colonization. Who we are is more than the trauma and damage-based narratives.
With the Nome Eskimo Community, Jessica co-created the Piaġiq Framework—a multi-generational, culturally grounded wellness model based on her Indigenous Connectedness research. Piloted through weekend workshops in Nome and Anchorage, the program immersed families in ancestral teachings, and hands-on participation in learning subsistence skills. The program also included collective storytelling, allowing participants to learn, practice, and reflect on traditional values, language, history, roles, and responsibilities. These workshops became powerful spaces for healing, where elders reconnected with youth, parents in recovery found support, and children rediscovered belonging. “I went from not knowing anyone here to feeling like family,” said one 18-year-old participant.
What makes the Piaġiq Framework different is the fundamental belief that Indigenous communities already hold what they need to heal. Grounded in ancestral values and co-designed with community, the Piaġiq Framework addresses the deep and persevering impact of colonialism—creating space for people to remember who they are and where they come from. Jessica and her team are (with support from the Catalyst Fund) working to expand the workshops into regular gatherings—bringing families back together to sustain connection, prevent trauma, and shape a future defined not by loss, but by love.