Heavy Metal Festival Aiming to Curb Teen Suicide

W
hen Nate Newton, bassist for the band Converge, first learned how steep the suicide rate among Native American teens was, he was shocked. “I was like, ‘That can’t be right. That’s so absolutely fucked up,’” he tells Rolling Stone. Native Americans have the highest suicide rate of any ethnic group in the United States, according to the CDC, and Indigenous high school students have “seriously considered attempting suicide” more than teens of any other ethnicity. “We hear anecdotes about how things can be bleak on reservations, but I truly had no idea that it was to the point it was.”

The suicide rate among Native Americans has increased year over year from 2018 to 2021, according to the CDC, with the problem especially adverse in Montana, which holds the U.S.’s highest overall suicide rate. The state is home to the Native American tribe the Blackfeet Nation.

“There’s just not a person in Indian country that hasn’t been profoundly impacted by suicide loss,” says Charlie Speicher, director of the Buffalo Hide Academy, an alternative school in Browning, Montana, where the Blackfeet Indian Reservation is headquartered. “It’s a tragic, terrible, life-altering issue that has impacted every family that I work with.”

Last year, Speicher conceived a novel way to help teens on the reservation: sharing his love of heavy music. Speicher is a lifelong metalhead who also appreciates hardcore punk and bands like Converge that fuse the two styles; he’s not afraid to wear a gory Cannibal Corpse T-shirt to a principal’s meeting. 

In 2022, he attended the long-running heavy music festival Fire in the Mountains, which until recently called an area near Wyoming’s Grand Teton National Park home. After it lost its site, Speicher had a plan: He invited the festival’s organizers to move the three-day event to the Blackfeet Reservation. Bringing them closer to his school would also open the doors to another idea: partnering with the performing musicians to improve his students’ lives and reduce the suicide rate by giving them something exciting in their lives. 

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“For the most part, a lot of our community is very supportive and happy that a music festival is being hosted on the res,” says Robert Hall, a Native American studies director and Blackfoot language instructor at Browning Public Schools. “A lot of [the tribal council] heard Charlie say, ‘Hey, this is for the youth,’ and as soon as you begin something with ‘This is for the youth,’ they’re like, ‘OK. Well, I’m in.’”

With the tribal council on board, Speicher invited Jeremy Walker, the festival’s founder, to Browning — a town with a population of around 1,000 — to see the area for himself. “When I walked onto that land, my jaw hit the ground, and I literally started crying,” Walker says. “I remember texting my wife, ‘We found a new spot.’ The feeling was immediate. It’s really beautiful.”

The Blackfeet Nation will welcome Fire in the Mountains for the first time to its Red Eagle Campground July 25 to 27, with performances by Wardruna, Chelsea Wolfe, Old Man’s Child, and Converge, among many others. The festival will feature workshops with several artists, with titles like Music as Medicine: The Healing Power of Heavy Music, a concept close to Speicher’s heart.

Last fall, Speicher co-founded the Firekeeper Alliance, an organization that focuses on improving the mental health of teens on the reservation via heavy metal. Speicher, Hall, and Fire in the Mountains performer Steve Von Till, a solo artist and elementary school teacher known for his work with the metal band Neurosis, are all on its board of directors. The organization seeks “to promote viable coping mechanisms” for teens in adverse situations, and it believes “heavy music (metal, punk, hardcore, etc.) in particular holds special healing power, while also providing critical coping potential for musicians, fans, collectors, listeners, and everyone in our creative orbit,” according to its website.

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Von Till feels especially honored to be a part of the endeavor since it builds off of the idea that heavy music can be therapeutic, a tenet long held by Neurosis, who play pummeling riffs with tribal-inspired drumming. (Rolling Stone rated their Through Silver in Blood album as one of the 100 Greatest Metal Albums of All Time.) “Being a Firekeeper brings together all of my loves, passions, and personal beliefs into one central location — the idea of music as catharsis,” he tells Rolling Stone, “and that being a part of an underground heavy-music community has given myself and a lot of my friends a sense of purpose and a sense of belonging in a society that we didn’t necessarily feel represented us.”

A vital component of the organization is a unique class at the Buffalo Hide Academy called the Heavy Music Symposium. Speicher says it “celebrates metal, hardcore, punk, and all forms of heavy music.” It’s also a place where students learn about the creative process and how music like metal and punk can serve as a healthy outlet for negative feelings. “So many hardcore and metal bands would say that their music is a vehicle to help transmute their pain,” Speicher says. “The music provides an outlet, a mechanism to be able to confront that difficult and painful life experience and turn it into something that doesn’t crush us and destroy us.”

But the students don’t have to take Speicher’s word for it. Artists who’ve spoken to the teens would be familiar to subscribers of metal magazines like Decibel and Revolver: Converge’s Newton; Von Till; Isis and Sumac frontman Aaron Turner; Enslaved guitarist Ivar Bjørnson; and Wayfarer frontman Shane McCarthy, among others, have all addressed the class either via Zoom or in person. 

The musicians are known for playing doom metal, black metal, and hardcore, and those who have spoken to the class live between Idaho and Norway. It’s possible none have ever stepped foot on a Native American reservation. (Instrument manufacturer Gibson donated several guitars so the teens can have hands-on lessons.)

Buffalo Hide students tell Rolling Stone that the class has had a positive effect on their lives. “It helps me in my own way,” student Reb Pollock says via email. “Being myself again is the main reason I love this class so much.”

The experience has been moving for the musicians who’ve participated, too. “Some of the students were wearing metal shirts,” McCarthy says of his visit to the school. His band Wayfarer, based in Denver, combines black metal, a dramatic, orchestrally inspired subgenre of extreme metal, with touches of Americana; their American Gothic album featured on Rolling Stone’s list of the best metal records of 2023. 

“Punk, hardcore, and heavy music has a way of allowing people to know it’s normal to feel these intense emotions.” 

Neurosis’ Steve Von Till

When he spoke at the Heavy Music Symposium, the students asked him about how he wrote songs and his approach to guitar playing. He picked up a guitar and began jamming some grungy punk riffs with students who’d recently formed a band called Crimson Harmonies. “It made me happy,” he says.

“There was the resident metal kid who wants to name-check bands and talk about black metal,” he adds. “And then there’s the kid in the Slipknot shirt, and that’s their intro into this whole world. I loved seeing the whole thing.” 

For Newton, whose band Converge creates expressionistic and poetic metal-tinged hardcore (listen to Jane Doe, one of the best albums of the century so far), speaking at the symposium was rejuvenating. “It was fun and oddly emotional for me,” he says. “It was refreshing to talk to these kids who weren’t jaded. They were unencumbered by trying to be cool. They were just interested in music and interested in what drew me to it.”

Von Till felt similarly invigorated after speaking with the students. “One of them had taken upon himself to do a bunch of research about some specific [Neurosis] tours to ask more specific and deeper questions,” he says. “It was cool to see them do their research.”

Although the musicians enjoyed chopping it up about metal with the teens, they’re also aware of the symposium’s purpose. Four decades ago, the press demonized extreme music. Parents of teens who’d died by suicide sued Ozzy Osbourne and Judas Priest, alleging the music inspired their children’s deaths. The lawsuits were not successful, but the controversy over “satanic panic” was lasting. 

The musicians who’ve spoken at the symposium, however, say that heavy music has always been a positive force in their lives. “It’s pretty well documented that people will blame heavy metal or punk rock music for dysregulated behaviors or suicidal thinking,” Von Till says. “It has always been my belief that by looking the darkness right in the eye, heavy music has given a lot of people a chance to overcome and process intense emotions in ways that may not be understandable in traditional Western clinical analysis — but it makes people feel better. It makes people feel like somebody understands what they’re feeling, whether it’s rage, darkness, or sadness. We are allowed to process those feelings through this intense music.”

McCarthy, who also books the Fire in the Mountains festival, credits metal with changing his life. “I have no idea where I would be without it — and I don’t want to know,” he says. Everyone he associates with as an adult, he says, is because of heavy metal. “The metal community is always accepting the people who are interested in it,” he says. 

McCarthy believes that talking about metal with the students could lead them to writing music, starting bands, and going to concerts. Once you have an interest in the genre, he says, there’s a community. “And if you were struggling with the weight of existence and the weight of your situation, maybe all of a sudden you wake up thinking, ‘Oh, I can’t wait to do this. I’m going to do this.’ And it can really have a massive effect.”

“Punk, hardcore, and heavy music has a way of allowing people to know it’s normal to feel these intense emotions,” Von Till says. “Feeling fucked up is normal. What’s not normal is carrying through with a suicide.”

Hall sees a therapeutic parallel between heavy music and Blackfeet culture. “Our word for doctor is āissōkinǎkii, and when you translate it for what it really means, you say ‘singer of heavy songs,’” he says. “So in our old perspective, those songs of healing were considered heavy.”  

There are many reasons why the suicide rate is high among Indigenous teens. Dr. Victoria O’Keefe, who is affiliated with the Cherokee and Seminole Nations and has studied suicidality as it relates to Indigenous people, is a clinical psychologist and an associate professor at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, as well as an associate director at the Johns Hopkins Center for Indigenous Health. Speaking by phone, she says the suicide rate can vary greatly among the country’s more than 500 federally recognized tribes. But there are common factors that contribute to suicidal ideation among all Indigenous people. 

“Colonization through systematic policies of genocide, land and cultural dispossession, and forced assimilation have been and continue to be extremely destructive to Indigenous families’ and communities’ ways of living,” she says. 

One example she offers is how the federal government forced Indigenous children into boarding schools located far from their families. “The boarding schools used tactics to strip away Indigenous identity and cultural practices, for example, changing children’s names from a tribal name to an English name, cutting their hair, and preventing them to speak their traditional languages, or practice their cultures.” That initiative, which proliferated from the 1800s until the 1960s, has had resounding effects on Native populations.

“The ongoing impacts and transmission of collective traumas across generations continue to impact the mental health and overall well-being of many of our Native youth and adults,” she says. “In addition, we have a severely underfunded health care system [the Indian Health Service] for tribal and urban Native communities.… Together, these historical factors and ongoing structural racism contribute to high suicide rates that we see in many of our communities today.”

Native Americans also experience a higher rate of adverse childhood experiences, including emotional, physical, and sexual abuse, among other factors —  according to the National Library of Medicine — compared with other ethnicities. Native children also grow up in areas with higher rates of poverty, racial discrimination, and familial conflicts, according to a joint university study by researchers at the University of Toledo and New Mexico State University. There are also very few Native American psychiatrists to address the mental-health crisis; a 2021 survey cited in the study reports that less than 0.5 percent of active psychiatrists at the time had Indigenous ancestry.         

The study found that the suicide rate among American Indian and Alaska Native adolescents was the highest of any racial or ethnic group. It also reported that Native teens “lost almost 16,000 years of potential life,” over a four-year period, due to suicide.

Dr. Jagdish Khubchandani, a professor of public health at New Mexico State University who co-authored that study, tells Rolling Stone they included that figure in the report to inspire more funding into research surrounding the suicide rate among Indigenous teens. “We have to build a business case for preventing youth suicide and improving youth health,” he says. “Each life has some amount of dollar value in the U.S. climate or worldwide. How much money have we lost? If that’s what policymakers would find appealing [to fund research], it’s important to note that [teen suicide] is an economic loss, too.”

He worries the suicide rate could worsen in the future. “[This is] perhaps the loneliest generation ever born in America,” he says. “Last year, the surgeon general of the United States issued an advisory that loneliness is the next epidemic. [Suicide prevention efforts] need to be sustained for a lifespan, from childhood to adulthood, so people feel connected. I like the music element of [the Firekeeper Alliance]. When kids become teachers, they get engaged [with life] and know there are adults out there looking out for them.”

“If you’ve been fucked up by suicide, get up here, come celebrate, and grieve with us. Let’s headbang and let’s be outside in a beautiful setting and just be together.”

Charlie Speicher

Speicher sees the Heavy Music Symposium as a unique way to show that he and other adults in town care about the Buffalo Hide Academy’s students. “Traditional suicide prevention methods are basically bullshit,” he says. “They’ve gotten us to where we are. They don’t work, especially in Indian country.”

“Conventional suicide-prevention approaches are typically focused on the individual, on individual risk factors, and also on reducing a crisis,” O’Keefe says. “This approach is rooted in Western- or Euro-centric approaches to mental health and well-being, and the solutions are focused on the individual.” Indigenous people think differently. “Many of our communities hold important knowledge and traditions that promote health, mental health, wellness, and life that are passed down from generation to generation,” she says. “Among many tribes, physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual health are all viewed as connected and can’t be separated from one another.” 

O’Keefe led a project, Culture Forward, a few years ago with the Center for Indigenous Health to compile resources for combatting suicide among Native youth. She says some tribes have been successful with unique initiatives. The White Mountain Apache Tribe in Arizona adopted a program called Celebrating Life. If people witness others having suicidal ideation, they report it to a suicide surveillance system and a group of community mental-health specialists respond. The tribe reported a 38 percent decrease in suicide deaths and a 53 percent reduction in attempts over 12 years. 

O’Keefe believes the Firekeeper Alliance’s efforts show promise in its community. She views it as “a strength-based suicide-prevention approach” and finds the use of heavy metal as a coping and healing mechanism creative. She adds that when she was growing up, she was a fan of Nirvana, which led her to heavier bands like Underoath and Chiodos.

“The Heavy Music Symposium is built on cultural connectivity and through an Indigenous lens,” Speicher says. “Most people pass through Browning and see boarded-up houses [and] winos downtown, and they think, ‘Oh, that’s ugly. That looks rough. This isn’t safe,’ and that’s not the way it is here. That’s not how Blackfeet experience this; that’s not how I experience it. There’s laughter, there’s beauty, there’s strength through terrible distress. There’s such power and resilience here.

“So what the Heavy Music Symposium focuses on is that we have everything that we need here to decide to live, and we have the support,” he continues. “We can do this together. We can cope with adversity; we can develop a strong sense of belonging with other people who have been through darkness like us.”

Speicher’s definition of “success” for the Heavy Music Symposium is as unique as the class. “I want to see kids smiling,” he says. 

One recent highlight was the standing ovation the students gave Morbid Angel’s phantasmagoric “God of Emptiness” music video when he played it for the class. “I want to see fists and devil horns in the air, and I want kids to talk to me about bands,” he says. “If we listen to a Carcass song, and they’re giving their perspective on the sound and style and using the terms that we’ve been talking about, if some kid says, ‘I really like this atmospheric post–black metal band,’ that’s a massive success.”

“Success in a little town is measured pretty easily,” Hall says. “What’s been really satisfying is that if students see me outside of school, they’re like, ‘Oh, hey. What up, Robert?’ and wave and will want to talk shit about anything, whatever. They find it safe to tease me now, and I enjoy that. So success has already easily been captured.”

Speicher knows his efforts are working when kids show up to class. “Everybody’s going to pass this class,” he says. “We’ve got the leeway and flexibility at our alternative school to issue credits and meet those expectations with our benchmarks and our standards. It’s going to help support their path to graduating.” 

The students who spoke with Rolling Stone said that engaging with heavy music via the Heavy Music Symposium was inspiring. “[I’ve] learned more stuff [from the class] and [I’ve been] getting more creative with my drawings,” Pollock says, adding that she’s enjoyed meeting the band members. “I feel calm in some way [when I listen to metal] and I try and listen for the drum beats since I’m-a learn the drums.”

Students will also get the opportunity to intern at the Fire in the Mountains festival this summer, reinforcing the Heavy Music Symposium’s work. Speicher and Hall also hope that the festival will help comfort a grieving community at large. “If you’ve been fucked up by suicide, get up here, come celebrate, and grieve with us,” he says. “Let’s headbang and let’s be outside in a beautiful setting and just be together.”

“We’re really happy that the Firekeeper Alliance was created,” Walker, the fest’s founder, says. “The last time we were up there, a high school senior who was in the symposium said that he had never looked forward to anything in his entire life, but he couldn’t wait for Fire in the Mountains. Just that means that we’re successful.”

The festival’s organizers selected Converge as the inaugural Firekeeper Alliance band, representing the organization’s values, at the festival, and Newton sees that recognition as a special honor. “When I spoke at the symposium, one of the things I talked about with the kids was how [Converge] is our band, and we’re playing these songs, but it’s not just us — it’s all of us,” he says. “It’s you guys in the crowd with us, creating one energy.”

Moreover, he knows what sharing that energy does for people. “I can’t tell you the number of times someone has come up to us at a show and said, ‘Hey, your music saved my life,’” Newton says. “I’ve had people tell me, ‘I had a gun in my hand, and I was listening to your music, and that’s what stopped me from doing it.’ It’s heavy. Those moments show you why it’s important that we do this and how lucky we are that we get to do it, that we can have a positive effect on someone’s life.”

That’s the effect Speicher keeps striving for. 

“We’re going to do our best,” he says. “And we’re going to do our best every single day.”

If you or someone you know is struggling or in crisis, help is available. Dial 988 or chat at 988lifeline.org to reach the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. The Trevor Project, which provides help and suicide-prevention resources for LGBTQ+ youth, is 1-866-488-7386. Find other international suicide helplines at Befrienders Worldwide (befrienders.org).

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