White settler colonies around the world have long reported disproportionately high
rates of Indigenous suicides, a consequence of the continuing violence of imperialism.
This article posits a need for interdisciplinary approaches to address this crisis and
therefore turns to humanist methods developed in Indigenous and feminist scholarship.
I analyze texts from U.S. psychologist Edwin Shneidman to rearticulate their relationship
to what I call settler suicidology. I then evoke literary critic Eve K. Sedgwick’s reparative
reading method to reimagine suicide prevention as suicide justice, reading the novel
There There by Tommy Orange (Cheyenne and Arapaho) to advocate for distributive
justice as a new approach to Indigenous suicide crises. My term suicide justice names
increasing accountability between settler suicide workers and the communities they
seek to serve.