NCRE Scholars Program

The Native Children’s Research Exchange (NCRE) brings together researchers studying child development from birth through emerging adulthood in Native communities. NCRE provides opportunities for the open exchange of information and ideas and for building collaborative relationships and disseminating knowledge about Native children’s development. Mentoring early career investigators and graduate students, particularly those who are American Indian, Alaska Native, or Native Hawaiian community members, is central to NCRE’s mission.

The NCRE Scholars Program provides career development support to early career investigators and late-stage graduate students interested in pursuing research on substance use and disorder and Native child and adolescent development. In the first eight years of this program (2012-2020), NCRE Scholars has included 19 Scholars in eight cohorts, including ten postdoctoral Scholars and nine graduate student Scholars. Early career investigators, including junior faculty, post-doctoral fellows, and late-stage doctoral students in psychology, sociology, public health, anthropology, education, or related disciplines are eligible to apply.

The NCRE Scholars program is supported by a grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (R25DA050645; Whitesell and Sarche, PIs).

Heather Sauyaq Jean Gordon | March 2024 Featured Scholar

We'd like to highlight former NCRE Scholar Heather Gordon's most recent work, which highlights the role of Indigenous culture as a protective factor from past and ongoing colonization and historical trauma. She explains how cultural engagement through social and intergenerational connectedness, Indigenous languages, spirituality and ceremonies, relationships with the land and subsistence, enculturation and identity formation, and traditional games and activities are protective for Indigenous people. She specifically focused some of her work on the protective role of land connection through subsistence in Alaska, and wrote a policy paper addressing how the loss of subsistence would be devastating to Indigenous wellbeing. See her recent work below:

• Indigenous Community Projects: Addressing Colonization through Using Culture as a Protective Factor. International Indigenous Policy Journal. 
  
• Current policy landscape prevents subsistence protections and practices necessary for Alaska Native children and families’ well-being. Child Trends. 
  
• 5 ways that subsistence practices support Indigenous child and family well-being. Child Trends. 

Heather Gordon, a Cohort 11 NCRE Scholar, is currently an owner/primary consultant at Sauyaq Solutions and an adjunct faculty at American University and holds a PhD in Indigenous Studies with an emphasis in Sustainability from the University of Alaska Fairbanks and a MS in Community and Environmental Sociology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.