- Good evening and thank you.
Thank you for your patience.
My name is Joanne Corbin and I am on
the resident faculty here at Smith College School
for Social Work, and it is my honor
to introduce the Lydia Rapoport visiting professor
and tonight's lecturer Doctor Maria Yellow Horse Braveheart.
Doctor Braveheart is an associate professor of psychiatry
and director of the Native American and Disparities Research
at the University of New Mexico, Department of Psychiatry
and Behavioral Sciences, division of
Community Behavioral Health.
She is also a senior fellow and executive
committee member with the New Mexico Center
for the Advancement of Research Engagement and Science
on Health Disparities and she is a faculty
senior fellow with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation
Center for Health Policy at the University of New Mexico.
As the Lydia Rapoport visiting professor,
Doctor Braveheart has met with School for Social Work
faculty this week, she has met with the masters students
and delivered a topic on racialized trauma and self care
and she's also lectured in the sociocultural classes today.
We have a tremendous opportunity tonight to hear
Doctor Braveheart's groundbreaking work on culturally
informed behavioral health interventions.
An aim of her research and practice has been to reduce
the emotional suffering among Native Americans
and Alaska Native populations through the development
of culturally responsive interventions driven
by the community.
She's starts from a position of creating space
to acknowledge and listen to population's experiences
of historical trauma, and to gain knowledge
about additional knowledge on these experiences
and conceptualizations of trauma,
and she integrates culturally syntonic
approaches to reducing the psychological,
physiological, and spiritual effects of historical traumas.
She uses a mixture of quantitative and qualitative research
methodologies to examine these issues.
She is currently primary investigator on
two federal grants, one on historical trauma practice
and group interpersonal psychotherapy
for American Indians through the
National Institute of Mental Health
and also the Mescalero Tribe Preventive and Early
Mental Health Intervention through the
National Institute of Minority Health and
Health Disparities.
Doctor Braveheart has been a principal investigator
or co-investigator on over 24 grants and contracts,
including SAMHSA, the National Institute on
Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism and various foundations.
Her educational history is that she has a
Bachelor of Science from Tuss University in psychology,
a Masters of Science from Columbia University School
of Social Work, and direct clinical practice
and a PhD from Smith College School for Social Work.
She has written numerous articles and book chapters
on this topic and delivered hundreds of lectures
and presentations.
Her presentation tonight is
historical trauma and unresolved grief,
implications for clinical research and practice
with American Indians and Alaska Natives.
Please join me in welcoming Doctor Braveheart.
(audience claps)
- (speaks in foreign language) my relatives
and it's good to be here, I've already been introduced
and (speaks in foreign language) Lakota and I say that I
live on United Airlines planes...
(audience laughs)
A lot 'cause I've done quite a bit of travel.
So apologies for the, we couldn't get the volume to work
on, there's a kind of a video clip that's
embedded in the Powerpoint presentation and
we did get here early, it just didn't cooperate with us so
we just sort of go with the flow and
so I wanted to dedicate this presentation to
(speaks in foreign language) Lala's a short name for
grandfather in Lakota so, to the Sundance
(speaks in foreign language), our extended Sundance family
and the also (speaks in foreign language)
Sundance family (speaks in foreign language)
and the Sitting Bull and Big Foot Memorial riders
and so we'll say a little bit more about that
but just want to acknowledge them and
thank them for all their love, support, prayers,
encouragement so that we can do this and
so that our future generations can live.
And I'll say more about what takini is
and what takini means so I'm gonna introduce
some this through several kind of introductory slides
that I often share and the first one is from
a traditional (speaks in foreign language)
Elders Council that was part of the preparation
for the Sitting Bull and Big Foot Memorial Ride.
In 1990 there were four years or preparation prior to
that and then the fifth year was the actual ride so
this was to heal from the 1890 assassination of
Sitting Bull and the Wounded Knee Massacre
in December 1890.
And so this is very eloquent and describes what we mean
when we talk about historical trauma and
unresolved grief and it said, "it's our way
to mourn for one year momentum for our relations
enters the spirit world, tradition is to wear black while
mourning our lost one, tradition is to not be happy,
not to sing and dance and enjoy life's beauty
during morning time.
Tradition is to suffer with the remembering
of our lost one and to give away much of
what we own and to cut our hair short.
The Chief Sitting Bull was more than a relation.
He represented an entire people.
Our freedom, our way of life, all that we were
and for 100 years we as a people have
mourned our great leader.
We have followed tradition in our mourning,
we have not been happy, have not enjoyed
life's beauty, have not danced or sung
as a proud nation.
We have suffered remembering our great chief
and have given him much of what was ours
and blackness has been around us for 100 years.
During this time, the heartbeat of our people
has been weak, and our lifestyle has deteriorated
to a devastating degree.
Our people now suffer from the highest
rates of unemployment, poverty, alcoholism
and suicide in the country."
So that really describes historical trauma
and historical unresolved grief and another quote that we
have permission to use is, and I always say we
because I think of collectively and about the
Takini Network, but this is about the passing of trauma
across generations, and we have permission to use
this from a Lakota parent who's in recovery from
alcoholism and said, "I've never bonded with any
parental figures in my home.
At seven years old, I could be gone for days at a time
and no one would look for me.
I've never been to a boarding school,
all of the abuse we've talked about happened in my home.
If it had happened by strangers, maybe it wouldn't
have been so bad, the sexual abuse, the neglect,
then I could blame it all on another race."
And then he adds that his parents were
boarding school survivors and that's where they learned
to drink, that's where they were physically
and sexually abused, and just started to pass that on
until he got into recovery.
And he also adds, "there ain't no calvary
running around now, we're doing it to ourselves.
Everything is progressing as it should."
So that's part of the internalized depression
and the passage of things on
cross generations, if it remains something that's
unconscious and automatic and internalized.
The other sort of introductory slide is that it in
a lot of tribal communities, but other oppressed populations
in this country and in the world, have multiple
losses and high rates of trauma exposure.
And we know now that trauma exposed
the greater trauma exposure, the greater risk
for PTSD, is increased.
So it's not that trauma exposure per say causes PTSD,
but the more that one is exposed to ongoing trauma,
the greater the risk is for developing PTSD.
So examples of that are death of
just with one extended family kinship network,
death of five family members killed in a collision by
a drunk driver on a reservation road.
And then death of a diabetic relative,
a cousin's suicide attack, another relative
dying from a heart attack, and we have high rates
of diabetes and heart disease in Native communites
and surviving family members include individuals
who are descendants of massacres and
boarding school, abuse at boarding schools.
So many community members feel like they're always
in a constant state of mourning and always
attending funeral.
So there's not really enough time
to recover from one trauma before another trauma occurs.
And cumulative, I talk about cumulative wounding
acrss generations so cumulative is that layering effect
of the trauma.
I often use the analogy when I'm talking with
tribal communities, I'm gonna date myself,
I used to use Dagwood's sandwiches as an example
and for those of you who are old enough to remember
Dagwood comics, and then for the younger folks
I started saying double Whoppers with cheese
and I know most people have eaten so
or triple whoppers with cheese and now I say,
because there are a lot of casinos,
cards, decks of cards.
So if you think of each card as a trauma, loss, or grief
and then just the layering and stacking
on top of one another.
So that's part of that layering effect.
So what I'm gonna talk about is the
historical trauma and unresolved grief,
framework, and little bit about the response features
and inter-generational manifestations.
We'll talk a lot too about the development
of the historical trauma and unresolved grief intervention
and the kind of work that I'm doing now.
So I'll start with a kind of a background of the
developing this work so this is setting the stage
and I'll have to see if this works if I just
have to click on the actual slide
or if I go forward.
This I haven't done in this kind of a format
so we'll see, no I have to see it's...
I think I click on the slide.
Oh well.
This is technologically...
This stuff is not working so we'll see what happens.
There, yay.
So it shows you visually the loss of native lands
and the remaining reservation so that's actually a
very powerful thing.
This is just right off the internet so
there are lots of maps that you can look at but
that one was pretty powerful and visual.
So currently there are 566 federally recognized tribes
but there are a number of state recognized tribes
and non-federally or state recognized tribal communities
surviving in the United States and
so we're 1.7% of the population which is
not a lot so a citation that I always
recommend to people is by Steven Pevar who
has a book called "The Rights of American Indians
and Tribes" and it's a really good read for everybody.
Native and non-Native folks but it's a really easy read,
it's been updated to include modern social policies
but it talks about all of the things that affect
and govern and regulate Native people's lives so
it's really good to look at that.
So there's a congressional policy that really outlined
genocide so I'd like to talk about that.
So one of the congressional resolutions was,
this one was in if I remember correctly
I used to have this in the Powerpoint but
around 1871, which was a resolution to
do away with treaties.
There's a historian named Helen Tanner that
was with the Newberry Library in Chicago
at the D'Arcy McNickle Center for the
History of the American Indian, and she gave me
a copy of a document that she was commissioned by
the US Supreme Court in 1980s for
the Black Hill's landclaim case, and she was asked by
the Supreme Court to chronicle all the
dealings of the United States' goverment with the
Lakota, Dakota, and Nakota, which is also
known as the Sioux Nation but we don't call
ourselves that.
Since 1852 is as far back as she went so
1852 was the first documented attack on a
peaceful Lakota camp, which was near Fort Laramie,
Wyoming and so she takes that history all the way
through, she talks about boarding school abuses,
and she says that the US government never
intended for the long-term suvival of the Lakota.
The initial policy was extermination, but because of
the Civil War, it became the wars against...
We gave the calvary a run for its money,
so it became really challenging and expensive
to keep that up so that's why they moved to
negotiating treaties with tribes.
So it wasn't out of an altruism per say,
or recognition of Native land rights,
but it was more of a socioeconomic reality.
And Helen Tanner is a European-American historian,
she's not a Native historian.
So I was pretty blown away by that when I
read that and that was part of her document
so then around 1871 is when Congress
moved to no longer negotiating treaties with tribes
and basically said that
we are to have no further recognition of our
rights to the lands over which we roam
and we are to go upon said reservations
and to have no alternative but to choose
between this policy of the government and extermination.
So and I read this myself, I actually had a
fellowship, if it's still in existence, for
American Indian women at the Newberry Library in Chicago,
it's the D'Arcy McNickle Center for the History
of the American Indian.
They also have other kinds of fellowships for
tribal college folks and other people that wanna go
and use the library area and it's not
related to behavioral health at all but it's
historical and anthropological references and
so it's a really good resource.
So I looked at a lot of government documents
when I was working on my dissertation.
And then the Bureau of Indian Affairs
started out under the war department.
And the Bureau of Indian Affairs became responsible
for our educational services, our social services.
Indian health service evolved from the BIA
so that then was moved over to health and human services
so both BIA and IHS have this legacy of
coming from the war department and
around 1824, the BIA was moved to the
Department of the Interior, but on the floors
of Congress 'cause I read a lot of that too,
there were debates all through the later
1800s about moving it back to the war department.
So there's that hostile legacy and of course
because I'm very very clinical, very psychoanalytic,
psychodynamic, which was my attraction to
coming to Smith and when I got my masters at Columbia,
I graduated in '76, it was still very psychoanalytic
and psychodynamic there, and I did some
psychoanalytic training, I really believe a lot
in the power of messages and unconscious
things that we're aware of so, lot of our tribal
communities are named after forts, and are named
after different army colonels and personnel that
were perpetrated massacres on our people so
I think that has an unconscious process.
A lot of tribal communities are changing those names,
or working at doing that, but I think that's
an important thing.
So and then the Bureau of Indian Affairs
Education Division, used to be called the
Civilization Division which is kind of interesting
and that there was a congressional policy of
forced separation of children and family from
all tribal influence and was very militaristic
so I think it's important to call our history genocide
because it does meet the United Nations
Geneva Convention definition on genocide,
which by the way the US didn't sign until the 1980s
and I keep forgetting to put it in the Powerpoint because
I'm so appalled by that fact.
But anyways so that is important to
tell us, so there's some quotes about that
sort of support, that contention of that our history
does meet the definition of genocide.
So this is from a video called Wiping the Tears
of Seven Generations, it's about the Big Foot Memorial
Ride which took place in 1990 that I
alluded to earlier so a quote from General Sherman was,
"first clear off the buffalo, then clear off the Indian.
We must act with vindictive earnest against the Sioux,
even to their total extermination, men women and children."
And another one from a former faculty at
Oglala Lakota College, Patrick Cudmore,
who was talking about the loss of lives in the
original conservative estimates about how many Native people
actually lived in the United States land area
and he said, "never before in the whole of human history
has the near extermination of a race been so total
and complete as it was in the United States."
And I already mentioned to you about Helen Tanner
so in 1890 that was the backdrop for the
Wounded Knee Massacre, that time period.
So at that point our people were confined to
reservations, dependent on government rations.
There was decimation of the buffalo so
that people were unable to live in the traditional way
and the importance of the Wounded Knee Massacre
in 1890, even though it happened to the Lakota,
it became sort of a symbol for a lot of tribal
communities because it was one of the last massacres
that occurred in terms of Native history.
At the time, the (speaks in foreign language),
the Ghost Dance was something that came from the
Paiutes in Nevada but spread to other tribes
and part of that was, in my opinion and I wrote
about that in my doctoral dissertation, which is that
I think it was also a manifestation of sort of
collective acute grief reaction because part of it
was, if you danced and prayed you would be reunited
with your ancestors who had been deceased.
The buffalo would return and then
there was a kind of a passive element that
passive with some sort of veiled aggression from
the Lakota version of the Ghost Dance
which was that the white people would just disappear
from the Earth so not that there'd be any hostile acts
but the problem would just go away
and the old way of life would return.
So people were starving, they were desperate,
there was illness, there was just total loss of lives
and way of life.
And actually, it's really important in terms of thinking
about grief for Native people, traditionally were
very connected to the land, to the animal nations,
to the plant nations, they're our relatives.
And so we have grief also about what's happened to them.
We have a sacred relationship with the buffalo so
the loss of the buffalo was very traumatic to our people.
We believe that we descended from them
and came out of the Black Hills.
That's our oral history, part of our oral creation stories
so there's also mourning for those losses
and those relatives, they're seen as relatives.
So that it's important to look at the backdrop of grief.
So I mentioned the boarding school era and
this is something...
Now it's interesting the Treaty of Fort Laramie,
which was never signed by Sitting Bull or Crazy Horse
'cause they were very traditional and wouldn't
sign treaties but the Treaty of Fort Laramie
actually asked for a regular day school in the community
and a teacher qualified to teach the elementary
branches of an English education who will reside
among said Indians, that's the way it's phrased
in the treaty, but what happened was that
this is we got instead.
And this was passed in Congress, a year after the
First National Indian Boarding School in Carlisle,
Pennsylvania, was established in 1879
run by an army colonel name Henry Pratt,
which is not what our ancestors agreed to.
They wanted somebody who was a teacher
who could educate the people, and even Sitting Bull
wanted schools for our children so that we could understand
and learn and cope better with the changing world.
So it says, "this bill provides for the
utilization of vacant military posts and barracks
for the industrial education of nomadic youth
and the employment of officers of the army as teachers
or to be otherwise detailed by the Department of War.
Education is a means of civilizing and elevating the
savage has ceased to be experimental, best results
are obtained with the removal of children from
all tribal influence."
So these schools were very traumatic.
Carlisle was over 1,000 miles away from
the Dakotas and the kids would try to run away
and parents would try to get at their kids but
if the parents didn't cooperate they were incarcerated,
kids were rounded up and sent back to the school.
Many kids did not survive the boarding school experience.
I know one tribe, not in the Dakotas but in
another state, this was a number of years ago,
remodeled a building that was an old boarding school
and they found human remains in the walls
that were children's remains.
So there were a lot of children that just sort of
never came home and people didn't know
what had happened to them so there's
a lot of horrendous abuses.
This is the video that didn't work.
I'm gonna play just a little bit of it
for the background, not because you're gonna be able
to hear it, if I can even get that to work.
And no that's not gonna work either I think.
There's supposed to be a thing that comes up
but there is a video, it's called Unseen Tears
and this is something that a...
Jeremiah Simmons who's a doctoral student
in psychology at the University of New Mexico
found for me and had embedded this but...
And it was working before, but oh well.
Sometimes things like that happen and you
just have to go with the flow.
Like that song ♫ Let it go let it go ♫
(audience laughs)
I actually really like that song.
So and my daughter's older so I didn't have to be
tortured by it.
She's 29 so...
Anyway so the impact of negative boarding school experiences
and I've pretty much covered this but just thinking
about abandonment issues and not understanding
why aren't my parents coming to get me,
why aren't they rescuing me from this,
and I have a friend who talked about his
boarding school experiences and he's probably around
late 50s, close to 60, and he talked about when
his mother took him to boarding school 'cause she had
been in a boarding school and had grown up in
boarding school, so when she took him to boarding school
she kinda didn't know how to prepare him for it
so he thought they were going on a trip.
Packed his bag, got to the school, and they got his bags
out of the car, there was priests and nuns standing there,
this was a Catholic boarding school, and she
got back in the car and he realized that she
was driving away, they were not going on a trip,
she was gonna leave him there so he tried to
chase after the car, and the priest and the nun
grabbed him and restrained him and held him
and he was crying and screaming and so
we have people in our current generations that have had
horrendous traumatic boarding school experiences.
And experienced a lot of physical and sexual abuse
in boarding schools.
Now there are, one thing that's important to mention
is that, not all boarding schools are the same,
the experience is the same.
In the Dakotas we had particularly negative boarding schools
where an overwhelming number of people talked
about the problems in the boarding school
and their experiences.
However, other people had good boarding school experiences
and nothing is ever all good or all bad, so people
formed really close bonds and friendships with one
another in boarding schools so that there were also
some very positive memories as well.
I like to mention that because I think it's important to
accept, and also clinically when you're working
with someone, you never attack somebody's defenses,
you never attack their way of coping so
if they're not ready to talk about something,
you just let it go and you come back to it and you
just kinda leave the door open,
oh I was just wondering and sort of just
go on and talk about whatever else you're gonna talk about
but you've at least planted a seed that it's okay
to talk about it.
One of the people that I'll talk a little bit more
about the research, but one of the people in one
of our groups that I remember,
had survived some traumatic boarding school experiences
and had been in behavioral health treatment a lot
and had said before, being in the group that
was focusing on the historical trauma worked.
She had never been even asked about, or invited
to talk about her boarding school experience
and she felt very relieved to be able to talk about it
and very supported in being able to talk about that
traumatic experience.
So I wanted to talk just about my early
professional and academic experience because a lot
of people have been asking about that in my stay here
so I thought it would be good to sort of
as an example, for people and also just to clarify so
some of this you already heard but
my motivation for all of this is my desire and commitment
to the reduce the suffering of Native peoples
and that's what I'm all about so I'm a woman on a mission
and that's why I haven't stayed at one institution,
because it's sort of like what's next what's next.
So before I went to Columbia, we actually had to
join the faculty there, we had a ceremony in South Dakota.
And so it was something that was blessed and
something that my community was felt was gonna be good
for our people and that was definitely the case.
Two of our consultants now on our
National Institute of Mental Health, or NIMH grant are
former colleagues at Columbia at the med school.
So these things are sort of synergistic and you
kind of have to trust the process and
it's really great and I had a lot of things that I
learned through that experience.
And what was really bizarre is when I was graduating
from Columbia, and I had no interest in going
in academia initially, that was not my plan, I was
just gonna be a clinician.
Not just, I don't mean it like that,
but I wasn't gonna go into academia 'cause clinical work
is really important and really difficult and I still do,
my work is clinical intervention research so it
still is clinical.
But I didn't have any intention of going into
academia but I had a fleeting thought that
oh maybe I'd like to come back here and teach someday
at Columbia, and then I never remembered that thought
until later and then the search committee called me
and said, "hey would you like to apply?" and I said,
"oh okay."
It was wierd, so I think sometimes things are very
more than coincidental.
So I developed this out of that clinical practice experience
but also having this sense of carrying grief that was
larger than myself and my own community
and I remember specific time I was lookin' at some
historical photographs and just got overwhelmed
with the sense of grief and at that time then
made a conscious connection that American Indians
are trauma survivors and that we share
some things in common with our Jewish Holocaust
communities and made that sort of analogy and
all of my Holocaust friends and colleagues are
not offended by that in any way.
And actually are very supportive.
And we had some conferences that we did back in 2001,
2003, and 2004, where we brought together--
I mean we as a Native people hosted it, the
Takini Network, we were the ones who
sponsored it, but we invited other massively
traumatized populations to be with us
and to share, and we shared our trauma stories,
our ways of working and with one another
and what we could learn from one another and--
Pardon me?
- [Audience Member 1] Palestinians too.
- Yes we didn't have any Palestinians at that conference
but yes, absolutely, so we had in terms of...
There was a woman who was Palestinian I believe
that was supposed to come and
ended up not being able to come.
But we had Japanese-Americans dealing with the
internment camp survival, African-Americans,
we had Maya refugees who were originally from
Guatemala but were from Grupo Maya in San Francisco,
we of course had all the indigenous peoples of the
Americas, the US, and Canada represented and
I'm wondering if I'm missing anybody but
we had a lot of indigenous people that came so
it's really important to look at of those collective
oppressions and that it was really a
very powerful experience.
So we continued talking about the...
I continued doing presentations and my involvement
with the Sitting Bull and Big Foot Memorial Ride
and then my doctoral dissertation which I put up
here only because this is Smith
and I've said Smith doctoral dissertation
but it's Return to the Sacred Path, Healing from
Historical Trauma and Historical Unresolved Grief
from Among the Lakota.
And I finished that and graduated in 1995.
So this is just a picture of Chief Big Foot
who was also known as Uŋpȟáŋ Glešká which is
Spotted Elk.
So he had another name.
And he was killed during the Wounded Knee Massacre.
So this is my definition of historical trauma
and historical unresolved grief, so I define
historical trauma as cumulative emotional and psychological
wounding across generations, including one's own lifespan,
because everything up to a minute ago is history
but I wanted to ground it in the collective
historical traumatic past and which I thought was really
important and in my experience is
Native people feel very empowered by that
because it destigmatizes what's going on now
for people and it reduces the self-blame, it sort of
opens people up to saying...
Much like the survivor's child complex that
many of the Jewish Holocaust theorists talk about
that it's a similar kind of concept.
It's not a diagnosis, it's not a disorder,
it's not pathology, but it's a response or a
reaction to all of these horrible things that happened
to a whole group of people.
So you're not alone in that.
And then the historical unresolved grief is the grief
that goes along with that because there's
a lot of loss of course.
And the historical trauma response is a constellation of
group of features in reaction to the massive group trauma.
So some of the Jewish Holocaust literature
is the largest body of literature still on
intergenerational massive group trauma.
But there's also literature on the
Japanese-American internment camp.
A former faculty member at Smith in psychology
is Donna Nagata and she was with us at least
our initial conference and Rita Takahashi who was from
San Francisco State University, if I'm
remembering correctly, who did a lot on the redress
around the Japanese internment but Donna Nagata
works with the second generation, the survivors or
descendants of the internment camp survivors,
both the survivors and then the descendants.
And what we found in the conference,
in the work, is how much we had in common,
just as massive group trauma survivors across
different groups, regardless of the
details of the history, so we kind of all came together and
transcended some of those differences and
developed as allies.
I didn't have included on this list because
there was less literature at the time initially
on the African-American experience but in terms
of the legacy of slavery, but one of our later
conferences we had somebody who--
Joy Degraw-Oleary who presented on
what she calls post traumatic slave syndrome and
there have been some books and some writing about that
and efforts at healing where some African-Americans
are going back to the place where most of the slave ships
left in Africa, because a lot of people can't trace
their traditional tribal ancestry, but they're doing that
in terms of healing and some people decide to actually
to stay there, I saw some documentaries on that before.
So this has relevance for all of the massively
traumatized populations so I kept developing
things and then got SAMHSA grants.
Actually the dissertation research I got a
SAMHSA grant for 'cause they have like
for conferences so I kind of ran it as a conference.
At the time I was talking with somebody about
a dissertation grant through NIMH, but there was a bit
of a barrier in terms of not having a control group,
I had more of a pre-post test design and one of the
suggestions was well you can withhold ceremonies
from half of the people and I said, "no you can't do that."
That's a very sacred thing so I didn't pursue that any
further and also I didn't have the time, I didn't wanna
delay so I got $50,000 from SAMHSA as a
conference grant and ran that through the
American Indian Institute which is at the
University of Oklahoma, only because I was really
good friends with the former director there,
Anita Chisholm, and she was really really supportive.
So I just was creative about how to do things
and then we got a lot of SAMHSA grants,
formed the Takini Network and I'll say a little bit more
about that and as we go along and then
eventually the historical trauma and unresolved grief
intervention was selected as a tribal best practice
by First Nationals Behavioral Health Association and
the Pacific Substance Abuse in Mental Health
collaborating counsel in conjunction with SAMHSA so
I'm just running all over the place, presenting a lot of
historical trauma presentations to different
tribal communites and then developing
further work on that.
So takini and takini's a Lakota word that means
survivor or to come back to life and I really
like that, the to come back to life part of it so
these are some ancestors who are Wounded Knee Massacre
survivors and three of nine brothers survived
and so our people have testimonies because
people who survived had scars and so our people
witnessed that.
So my work is spiritually and culturally grounded.
And that's something that's really important
and that has kept me going, believe me.
I was actually asked by, when I did the dissertation
workshop, I was asked by an elder to
lead our people in the historical trauma work.
And that was at the end of the intervention,
the first one in 1992 which we had at Sylvan Lake
in the Black Hills, and I chose that location
actually intuitively and then later learned that
that was a place where Sitting Bull had had a vision
and in that vision he had an eagle
that came to him and then turned into a man and told him
that he was responsible for protecting
the Lakota nation and he took that to heart
for the rest of his life and
as a result of that I think was part of why he
was assassinated in 1890.
But he was staunchly traditional and
very much wanting to protect the people.
It's also a location near Harney Peak which is where
Black Elk, some of you have heard of Black Elk Speaks or
I forgot the other name of the book that
Black Elk talks about but kind of talks about the
Lakota sacred rights and ceremonies and
also that the Black Hills is a spiritual home
and soothing place so it's kind of like
Winnicott's holding environment, in a traditional
kind of conceptualization of that.
And when I was developing the dissertation and
the workshop, the intervention for 1992,
I actually asked, I mean from day one
everything was spiritually guided, I asked for prayers
from the Sitting Bull Sundance Committee
because I wanted it to be really sacred
and healing and that was really important to me so
the Takini Network, we morphed into the
Takini Institute now.
We actually have no funding, but we do the work,
we get the funding through other ways of doing that
but we're still doing the work and
so we're committed to our traditional spiritual
practices and staying grounded.
Living according to our (speaks foreign language)
which are our seven laws which include
generosity, compassion, humility, respect,
kind of that understanding of the sacredness
of all of creation.
And we see ourselves as survivors and learners
and no one is above another.
So I think I shared some of this, but the way
that we did the dissertation and the intervention
that first one, was we had a four day training
of the trainers, so we had male and female pairs
for the larger training, then broke up into small groups
so we trained those people in that
and the idea was to sort of spread this
and to have people have that capacity for
doing those things and we included clinicians
and service providers, people who were counselors,
spiritual leaders, Sundance helpers and leaders,
and we required that people, if they weren't
clean and sober or drug and alcohol free,
abstain during that time.
And that's partly because, traditionally Lakota,
we had no mind or mood altering substances
and we didn't even traditionally use tobacco.
It was red willow bark, so we didn't have drugs
and people don't understand that.
So all of our visions and spiritual experience were
induced just through ceremony, through prayer,
through fasting and so that's one thing that
we can be very proud of because it's also
something that can be used in prevention.
Now for those tribes that did use peyote,
it's seen as a medicine, or had alcohol,
there are very few tribes in North America that had
alcohol, there were more in the south of the border,
but even for all of those tribes, it was very ceremonial
so it limited then, there was no such thing
as social drinking and drunkenness traditionally.
To my knowledge among the tribal communities,
as far as I know, I'm qualifying it because I don't
know all tribes' cultures but...
So we asked Doctor Eva Folgelman, who I think
I mentioned as a Jewish Holocaust child
of survivors, a psychologist, a therapist,
a clinician, author, and she's been doing
training on working with children of
Holocaust survivors and she was working
at the Training Institute for Mental Health
in New York, and I had actually read
one of her articles and then I saw that
in a newspaper and I was like,
"hey, this is good."
I called up the Training Institute, they gave me
her professional number, I told her who I was,
what we were doing, I said
"would you come to South Dakota
and work with us?"
I wanted to see if she knew something that we didn't know
that we were not already doing.
She was very gracious, I sent her a lot
of information, then I went to New York
to meet with her and she came out
to South Dakota and spent a day and a half
with us and it was very cute.
She said, she was with us, so she was like
involved with the facilitator training and about
halfway through the first day she said to me,
"you guys are so nice to one another!
You're not arguing, if this was a Jewish group,
we'd be arguing by now."
(audience laughs)
She made me laugh and I said,
"well we're more indirect."
It's kind of like we kinda sock it to somebody
but it's a little more indirect sometimes but
it was very helpful.
Then she showed us a video that she did on children of
Holocaust survivors and a lot of our
people and our facilitators really related
to the same sort of emotional experiences
and I'll talk about that shortly here,
about the historical trauma response features
about the compensatory fantasies,
the need to make up for the past.
So her gift to us was that we were doing everything
she saw correct, but she said we needed to write and
make videos, and get the word out about
our traumatic history because that's what
the Holocaust community does.
They do a lot of education and
writing and getting it out there and our
history is really pretty subjugated in this country
and we're ignored a lot so...
I remember when the movie Lincoln came out
I was not happy, I never saw the movie
and I don't wanna see it because, around the time
that Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation,
he signed an order to kill innocent Dakota
in Mankato, Minnesota.
And that's not talked about in history,
nobody addresses that so those are those
kinds of issues so we prayed that this work
would help our people and
I think I already shared this sort of pre-test
and post-test measures, and then a sort of
retrospective report about grief and how
that was happened, how people experienced that.
At the time the mean age was 43, sp those folks
would be in their 60s now.
And a great majority of them were boarding school
survivors and had a lot of distance from the
boarding school which meant they got to
go home not very often and
a lot of them reported negative boarding school experiences
including physical abuse and a percentage of
sexual abuse in the boarding schools and of course a
group that experiences a lot of grief and loss.
So I'm not gonna go through all this,
this is some of that just those early results
and there's actually some of this is written up
in a Smith article that I did in 1998
on the dissertation but I wanted to point out that
feeling responsible for undoing the pain of the past
that that reduced at the end of the intervention and
other sort of what we consider negative affects
reduced and evaluation so
(speaks in foreign language) is a Lakota word for
white people and it's not really very complimentary
but I have to tell you, it means takes the fat,
which is greed.
Greed.
So but we put that up there,
and there was actually a more positive evaluation
at the end of the intervention which is showing
some healing.
We also had one European-American who
said that she represents almost all of western Europe
in her ancestry and she loved to present
about genocide and she was really cool and
she was part of our team, so we think that that
could have had an impact on some of that healing
to have somebody who's a white person
to talk about genocide is very validating
and instills hope, like okay they can understand
this too.
So I'm not gonna belabor this but just in terms of the
semantic differential, and this I wanted to mention
because it's interesting that, sort of that there were
gender differences and I think there's some gender
differences in processing grief but there are
also gender differences in male and female roles,
traditional roles.
Women and children were never considered
the property of men among the Lakota and
domestic violence and child abuse were not tolerated
and could be punished by banishment, physical punishment
of the same kind that the abuser meted out or death.
So it was a pretty strong taboo against physical abuse.
Now we have problems because of the boarding school
influence and all things that have happened where we do have
domestic violence in our communities and we have
a lot of oppression going on but
that's something I wanted to mention.
But our men, the traditional role, was as the
warriors and the protectors of the people.
And because of being disarmed, they could not
fulfill that at Wounded Knee.
They were not able to protect the people.
So they were not able to enact their role so
we felt like they had sort of different issues
or responses so what's interesting is the last row
in terms of joy.
So the women, before the intervention almost
60% reported joyful in general and this is just
self-report, not a real sophisticated kind of measure,
but only 33% of the men.
But you look at after the intervention.
70% of the women felt more joyful,
almost 71% and almost 87% of the men.
So the men really skyrocketed.
And I think part of it was the way I explained it is
we went through the history of the Wounded Knee Massacre
and all the details and the boarding schools so that
that the men heard the true history about being
disarmed and a lot of them were killed.
It was more women and children that were massacred
than men because there were more women and children present.
And that the men, it was not their fault
in other words and so it was helping with
not internalizing that pain and trauma.
Now interestingly, the men experienced greater
trauma in boarding schools overall, especially sexual abuse.
And that's pretty interesting.
Now there happened to be more full-blood men in the sample
than women, that was just the way it worked out.
But the number wasn't large enough to tease out
how much was related to Indian phenotype,
skin color and features, how much was related to gender,
and what was that about but that's something that
was pretty striking so we have a high rate of that
in our communities and at the end of the intervention,
which was really awesome for me and I can't even
put words to it.
One of the Big Foot Memorial riders...
Afterwards we were standing in a circle and that was
also the time that the elder asked me to lead
the people in this historical trauma work,
but we were standing in a circle at the end,
and people just started stepping into the circle,
giving uninvited testimony of their experience,
it was awesome.
And so one of the riders said, "you know I sacrifice to
wipe the tears of the people, but until today
no one had wiped my tears."
So what we did at the end of the intervention--
So part of the intervention was they broke up into pairs
and shared kind of their trauma and grief history
in pairs, and kind of processed with those pairs.
So we had small and large group processing and
so they had a chance to work with a partner.
So and then at the end, one of our healers gave us
a wiping the tears exercise, which was based on a
wiping the tears ceremony, to the Lakota grief resolution
ceremony, and so we had the person with their partners,
they're facing one another but everybody's in a circle so
you basically have two circles, one facing out
one facing in, and you each have a cup of water,
and you console the person and you encourage them,
and then you give them water and the water
symbolizes replacing the tears that have been shed.
And then while they're doing that, we're singing and praying
and it's really a beautiful thing that our healer gave us
'cause I wanted him to have people sort of
become relatives, in a sense, to support one another.
And also to console one another.
So it was after that that then this rider steps in
and says that.
So it really, for me, I got back from this and I had
just taken a position at the University of Denver
at that time on the faculty, and I got back from this
(mumbles) experience I was just like in another world.
And a faculty member came up to me, very
innocent being very sweet, says, "how was your
data collection?"
And I was like, "oh my God, you can't
reduce this to data collection."
It was just jarring.
But I was still in this other realm, it was just
an awesome experience, plus being in the Black Hills
for all that time was just beautiful.
So the later development of the historical trauma
just that I was on the faculty at the University of Denver
and then I mentioned going to Columbia,
so all of these things really just followed.
So the historical trauma reponse features, I wanna talk
just briefly about that and a few more things
before we open it up for questions.
So the historical trauma response features would be a bear
to actually research.
There have been some people that are attempting now
to do some research.
My colleague and friend Doctor Karina Walters
at the University of Washington, has been trying
to tackle some of that.
Also Doctor Les Whitbeck who's non-Native but
he's at University of Nebraska and was very respectful
and developed the historical loss scale,
and this historical loss and associated symptoms scale.
And then while I was at Columbia, I started developing
the indigenous people's survey, which is
really not a good name 'cause it's not a survey
it's really a instrument that when you give it to someone
they should be with you because it's really more of a
clinician administered instrument.
I mean they can take it, but it could be
triggering because it asks about trauma history
and grief history, it kinda puts a lot of
things together, includes some other structured measures on
looking at grief and trauma responses so
this is the first time we're using it in the NIMH study
but there's a group in California at...
Tribal group working with Stanford and they're doing a
diabetes intervention and they're using pieces of that
indigenous peoples survey so there's quite a bit
of interest in it and one of the things
is it doesn't just include American Indians
Alaska Native, it includes First Nations folks and people
from Latin America too.
So we're asking about indigenous identity
and then there's sort of separate sections for
the history because the US and Canadian history
is more similar for Native folks than from the
history in Mexico, Central and South America.
So we just sort of separate it because there's another
layer of colonization for people from the
Mexico, Central and South Americas so it's the
original Spanish conquest but then especially if they've
moved here to the US, then they have the migration
trauma and the other kind of oppression that's occurred.
So I actually had some students at Columbia,
and I wanna acknowledge and recognize one
Maribel Perez who's a licensed clinical social worker now
who is a indigenous Nahua woman from Mexico originally
and she was one of the people.
And Doctor Jennifer Elkins who is a graduate of Columbia
and she worked with me as a doctoral student
and she's now at the University of Georgia
and we're still collaborating on articles
and she basically volunteers 'cause I didn't have any money
to pay her, so she's been wonderful so I have some
wonderful colleagues.
Her background is Jewish-American so
I just like to acknowledge people.
So some of these things are difficult to
operationalize, but one thing that Karina Walters found
in some of her work is that there does seem to be
an association with historical trauma response features,
basically she also calls it the colonial trauma response,
and things like PTSD symptoms and other kinds of symptoms so
a lot of these are gonna be evident to people here
but I do wanna mention the psychic numbing which is
basically shutting down all the feelings
'cause you're trying to shut down the pain
but then you sort of go through life
feeling numb and I've seen that quite a bit
in our community.
The fixation to trauma which we used to think of
as more just psychological, being attached
to the trauma because it's familiar
but we know now that there's brain chemistry involved.
So if you, and I explain to people like you look
through a trauma lens, so if you think of these glasses
say as trauma lenses, and I put them on,
then everything that I look at is fitered
through these lenses, is filtered through the trauma.
And related to that also is the hypervigilance.
Hypervigilance is staying on guard,
being in heightened state of alert
and is waiting for the other shoe to drop.
It's talked a lot about in twelve step meetings,
in adult children of alcoholics meetings because
a good analogy is a kid going into an alcoholic home
and just being on guard and then all of those
cortisol levels starts going, the blood pressure,
the stomach juices start turning, the pulse
heart rate goes up, and all of those things
which over time is very damaging for your body.
So that that's the hypervigilance.
So you're looking through these trauma lenses
and coming here tonight, if you're a person who's
been traumatized a lot and harmed,
you come into the room and you size it up
and you find out where the door is,
I wanna sit near the door so I can get out
and now just 'cause you're a midlife person and you
gotta get to the bathroom, it's because you wanna escape
you gotta keep yourself safe.
And somebody who's not been traumatized so much is like
ooh this is exciting, I wanna see who's here and
you wanna sit next to people you wanna visit with
or sit so you can see better, but it has nothing to do
with keeping yourself safe.
So that those are the kinds of things that we deal with
and how many of you have ever been in a car accident?
That's another good example.
Lot of people.
So New Mexico's not the only place with
a lot of car accidents but so
I had a fender bender, which was very minor but
my daughter was quite a bit younger then
and she was sitting in the passenger's seat
and somebody came from the right trying to cut across
very illegally to get to the post office.
And so the car came and hit the front right fender and
she was fine, I was fine, and this was in Denver,
the police came.
And then the police asked us, it was raining, asked us
to both come and sit in the police car.
The guy who hit me and me, and I thought,
oh no I'm gonna get blamed, I'm gonna get the ticket,
which is another thing about sort of a
hypervigilance but related to microaggressions.
How many of you have heard of microaggressions?
Yeah.
Lot of people.
So expecting that the police are gonna blame me
because the guy was white, thank God he was honest,
and he said, "I tried to race her
to get across to the post office."
Across like six lanes of traffic,
on a rainy busy morning.
So he said, "okay ma'am you're free to leave now."
But it's interesting because so we have this hypervigilance
for lots of reasons.
I already mentioned sort of a compensatory fantasies and
then related to that is the loyalty.
And Doctor Fogelman talks about loyalty
to the ancestral suffering and to the deceased.
And if we identify with the suffering of our ancestors
instead of their strength, then remaning loyal to them means
that we focus on suffering in our own lives,
creating suffering in our own lives,
and that really resonated for me because
I think a lof of us do that and
we kind of feel like we can't be very vital
or happy or alive and vital
because we're somehow betraying the memory of our people
that have suffered so much.
But our ancestors don't want us to suffer,
they wanted us to be happy and they sacrificed
a lot so we could survive.
So we also kind of owe it to them to be vital
and happy and I'm preaching to myself
as I'm saying that too.
But I won't go through this, but it's just that other things
are related to the historical trauma response.
Depression, prolonged or complicated grief,
but the historical trauma and unresolved grief
is not just for sort of within your lifespan
but is generational, so sort of preoccupation with
ancestors lost in the past and their suffering
and kind of yearning for them and pining for them
and I think there are tribal cultural differences
and I think there's some tribes maybe who
just their culture is maybe more predisposed
to kind of hanging on to the ancestral past
or the history.
Like in the Dakotas, it has been pretty notoriously
racist and difficult, and the history is difficult because
we had the Battle of Little Bighorn, which is technically
actually in Montana but that's part of the area.
We had all of this kind of history.
Very sort of polarized communities.
So that I think those kind of things also make a difference.
I also think that tribal cultures need to think about
what are their traditional grief practices that
I know for our people, for the Lakota,
when a close relative dies we cut our hair.
And traditionally, that's the only time we cut our hair
but now we're modern so we get different kinds of hairstyles
and but that that is symbolizes a loss of a part
of the self.
And that so that, to me, is very symbolic
of the quality of attachment so I think we might have
some different kinds of attachment styles
and you know Freud's paper on mourning
and melancholia talked about the more--
Sort of almost like a total decathexis or
removal of attachment to the lost person
or the lost object, as it's called clinically.
As kind of a removal of that is a resolution
of mourning,
And before that process there's identification
with the person who's loss of sometimes you'll see people
start doing things like the person who lost, or mannerisms
or even developing symptoms of their illness, it's all part
of the grief literature.
But I think that with...
I don't think that that fully describes anybody, actually.
I don't think none of us ever really fully removed
that attachment to our loved ones.
I don't think that the mainstream grief practices
help the mainstream culture either here.
The mainstream culture is you're lucky
if you get three to five days of funeral leave,
and it depends on the relationship
and then you're expected to go back to work like
nothing happened.
So in the old days, our people would---
If you saw somebody with short hair,
you knew they were in mourning.
There was a period of mourning of about a year
that you were supposed to observe,
you weren't supposed to dance and all kinds
of things like that that honored that process
and now everything's sort of rush rush rush
and you just get on with it.
And I don't think that's healthy for anyone
so I think we have to rethink how we deal with
grief and loss in our culture,
and on our general culture.
Other relevant terms, and all of this is Anna Freud's
identification with the aggressor, and Paulo Freire's
internalized oppression so which happened to our people
that we can act those things out and I've already
mentioned this in terms of the microaggression.
There's also a related term is percieved discrimination
which has been associated with increased depression.
So those things are real and
they're very important.
So this is fast forward to the current study and
this is our...
Doesn't show up quite what the white is
but that's transcending the trauma there.
So we start with the
Eva Fogelman uses the terminology
confrontation with the past.
We were already doing that but I like that,
how she says that and so I like to acknowledge her
and understanding how trauma affects the brain
and the body and affects us releasing the pain and
that's through the various exercises
and sort of cathartic release and then transcending
the trauma and at the center is the
return to the sacred path, and I've already pretty much
described that so the early research was
basically finding, which I showed some of those other
slides, but that increase in joy and decrease
in guilt and a reduction in a sense of feeling responsible
to undo the painful past.
And then we apply this to working with parents
in parenting interventions and
integrated it with a model, this was through a
SAMHSA grant, that was a woman who's no longer
alive, Doctor Marylin Steele, who's an African-American
psychologist from California, and she had a model
called Strengthening Multi-Ethnic Families and Communities
and it was very good.
In the SAMHSA project we were limited to
certain kinds of things that we could choose from
and that year, the cohort, most of the Native
and Latino grantees gravitated towards her model
and it was really really interesting.
She was very very kind and so we had a Lakota parenting
model where we focused on the historical trauma intervention
and then our traditional parenting skills which actually
have very good protective factors.
Because our children our considered sacred
and placed at the center of the nation.
So we're traditionally a very child-centered culture.
So in doing qualitative evaluation of that,
the parents felt more competent as parents at the end,
increased use of traditional language, which we
weren't even expecting but we used a lot of traditional
terms, and they not only reported an improved relationship
with their children, their perception of that,
but also with their parents, grandparents,
and their extended family.
And increased communication with their parents
and grandparents about historical trauma
and their past boarding school experiences
and also increased pride in being Lakota,
valuing one's own culture and our seven laws
which I mentioned before include things like
generosity, compassion, and humility and respect.
So this current study is started in 2013, we're just
started our third year, which it's unbelievable,
it's a three year study, it's a pilot study,
clinical trial, and feasibility study and that's what
the mechanism is an R34 and
funded by the National Institute of Mental Health.
We're very blessed that we have an awesome program
officer who's very hands on and involved with us.
We have a really great studying monitoring team
that include two of my former colleagues
from Columbia that are part of the medical school
in New York State Psychiatric Institute.
So sort of the rationale before it is
the lack of empirically supported treatment models
for Native people and that we've been sort of
forced to use models that we haven't developed
and aren't developed with us in mind.
One of my colleagues, Doctor Jeanne Miranda,
who is in California, has done a lot of disparities
research, she was on the original Surgeon General's Report
several years ago about the status of minority
mental health.
She reported the severe under representation of
not only Native people funded by NIMH
but NIMH studies that included Native people.
There were only, I don't remember the number
but it was appalling out of millions of people.
I'm thinking it was something like 52 or 76
but I don't want you to quote me on it
because I should've double checked.
It could be a little higher than that but it's
extremely low.
So she asserted that we have no evidence
that these evidence-based practices empirically
supported treatments work with Native communities
because they have not been included in the research.
And my sort of beef is we have our own culture,
we have our own wisdom.
We have our own traditional practices,
we have our own practices going on in
lots of tribal communities and also with other communites
of color and other groups, and that are based
on that wisdom.
And I feel like the funding should be given to
support the development of evidence based on those models
instead of imposing a model that's been
developed with basically non-Native
or non-persons of color, mainstream culture
at NIH that are more fluent cultures and
that's sort of the stereotype, I'm generalizing
a little bit but I think to make the point so
we have our own models and we need help
in developing the evidence base for them.
And that would be ideal, I think
instead of having to culturally adapt models.
And the idea of cultural adaptation is usually
very superficial, like you put nice Indian designs
on the manual and you serve some fried bread
and have a drum one night and that's
cultural adaptation.
And it's not coming from the core
and the values and the world view
which can be different.
So we need those kinds of interventions.
So the design for this current NIMH study is taking
group in a personal psychotherapy and combining it
with the historical trauma and unresolved
grief intervention.
And it's random assignment to either
IPT only or the combined model and
into tribal sites but in different culture areas
and one's urban and one's reservation.
And so we train clinicians in the model
and train tribal college students and graduates
and it's out-patient group treatment,
twelve sessions and then we'd collect data
at different time points and we wanna develop
a multi-site study, larger, that's the next thing so
we do some qualitative interviews and
the verbal feedback, 'cause we don't have any of the data
analyzed yet to tell you the results,
but the verbal feedback from the participants is the
perceived helpfulness and the clinicians
who are delivering the intervention talk about
how they really feel that they see changes in the people
and people are glowing and one woman in particular
that is an older woman, who I think I mentioned earlier,
was a boarding school survivor.
Had never had a chance to talk about
her boarding school trauma before
and felt very empowered to do so.
So this slide is just sort of some of the measures,
I'm not gonna go through all of that but we
do use the Hamilton Depression Scale,
which is used a lot with IPT studies.
And we also use the Inventory of Complicated Grief
and PCL which is for PTSD symptoms and then
Les Whitbeck's Historical Loss and Associated Symptoms Scale
along with looking at PHQ 9 for depression, which a lot of
Indian health service clinics are using.
So in conclusion, again takini being rebirth and
having hope through the historical trauma intervention,
this is from that same traditional (speaks foreign language)
elder's council booklet, and it said,
"let a hundred drums gather.
It must be a time of celebration of living,
of rebuilding and of moving on.
Our warriors will sing a new song,
a song of a new beginning, a song of victory.
Let our warriors sing clear and loud so the heartbeat
of our people will be heard by Sitting Bulll and
all our ancestors in the spirit world.
Let us send to our great chief a new song to sing
when he rides around the people in the spirit world.
Look at our children, they're going to live again.
They are going to live again.
Sitting Bull says this as he rides."
And just some pictures to leave you with.
This was a buffalo in the Black Hllls
on the side of the road.
Taken from the car, safely inside the car.
So they're just awesome and they're inspirational
because they've survived so long they're our relatives
so I'm very inspired by them.
When I get really tired, especially physically,
I just think of those big bodies on those little skinny legs
and so when I've had to dance in ceremonies I remember that
and I just get, okay if they can do it I sure can.
My legs are a little bigger than...
(she laughs)
So I said, "I can do this."
That was from a buffalo roundup in South Dakota.
So we have some time, as far as I understand for
questions and comments and again,
my apologies that the video didn't work at all but
I'll put that site back up there.
It's about the Sherman Indian School, which actually
predated the Carlisle Indian School in New York so
I'll put that up there again.
(audience claps)
Thank you.
- [Audience Member 2] I have a question.
I noticed that you focused a lot on like
individual or collective interventions?
And I was curious about the suggestion for like
policy change or like otherwise like higher level or
(inaudible) interpersonal individual level?
- Yeah so the question is
suggestions for policy change or
higher level interventions or so.
I'm not a policy person so I don't really know the
whole science of that.
I know in my earlier days I was involved in
different kinds of groups and kinda community activism
but it's not like a science for me, I don't know but
I've been involved with different kinds of task forces
and of course our three historical trauma conferences,
where funders were present.
SAMHSA actually gave us a lot of support for those
conferences, we had foundation grants.
When we started the Takini Network, we didn't have
our own 501C3 initially, so the Seventh Generation
Development Fund, which is a great organization out of
California, and helps tribal programs get started
that are more grassroots efforts.
But they don't support programs that have federal funding.
They made an exception for us, we didn't have
federal funding initially, but they made
an exception for us because of the type of work
we were doing, they saw that as really helping our people.
And then eventually we got our own 501C3 for the
Takini Network, which we don't have now.
We just let it lapse after 2003, just 'cause the funding
challenges post 9/11 kinda caught up with us and
we all have other jobs that we're doing so...
So I think that those are some things.
I know a lot of our folks have been involved with
UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues
and have gone to testify, been to Geneva.
There's a Lakota treaty council.
My brother's been involved with all of those things and
has friends all over Europe who are
support, have Native support groups actually
in Europe, and trying to raise funds and just sort of
offer political support.
So I don't know how helpful that is.
I think trying to change legislation and do
advocacy is really important in that area.
I also know that there's a boarding school healing project
and they've done a lot to try to get testimony.
Kind of like the truth and reconciliation commission work
on these boarding school abuses and other kinds
of trauma and trying to put that on the map
but we sort of, in the Takini Network, are very
careful and protective because we do this healing work,
we wanna stay neutral and sort of politically
very trustworthy.
The other thing is when you have a certain kind of a
spiritual commitment, you're supposed to stay out of
controversy and so that's something that we
also have to try to navigate so that you sort of
stay pure and you're neutral and you
sort of help the people.
I have had the privilege of actually doing some
work with some Native Christian fundamentalist groups
so even though I practice traditional Lakota spirituality
and we know that there's all this colonization
that the Christian religions were involved with
in the boarding schools, we do have a lot of people who
are Christian in Native communities and who
practice both traditional and Christian beliefs
so we don't impose that on anyone.
But it was actually quite an honor to work with this
Christian fundamentalist camp and
the people were great, and if you kind of just don't
listen to certain language, that they
sounded like rabble rousers, actually.
They wanted to get more culture into the services
so they invited me to stay for the ecumenical services,
they decided that I was anointed and it was
a real honor and I stayed it was really a good experience
so my recommendation to them was to
keep doing what they were doing and to develop
in their own healing work, something that fit their belief
system and their services, so it wouldn't violate that but
they were still very much Native people and
really wanting to protect and help Native communities.
It's just that they had been Christianized and really
believed in that way but they sort of had their
own version of how that got played out
so I just think that's another example of
sort of facilitating or helping other people to...
I think that's a very sacred thing, is someone's
relationship with their own spirituality that we can't tell
somebody else how to practice or how to believe.
That's kinda sacred ground.
And so just to support other people in
empowering themselves in whatever way
that you can.
And I don't have any more scientific way of
suggesting that but I stay really
I've kinda narrowly focused in terms of again
like I said being a woman on a mission so...
Thank you.
There's a lady back there and a gentleman over there.
- [Audience Member 3] First of all I'd like to say
thank you very much, it was an honor
to hear you speak tonight.
Thank you very very much.
- Thank you.
- [Audience Member 3] I have a couple of questions.
My first question is, did you ever get to look at
the atrocities that happened in Ireland with the
Magdalene laundries?
I see a lot of similarities and I just
am curious about that.
- No I didn't.
I'm sort of remotely aware of other kinds of atrocities
to other groups but I spend so much time
and focus on this that I...
I don't act like I have limited time 'cause I'm always
doing so much but yeah so but I really encourage
that sort of communication of other atrocities
across the world and unfortunately,
people have not learned to--
I mean collectively, to treat one another with respect
and dignity and unfortunately genocide
is continuing in the globe so.
- [Audience Member 3] My second question is
and you just touched on it a little bit in the earlier
question and that is, very curious about how
the generations of the people who have been a part
of the atrocities, how these later generations deal with
that so like people who taught in the schools,
stuff like that, and was wondering if that ever came up
in your research, or anybody doing the research on how
just the progress of the people that did work either
as workers (inaudible) internment camps or
in the schools or if you had any knowledge of that.
- I just know of some, a few clinicians who are
actually of German-Catholic descent who
sort of carry a sense of guilt about the Holocaust,
even though they weren't personally involved
but that's part of their legacy.
And so some of them work in tribal communities.
So I think that that's sort of one thing that they
do to sort of try to maybe undo a little bit
and it's hard but I know a lot of conferences,
even like the American Indian Movement when they would have
different conferences, they have meetings of allies.
So like there's this concept of people who are allies who
wanna support Native efforts so that's one thing that is
happening but what I like to recommend to people,
and I would always to student is to look at your own
history, because the people that came to this
continent were escaping oppression often times,
and so people were coming here, maybe carrying
trauma and to sort of go back and try to heal
that too would be really good.
Would be helpful.
- [Audience Member 4] (inaudible) take one more question.
- Oh, okay.
Go ahead.
(mumbles) pointing, and I had said him.
How 'bout two?
That gentleman back here and then down here.
'Cause I had told him first.
(she laughs)
- [Audience Member 5] I was curious to hear a little bit
more about the compensatory fantasies, if you could
speak to that, and also maybe give some examples.
- Yeah so the field that you go into, for example.
I usually like to recommend to providers that,
are you really doing what is your gifts, using your gifts
and your passion and what you're supposed to be doing
or are you acting out your compensatory fantasies?
So you're trying to...
So compensatory fantasies is trying to
make up for something that you didn't cause
that's traumatic in your family or your family history
so we'll say children of Holocaust survivors.
They feel like they have to somehow be everything to their
parents, there's tremendous pressure on them
because they feel like in some way they have to make
up for the Holocaust losses.
Even though they didn't cause it so
what I see in a lot of Native communities is that we
sometimes do that so we're doing things where
we're just like dishrags, just wrung dry, trying to
help our communities.
Some people who go away to school and then
they feel so guilty about having this opportunity
when people are suffering at home that they drop
out or flunk out and go back home
just because that's out of the compensatory fantasy so.
That's a example.
- [Audience Member 6] Okay thank you Doctor Braveheart.
I'm particularly inspired and intrigued when you talk about
the engagement with wisdom, indigenous wisdom.
And you gave example, you couldn't think
of the exact number but in terms of evidence-based
research, and I wonder how you are realizing your hope
to incorporate and engage with indigenous knowledge
and wisdom in Western research context.
- Yeah so actually the miracle of getting this
NIMH funding...
Actually we were in a ceremony around the time
before the decision was made.
And the healer told us that we would get help
and actually gave me something from the ceremony
and that's kind of an example of kinda that
sort of empowerment on some other kind of
level but so I think that's it and the fact that
we got the funding I'm still pretty amazed and that we have
this study monitoring team and that we have
and the program officer.
And sometimes we really have to
really share with them to help them to understand
because some of them don't have any
conception of what it's like on some of our reservations
and in some of our communities and the...
One of the examples is a very simple thing,
the research incentives.
The gift cards so for our department tends to use
Walmart gift cards 'cause there's not an additional fee.
But Walmart is 90 miles away from this tribal community.
So people would actually be in debt trying to use their
research incentive.
So we have to pay a higher fee so we can use
Visa gift cards which the local tribal gas station will
accept 'cause they can't get to Walmart.
I mean people do go to Walmart
but it's a big production and they have to
make sure they have enough money and
have to be doing other things so then
it sort of defeats the purpose and that's just a
minor sort of example but
I just feel like we got funding staying true
to the model and it's amazing that that happened.
And I think I also cultivated relationships
within NIMH over the years.
I mean so I was thoughtful about getting
to know program officers, sending in a concept paper
and say what do you think and learning and going
to NIMH Mental Health Service Research conferences
and they do have a thing where you can go as a new
investigator and you have to apply for it and I did that
and it's good 'cause then they bring you in
a day early and give you some mentoring and training
and they really are interested in
including more diversity and they realize that
one of the most under represented groups
are American Indians, Alaska Native in terms of
PIs and researchers and so they're really
trying to correct some of that.
Which is good, so.
So I think just hanging in there and not giving up
and trying to be strategic and...
The Dean!
The Dean shall speak now.
- [Dean] (inaudible) this was wonderful and I wanted
before you spoke tonight to make sure everyone knew we
had a very special guest in the audience as well
(inaudible)
helping to educate individual (inaudible)
(audience claps)
- I'll leelee you.
(makes Indian noise)
That's how you honor somebody.
(audience claps)
They're doing great work by the way
'cause we had a chance to talk about many things
including some behavioral health issues
in the community so we really had a good time visiting
and little bit earlier today so.
Thank you.
- [Audience Member 3] I'd like to thank Doctor Braveheart.
Thank you very much.
- Thank you.
(audience claps)