summer reading part three

all quotes from the book indigenizing the academy: transforming scholarship and empowering communities edited by devon abbott mihesuah & angela cavender wilson
 

from chapter 7: "keeping culture in mind: transforming academic training in professional psychology for indian country" by joseph p. gone 

"the conventions of professional practice in psychology are western in origin and frequently diverge in profound and problematic ways from the cultural concepts and practices of contemporary Native communities."

"the history of euro-american colonization renders the provision of conventional psychological interventions to Native people a potentially detrimental encounter, resulting from the fundamental incongruence of such interventions with the extant healing traditions of many tribal nations."

"these western ethnopsychologies. . . are discordant with most tribal ethnopsychologies with regard to emotional experience and expression; norms governing kinds and qualities of acceptable communication; the nature of distress, disorder, and its treatment; and the meanings of personhood, social relations, and spirituality."

"western ethnopsychologies of the person typically embrace the traditions of dualism, individualism, and modernity, conceptually separating mind from body, prioritizing the individual self over social relationships, and typically excluding attention to spirituality.  one implication of these formative cultural assumptions is the organizational segregation of 'mental health' from the rest of biomedicine within western health care systems."

"Gros Ventres are culturally committed to a view of personhood that celebrates forbearance, emotional reserve, and strength of mind in the face of hardship, suffering, or distress. . .such a view of personhood stands in sharp contrast to the cultural assumptions embedded within the most prevalent contemporary psychotherapies, in which confessional acknowledgements of weakness, fragility, or dependency are explicitly encouraged and unvarnished expressions of illicit thought or troubling emotion are directly solicited."

"Native American experiences of Euro-American colonialism have always inspired acts of resistance, discourses of critique, movements of agentic negotiation, and moments of alternative possibility, though always in the context of asymmetrical power relations."

"to the extent that we are committed to refashioning, reenvisioning, or reforming the Western academy with recourse to indigenous thought and practice, we are inevitably prescribing (whether implicitly or explicitly) what we are willing to adopt from the western university tradition, what we are willing to adapt of our own indigenous epistemological traditions, and which aspects of these disparate traditions we are prepared to omit from the transaction altogether.  the intrinsic complexity here involves an infinite array of strategies for deciding what to adopt, what to adapt, and what to omit from these divergent ways of knowing and learning within our visions for transforming the academy."

"community psychologists have long advocated community-based education and consultation (as opposed to clinic-based psychotherapeutic services) emphasizing collaborative and empowering relationships with community stakeholders (as opposed to expert-client relationships with patients) toward the development of strengths-focused (as opposed to deficit-focused), preventive (as opposed to rehabilitative) interventions."

"cultural psychology takes as its conceptual point of departure the co-constitution of culture and mind.  its central locus of inquiry therefore concerns the semiotic (i.e., symbolically mediated) nature of human experience.  the resultant formulation of local ethnopsychologies within the framework of cultural psychology will encompass multiple relevant content areas, including culture, language, and mind; self and personhood; emotional experience and expression; concepts of health, illness, and healing; and research reflexivity (i.e., attention to how the knower constructs the known)."

from chapter 8: "should American Indian history remain a field of study?" by devon abbott mihesuah

"we need to eliminate useless or repetitive research and focus on actual community needs; it is both unethical and wasteful to plow familiar ground continually." -vine deloria jr.

"nietzsche asserted that 'the unhistorical and the historical are necessary in equal measure for the health of an individual, of a people, and of a culture.'  for Indigenous people, knowledge of the past is crucial for their identity growth and development, pride, problem-solving strategies, and cultural survival.  nietzsche also claims that being 'unhistorical' - able to forget the past - is one way to find happiness.  in some circumstances, the advice to 'forget it and move on' is useful, especially for trivial day-to-day events and confrontations.  but the strategy of becoming unhistorical is simply not possible for tribal people with complex histories and cultures and devastating past (and present) relations with non-Natives that have shaped their modern realities."

"history is best defined as a continual, open-ended process of argument, which is constantly changing.  no question is closed because any problem can be reopened by finding new evidence of by taking a new look at old evidence.  thus there are no final answers, only good, coherent arguments: history is not some irreducible list of 'the facts' but continually changing bodies of evidence." -norman j. wilson

"narrative is also the reflection of the author's bias, political agendas, and patriotic fervor.  if one needs to prove a point, any history is possible."

"Native historians and our allies should have the right to identify histories that are helpful to the tribes, accurate in their tribe's eyes, racist, or incomplete.  wilson proposed it first by entitling one of her essays 'American Indian history or non-Indian perceptions of American Indian history?' and by suggesting that authors admit what they are attempting to accomplish."

"a useful model in understanding why historians write the way they do is the 'patterns' of history put forth by grob and billias, in which they argue that writers analyze the past according to the standards and political and social climate of the generation in which the historians live.  'every generation of american scholars seem to have reinterpreted the past in terms of its own age,' they write.  'thus, each succeeding generation of americans seems to have rewritten the history of the nation in such a way as to suit its own image.'"

"any science of society should be launched in the service of some conception of social justice, equity, freedom, and progress - that is to say, some idea of what a good society might be." -hayden white

from chapter 9: "teaching Indigenous cultural resource management" by andrea a. hunter

"the issues between these two [Native American and archaeology] communities center on various aspects of cultural heritage, that is, who owns the past, who manages the past, and who has the right to tell stories about the past.  imbedded within these questions, particularly the question of who owns the past, is the concept of repatriation and protection of sacred ancestral sites and objects."

"if there has ever been a discipline in the academy that needed to be Indigenized, it is certainly anthropology, and archaelogy in particular."

"traditionally, american archaeology has adhered stringently to a western, scientific worldview for studying and understanding past cultures and teaching about the past.  incorporating tribal knowledge, oral histories, and particularly migration and origin histories into archaeological research of past cultures is viewed by some as an inappropriate course of study because such resources are considered objectionable."