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Alternative Knowledges and the Future of Community Psychology: Provocations from an American Indian Healing Tradition

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Alternative Knowledges and the Future of Community Psychology: Provocations from an American Indian Healing Tradition Am J Community Psychol (2016) 58:314–321 DOI 10.1002/ajcp.12046 COMMENTARY Alternative Knowledges and the Future of Community Psychology: Provocations from an American Indian Healing Tradition Joseph P. Gone © Society for Community Research and Action 2016 Abstract In the early years of this globalized century, felt that perhaps some new hope and a cure could come alternative health knowledges and wellness traditions from the spirits and our ceremonies, so he asked for circulate faster and farther than ever before. To the degree help. So I asked my helpers, spirit helpers, for their that community psychologists seek collaboration with advice [during a ceremony], and to my surprise they cultural minority and other marginalized populations in spoke right up. They explained to me that cancer was support of their collective wellbeing, such knowledges like a flower. It grows, buds, and blooms. It can con- and traditions are likely to warrant attention, engagement, tinue to grow and become larger and occupy much of and support. My purpose in this article is to trace an the body or it can stop growing and become smaller epistemological quandary that community psychologists and then die. Cancer is a living being.... My spirits are ideally poised to consider at the interface of said that they would stop the cancer from growing and hegemonic and subjugated knowing with respect to budding.... If the young man did something else, it advances in community wellbeing. To this end, I describe might make it go away. What the spirits wanted this an American Indian knowledge tradition, its association young man to do was to go fishing. with specific indigenous healing practices, its –Joseph Eagle Elk (Lakota heyoka) differentiation from therapeutic knowledge within disciplinary psychology, and the broader challenge posed by alternative health knowledges for community Introduction psychologists. At the outset of the millennium, I embarked as a newly Keywords American Indians Community Psychology minted clinical-community psychologist on a research Knowledge systems Health and wellness Traditional investigation among my own people, the Gros Ventre of healing Indigenous spirituality the Fort Belknap Indian reservation in northcentral Montana. For that project, I wished to understand local “ ” [This psychologist named Frank] spoke to me explanatory models for depression and problem drinking about...his patient. He had many problems which based on interviews with tribal community members. One fl Frank treated, like depression and sadness, but he had of my respondents, an unusually re ective reservation tra- one big problem that was beyond Frank’s work; the ditionalist called Traveling Thunder, explained the origins “ ” young man had cancer. He had been given four months of these mental health problems as arising not from pol- — to live, and now they said he would soon die. Frank luted genes or broken brains or even as a legacy of wounded childhood or collective psychic trauma—but ✉ rather as a consequence of the colonial subjugation of Joseph P. Gone indigenous ceremonial knowledge and practice (Gone, [email protected] 2007, 2008b). Loss of ceremonial tradition, he asserted, Department of Psychology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, disrupted long-standing tribal relationships with the USA Creator, thereby obstructing community access to Am J Community Psychol (2016) 58:314–321 315 life-generating sacred power that is circulated by such experiments as the preferred means for settling questions ceremonies. In stark contrast, then, to the rehabilitative of therapeutic efficacy (Gone, 2012). mission of reservation-based mental health professionals In commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the estab- (who, he observed, routinely engage in cultural forms of lishment of community psychology, I celebrate this impor- “brainwashing”), Traveling Thunder advocated for a col- tant milestone of our profession by considering the future lective return to prayer through ceremony as the basis for of alternative knowledges—especially knowledges in asso- recovery from rampant (post)colonial pathologies in our ciation with health and wellness interventions that lie communities. This identification of conventional mental beyond either disciplinary psychology or biomedicine—in health services as expressing a potentially implicit form of an increasingly diversifying society. I do so from the hegemonic cultural proselytization (Gone, 2008a) has perspective of this alternative indigenous discourse, with a shaped my program of research in profound ways ever particular emphasis on indigenous healing traditions. Para- since that formative project. Indeed, it has led me to con- doxically, with respect to most things indigenous (whether sider indigenous healing traditions such as the one cultural, epistemological, or therapeutic), to look forward reflected in the practices of the late Lakota medicine man is also to look backward so as to trace lines of continuity Joseph Eagle Elk (Mohatt & Eagle Elk, 2000), as specific and to harvest insights from histories of both subjugation instances of broader systems of knowledge that are diffi- and “survivance” (Vizenor, 1999). In this instance, I cult to reconcile with reigning forms of therapeutic examine a particular indigenous knowledge tradition— authority. specifically a Teton Sioux or Lakota knowledge tradition In fact, as part of my scholarly journey, I have docu- —as just one representative of a plethora of peripheral mented through several diverse community-based investi- knowledge traditions that might give rise to culturally gations the emergence and establishment of an alternative health claims, including cultural meta-claims alternative (or alter-Native) discourse concerning Ameri- about knowing that may in fact be required for proper can Indian wellness and distress throughout “Indian adjudication of such claims. This Lakota knowledge tradi- Country” (Gone & Trimble, 2012). This discourse is tion is associated with the heyoka role made famous by both parallel to and divergent from professional knowl- Lakota holy men such as Nicholas Black Elk, whose edge among mental health clinicians and researchers. It visionary experiences continue to be circulated to an speaks to four domains of common concern: the origins inspired readership around the world (Neihardt, 2014). of problems, norms of wellbeing, approaches to treat- My ultimate purpose is to trace an epistemological quand- ment, and assessments of outcome. Regarding the origins ary with which community psychologists are ideally of problems, this alternative discourse identifies historical poised to grapple at the interface of hegemonic and subju- trauma (i.e., the collective, cumulative, and intergenera- gated knowing. To this end, I will describe the Lakota tional impacts of European colonization [Hartmann & heyoka tradition, its association with specific healing prac- Gone, 2016]) as the source of pervasive community tices that are embedded within a broader knowledge sys- dis-order rather than the biological, intrapsychic, and tem, the differences between Lakota therapeutic behavioral factors that are typically described as leading knowledge and that of professional psychology, and the to psychopathology. Regarding the norms of wellbeing, broader challenge posed by alternative health knowledges this alternative discourse imagines a restoration to local for future community psychologists. and long-standing forms of indigenous selfhood and rela- tionship (grounded in diverse cultural psychologies [Shweder, 1991]) rather than the enhancement of neolib- Black Elk and the Heyoka Tradition eral individualist forms of selfhood (i.e., free agents nav- igating free markets in pursuit of personal happiness One area of my scholarship concerns traditional healing [Adams, Dobles, Gomez, Kurtis & Molina, 2015]). among northern Plains Indian peoples. For example, I Regarding approaches to treatment, this alternative dis- have analyzed the narrative of Bull Lodge’s Life, written course pursues reclaimed indigenous traditional healing by my great grandfather Fred P. Gone in 1941, which practices—especially ceremonial practices—as the means recounts the events and actions associated with the most to restoring community members to wellness rather than famous medicine person among the Gros Ventre. My implementation of established professional mental health analyses of this narrative have produced insights into the treatments—including evidence-based approaches—as the nature of American Indian traditional healing vis-a-vis most legitimate forms of therapeutic intervention (Gone, modern psychotherapy (Gone, 2010), the importance of 2009a, 2010, 2011b, 2013). Finally, regarding assess- place for the practice of Native healing (Gone, 2009b), ments of outcome, this alternative discourse privileges the generative power circulated by narrative accounts of indigenous ways of knowing rather than scientific signature life events such as war stories (Gone, 2011a), 316 Am J Community Psychol (2016) 58:314–321 and the indigenous functions served by multigenerational or otherwise live in danger of imminent death from light- preservation of this particular life narrative (Gone, 2006). ning. Black Elk finally confided his vision to an older holy For this article, I examine relevant portions of John man named Black Road and subsequently fulfilled this Neihardt’s interviews (DeMallie, 1984) with the Oglala obligation to the Thunder beings by sponsoring the heyoka Lakota holy man and healer, Nicholas Black
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