Recounting coup as the recirculation of Indigenous vitality: A narrative alternative to historical trauma

A complex psychosocial portrait of substance use disorders among Indigenous people in the United States: A scoping review

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES

There has been a prevailing but erroneous belief in the medical community that there is a biological vulnerability in the American Indian/Alaskan Native (AI/AN) community to substance use disorders (SUDs), with alcohol use disorder (AUD) being the most prevalent. This scoping review aimed to examine what possible psychosocial issues could lead to the development of the perpetuation of SUDs in the AI/AN population.

METHODS

The protocol for this scoping review followed Arksey and O'Malley's methodological framework. There were 405 articles included for full-text review. Further inclusion criteria were applied which included: Directly looking at participants who had a SUD, including either in the discussion or conclusion a statement linking their data to psychosocial issues as a possible explanation for their data, and having measured the psychosocial issue with a research device. The final review included 15 studies.

RESULTS

Four psychosocial themes were uncovered using an inductive process, where recurring words related to identity, prejudice, isolation, discrimination, and self-concept in the literature. These themes were trauma/historical loss, mood, and discrimination/self-esteem. All of these themes are interrelated, and all influence the development or sustainment of a SUD.

DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS

Complex psychosocial factors in the AI/AN community are associated with SUDs. This trauma and historical loss should be addressed with culturally tailored treatments.

SCIENTIFIC SIGNIFICANCE

There are not many manuscripts that specifically look at the interplay of mood, trauma, self-worth, and discrimination with SUD in the AI/AN community. This scoping review aims to highlight these issues as well as discuss how culture should play a part in treatment.

Beyond resilience: A scoping review of Indigenous survivance in the health literature

Health inequity scholars, particularly those engaged with questions of structural and systemic racism, are increasingly vocal about the limitations of "resilience." This is true for Indigenous health scholars, who have pushed back against resilience as a descriptor of modern Indigeneity and who are increasingly using the term survivance. Given the growing frequency of survivance in relation to health, we performed a scoping review to understand how survivance is being applied in health scholarship, with a particular interest in its relationship to resilience. Results from 32 papers indicate that health scholars are employing survivance in relation to narrative, temporality, community, decolonization, and sovereignty, with varying degrees of adherence to the term's original conception. Overwhelmingly, authors employed survivance in relation to historical trauma, leading us to propose the analogy: as resilience is to trauma, so survivance is to historical trauma. There may be value in further operationalizing survivance for health research and practice through the development of a unified definition and measurement tool, ensuring comparability across studies and supporting future strengths-based Indigenous health research and practice.

Origins of antimining resistance in the life of a grassroots American Indian leader: Prospects for Indigenizing psychobiography

American Indian communities have long been subject to environmental degradation, but successful "grassroots" struggles to end such exploitation are exceedingly rare. How is it that Joseph William Azure-my father and an unsung hero of social change-came to "notice" in 1985 that "our entire [reservation] mountain range was at risk" from destructive gold mining and, in response, to form "a small grassroots traditional society" that created "a lot of local and national publicity for our cause to save" these mountains? To address this question, I adopted and adapted the approaches and methods of psychobiography to trace shifts in his sense of self in response to midlife socialization into Indigenous traditional spirituality. In developing this brief account of his development as a social change agent, I propose that psychobiography may require "Indigenization" if it is to better represent American Indian lives. Specifically, some Indigenous life stories will perhaps require tellings that center on collective endeavors rather than individual ones, reconstruction of life experiences based on comparably limited (material) archives, deeper preservation of the conventions of orality, and curation by close kin rather than by "distanced" analysts.

Re-imagining mental health services for American Indian communities: Centering Indigenous perspectives

The Indigenous peoples of North America are heirs to the shattering legacy of European colonization. These brutal histories of land dispossession, military conquest, forced settlement, religious repression, and coercive assimilation have robbed American Indian communities of their economies, lifeways, and sources of meaning and significance in the world. The predictable consequence has been an epidemic of "mental health" problems such as demoralization, substance abuse, violence, and suicide within these communities. One apparent solution would seem to be the initiation or expansion of mental health services to better reach American Indian clients. And yet, conventional mental health services such as counseling and psychotherapy depend on assumptions and aspirations that may not fit well with American Indian cultural sensibilities. For example, counseling practices draw on the presumed value for clients of introspective and expressive "self talk," whereas Indigenous community norms may emphasize communicative caution outside of interactions with intimate kin, leading to marked reticence rather than candid disclosure. Moreover, given community sensitivities to salient histories of colonization, such differences have the potential to further alienate American Indian community members from the very services and providers designated to help them. In this article, I review a postcolonial predicament that bedevils American Indian community mental health services and trace a program of research that has sought to harness American Indian cultural and spiritual traditions for reimagining helping services in a manner that truly centers Indigenous perspectives.