Indigenous Practices: The New Gold Standard

How my eyes were opened to the grassroots practices that can become an important part of mental health care.

Indigenous what? 

I doubt that many people link indigenous practices with evidence-based mental health practices or "the gold standard."  How did I come to be immersed in this term?  My journey is one that I cherish.  Born and raised in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Bernalillo County (we learned to spell both of those in the first grade!), I was fortunate to be surrounded with slices of life that came together in a rich tapestry of humanity.  I took it all for granted - the Shoshone boy I had a crush on, the Dene (Navajo) boy who took me to the senior prom.  Was my own Japanese heritage an unconscious magnet for people who were different? Or was it my Mom who loved Native American and Asian art?  Add to this my Black nanny, Croatian uncle and wonderful hispanic neighbors, mixed in with exports from the Midwest and the South. My grandmother came from Kentucky, so I had a Japanese father with a Kentucky accent.  Who knew?

If we fast forward, my professional development as a marriage and family therapist included clinical work, teaching, research and administration.  The common denominator in all of these was my insistence on always finding a better way.  How could I be a better clinician, become more innovative in program development, and keep a focus on those who were underserved?  I’ve never thought that the latest was the greatest; that the most recent scientific or clinical developments have no room for improvement.  I am one who is always looking to critique and build on the most recent work. I never agreed that the most recent scientific or clinical developments have no room for improvement. 

Where can we go from here?

By the time I moved to California, I was convinced that my experiences in the Black community of Louisville were a compass.  Who else suffered racism, microaggressions, and marginalization?  How can one part of my life inform another?  One of the most life-changing experiences came when I worked on the California Reducing Disparities Project (CRDP).  In order to reduce mental health disparities, this initiative was created to identify areas for improvement and develop solutions to help serve those who have been underserved and underrepresented. Still ongoing today, the first group of grantees learned from our citizens and each other. Asian American, Black, Hispanic, LGTBQ, and Native American study groups brought a wealth of information to the project.

Through this initiative, there was a lot of brainstorming and support for including the voices of family members and community members who are often left out of professional and policy decision-making. Although I was in the Black study group as a co-author of our report (see our report linked in my publications), I was interested in how many of the Native American ideas passed down through generations applied to our group, too. (Through research and discussion, there was a lot of brainstorming and support for including the voices of family members and community members who are often left out of professional and policy decision-making. It also led me to direct a demonstration project related to building resilience in African American families.)

As we completed our work, two things happened almost simultaneously.

First, my work in medical family therapy took my students and me into community health centers where we found traumas of all types, from gunshot wounds to abuse and neglect discovered by our physicians.  At that point, none of us had any formal trauma training.  During a three-year program in Somatic ExperiencingⓇ, I learned how helpful body-oriented trauma treatment can be.  This was the beginning of a wave of interest in meditation and mindfulness as mental health practices.  Learning how to focus on my own body was an ongoing challenge in a society that encouraged me to catch up, keep up, and get ahead.  I began to take some breaths and see what my body could tell me.  Turns out, I needed a lot of help just to get myself oriented to the wisdom of my body.

In scientific circles, the growing interest in yoga led to studies that began to link this practice with nervous system regulation.  This was a different world than my traditional mental health training that relied on cognition and analysis.  And yet, apart from those seeking mental health training, public interest continued to grow.

My Japanese DNA began to kick in, feeling some pride that these Eastern practices were becoming so popular, but no one seemed to give credit to these ancient ways of thinking or how they were attached to a paradigm of spirituality that transcends Western medicine and religion.  Certainly, insurance companies were not paying for them!

So, I continued my interest and developed more skills in these areas, eventually attending a conference where I met Forrest Cuch, retired Director of Indian Affairs for the State of Utah.  As I listened to him talk about Native healing practices for intergenerational and racial trauma, energy from my childhood memories flooded my soul.  After serving on the CRDP and seeing how a native way of knowing was useful to our Black work group, I began to look more closely at differences and similarities between groups.  In this case, both were survivors of intergenerational trauma, even though one group was herded onto reservations, while another group was systematically squeezed out of opportunities that led to the great migration north and a scattering of citizens across many urban areas.  The pain was just as deep even though resilience emerged from a variety of sources.

And so, back to my original question -- indigenous what? 

Why do I use this word to define my work now and how does it guide me? To begin, our nervous system is indigenous. Our bodies were not made for contemporary, westernized lifestyles. Many symptoms of trauma emerge from the lack of basic healing customs that are the foundation of community life.

For example, some groups in South Africa will form a large circle of family and friends around someone who is suffering from depression. Then, each individual in the circle takes a turn saying something good about the person in the middle. America is still very based on individualism rather than collectivism. Through cross cultural explorations, the goal of my work going forward is to introduce and promote an array of healing traditions for westernized mental health care.