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About Smoke signals. (Grand Ronde, Or.) 19??-current | View Entire Issue (March 15, 2003)
Smoke Signals 11 MARCH 15, 2003 Dr. Joseph Stone Publishes Notable Paper Study traces the effects of colonialism on Tribal peoples. The past is never dead. It's not even past William Faulkner By Ron Karten When Sheridan's Friends of the Library commit tee turned down a $75,000 grant from the Spirit Mountain Community Fund last August over the committee's insistence on being free to use Phil Sheridan's name for the new library, one of those who commented asked when the Indians are going to get over this terrible history of theirs, and lay it to rest. Joseph Stone Ph.D., Behavioral Health Director for the Health and Wellness Center of the Confeder ated Tribes of Grand Ronde, provides a context for that question in his latest publication, a technical paper with the technical title, "Focus on Cultural Issues in Research: Developing and Implementing Native American Postcolonial Participatory Action Research." The article takes on many even in the psychology community who believe, in Stone's words, "there's no theoretical way to describe historical facts and tie them to present issues." Still, he made some points very clear, and the dedication is a good place to start: "This paper is for you, little brother, and it is for all the injured young Native men and women who have chosen to take the path of suicide." It was presented to a Work Group on American Indian Research and Program Evaluation Method ology held in Washington, D.C. last April. The paper described the interplay between a well known history and its many behavioral results on-going for 500 years. Stone's paper focused on the effects of post-colonial stress, or put another way, how terrible parts of Indian history con tinue to be replayed in the lives of Indians today. Stones explanation goes like this: when the parents suffer from excessive anxiety, depression, and or substance abuse, the children never or only partially learn the physically but also emotionally because if you don't, you die or at least you face some severe consequences. Unfortunately, less acceptable behaviors work just as well to force the issue including substance abuse, risky sexual escapades, and even criminal behavior. Along with requiring added stimulation, the prob lem also makes it more difficult than usual to re cover from traumatic events, including war or sexual assault. In fact, according to Stone's paper, those with compromised ability to regulate their emotions experience a wider array of psychiatric disorders. "The experience of families in stress. . .was the cru cible of child development for Tribal families and their children across the past five hundred years," Stone wrote. Stone traced the postcolonial period almost gen eration by generation, starting with biological war fare in which colonizers treated Indians to blankets laced with smallpox; to the Indian Wars when sol diers attacked Tribal communities often when the men were gone with "grapeshot," or the metal sweepings off a blacksmith's floor, because it was cheaper than regular gunshot, (and as a side issue, also was laced with horse feces from the blacksmith floors, meaning that even slight wounds caused deadly infections); to the Indian boarding schools (run both by the government and religious orders) where the aim was to wipe out the Indian language and culture, and where rules were sometimes enforced with physical and sexual abuse, which Indians then brought back to their families as accepted methods "The experience of families in stress. . . was the crucible of child development for Tribal families and their children across the past five hundred years. " "Joseph Stone Ph.D. Behavioral Health Director ""Tiiiffwii '"iif Tl i nm-Hr'f',!'nU- Chemawa Indian School is one of many boarding schools across the country for Indian youth. The history of the boarding schools is a checkered one, particularly in past years, with many Indians suffering horribly from the experience of being torn from home, family and language. Dr. Stone cites these experiences in his analysis of how colonial oppression continues to affect Indians today. ability to regulate their own emotions. As a result, the children need to in dulge in risky behavior that makes that regulation more imperative. If you are rock climbing, for example, it is more imperative that you behave in appropriate ways of discipline. "Thus," Stone wrote, "a generation of situational molestation or sexual abuse is introduced into the Tribal communities as yet another form of learned behavior derivative from the boarding school era." "Tribal people, as a subgroup, are the most deco rated Veterans of foreign war in this country," wrote Stone. And these warriors are not alone in return ing from war with posttraumatic stress, but add to that for Natives, returning to a terminated reserva tion. Stone cited from a study showing that the ef fect of termination on posttraumatic stress in Indi ans "was ten times that of the U.S. population at large." The generation returned from war to relocation in a city, where substance abuse sometimes accompa nied poverty, lack of language and job skills and "on going racism and oppression." And because "the dynamics of racism and oppression are becoming quite sophisticated," Stone wrote, Tribal people in ternalized the process and identified it as self-image. Today, "this generation of Tribal people. . .may have a child of four years of age who is reported into the child protective service system because the parents are substance abusing." "These are the issues of the current First Nation generation in the U.S.A.: poverty, substance abuse, psychiatric disorders, oppressive political and racial systems and agenda, culturally inappropriate child protection efforts and treatment methods, and the cumulative effects of several generations of postcolonial stress." And others in the work group had specific experi- ences of these effects: "you know, I just kept hearing my grandma saying, 'I could never hug my kids,' said Dr. Paulette Running Wolf, Ph.D., (Blackfeet Cree), a senior scientist providing site liaison ser vices to the American IndianAlaskan Native grant communities that are participating in the national evaluation of mental health services for children. "I said, "Why, grandma? What do you mean you could never hug your kids?" She said, "Because I thought I had TB and if you had TB you were taken away and put in an institution and you were never seen again." Stone's paper supported principles for continued research in Indian communities suggested by an other researcher: Tribal oversight; the training and employment of Tribal members as project staff; Tribal facilitators, and most important, the use of "cultur ally specific interventions (derived from Tribal be liefs and values, not adapted from elsewhere)." Dr. Walter Hillabrant, Ph.D. (Citizen I 25 Potawatomi), a clinical psychologist serving as Tech nical Director for the Committee on Benefits of the National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Depen dence, cautioned about "constructs and theories and nroDositions which aren't testable." He said. "I chal- lenge people who want to explain lots of things. . .in terms of postcolonial stress, that they be able to ar ticulate areas of discourse that would be inconsis tent with that." As part of the process, benefits and successes must be factored in, Stone agreed, and concluded by adapt ing the advice of the pioneering psychologist Carl Jung: "I would rather we be whole than good that we have our history, we have our shadow we have to grow." The paper came out of years of working with this subject matter, said Stone. From the time of his brother's suicide, he was asking himself, "Where does it fit together across time?' He had been talking about it for years and finally, he said, "People began to challenge me to write it." When it finally came out, he was before a group of Native people. "It was like I was on auto-pilot." He was in front of a white board. He found himself writing down the theory "level by level" almost with out knowing it. "It took me 35 minutes to get it all down." There was a pregnant pause in the room and then he heard the words, "Dr. Stone, I'll buy that theory." The other piece of this, according to Stone, is that Native people have to "own our presence within the time line. Then we own the effects in ourselves." "It's an incredibly painful theory," he said.
