Duran, Edwardo and Bonnie. Native American Postcolonial Psychology. State University of NY Press, Albany. 1995.
- Here is a look at the psychological realities of the survivors of a conquered people. “Chronic and/or acute Cartesian anxiety disorder” is useful term here (pg 7). The worldviews of the conquerors become ultimate hegemonic truths, but strength in numbers and ferocity of violence does not constitute truth. The fragmented and maniacal emotional states of the modern West continue to dominate and destroy the original diversity of the planet.
Ch 1. Intro
(4) Much of the study of cross-cultural issues and the resultant literature was primarily an exercise that had to be validated by the rules of the academy. It did not take a great revelation to discover that the people who made up the rules of this academy were predominantly white males. In this sense, knowledge from a cross cultural perspective must become a caricature of the culture in order for it to be validated as science or knowledge. Borrowing from the imagery of Frantz Fannon, the study of colonized peoples must take on a ‘lactification’ or whitening in order for the produced knowledge to be palatable to the academy. The consequences of such cross-cultural production of knowledge has been ongoing neocolonialism within the discipline of psychology. For example, intelligence testing and sciencing based on eugenics are the root metaphors upon which modern theory and practice are based.
(5) The reality of doing cross-cultural investigation is that most of this analysis is performed through the inoculated gaze of a psychology whose discourse is founded on the premise of the universal subject – the subject of a historical project of emancipation via reason. As long as the language implies that the discourse is cross-cultural, we are perpetuating the notion that other cultures do not have their own valid and legitimate epistemological forms. “Cross-cultural” implies that there is a relative platform from which all observations are to be made and the platform which remains in place in our neocolonial discipline is that of Western subjectivity. When Western subjectivity is imposed on colonized people, not only will the phenomenon under scrutiny evade the lens of positivism, but further hegemony will be imposed on the community in question.
- Positivism: the negation of metaphysics/theism. Only scientifically verified, mathematically formulable, logically provable phenomena exist, or are worthy of investigation.
- The “relative platform” of western subjectivity/reason/scientific method. Ie, things can be compared relatively, but through the lens of Western truth.
(6) In order for our discipline to lead the way toward a true integration, sincere work must be completed as we move toward a postcolonial paradigm. Quite simply, a postcolonial paradigm would accept knowledge from differing cosmologies as valid in their own right, without their having to adhere to a separate cultural body for legitimacy.
- For instance, Western science says Native Americans have been here for 10-12K years, since the last ice age (Bering Land Bridge Theory). Natives say “we’ve been here forever..”, ie longer than that, or actually a sense of time that is not the linear one that modern science uses. Why can’t the modern Western mind accept the Native perspective? Because the Conquerors are in charge, and they will decide what is true. Because “daddy said so.”
- If modern Western science is so true and so great and so real, then how do we account for the environmental destruction that has followed in its wake? 500 years of myopic human tinkering is currently destroying a planet that was billions of years in the making.
(6) The past five hundred years have been devasting to our communities; the effects of this systematic genocide are currently being felt by our people. The effects of the genocide are quickly personalized and pathologized by our profession via the diagnosing and labeling tools designed for this purpose. If the labeling and diagnosing process is to have any historical truth, it should incorporate a diagnostic category that reflects the effects of genocide. Such a diagnosis would be ‘acute and/or chronic reaction to colonialism.’ In this sense, diagnostic policy imposes a structure of normality based in part on the belief in the moral legitimacy and universality of state institutions [of the conqueror].
- Everyday acceptance of the violent and genocidal foundations of the current paradigm, instead of the hiding and passing over of it – in schools, churches, and government buildings. And in film and public monuments.
(6) We cannot continue to reward knowledge that reifies the thought of western Europeans above all others.
- How do we avoid the dominant epistemologies being determined by the conqueror? Perhaps the answer is in George Lakoff’s work. Defusing the “male authority” model of the family/government, and emboldening the opposite model whose main precept is empathy.
(7) If psychology continues on its present course, the judgment of history will continue to be unkind – as already described by Michel Foucault in Madness and Civilization (1967). It is no longer acceptable for psychology to continue to be the enforcement branch of the secularized Judeo-Christian myth. Through the worshiping of logical positivism, our discipline has been a co-conspirator in the devastation and control of those peoples who are not subsumed under a white, male, heterosexual, Christian subjectivity.
The Newtonian and Cartesian fundamentalists who continue to entrench themselves in kneeling at the altar of science must analyze and deconstruct their actions anew. A very simplistic analysis will illustrate that their so-called objectification of science is nothing but ongoing social control and hegemony…These notions are sure to disrupt the linear thinking of most of our objective scientific brothers and sisters in the profession. A postcolonial diagnosis for such objective scientists would perhaps be ‘chronic and/or acute Cartesian anxiety disorder.’…Postcolonial psychology will celebrate all diverse ways of life rather than comparing others to what they are not.
- This unfortunately entails that the conquerors relinquish their control over the conquered. Again, Lakoff’s empathy is the political way. It’s a start anyway.
Ch 2. Psychological Worldviews
(14) Western thought conceptualizes history in a linear temporal sequence, whereas most Native American thinking conceptualizes history in a spatial fashion. Temporal thinking means that time is thought of as having a beginning and an end; spatial thinking views events as a function of space or where the event actually took place.
- A worldview of place is difficult for a culture who does not have a proper home; one who is defined by constant expansion and conquering. Such a culture doesn’t have a home place, because it is always looking for a new and better one to exploit.
- The Eternal Recurrence of Nature Based societies makes the marking of passing time a less relevant activity.
(15) Another crucial worldview difference of which the Western therapist must be cognizant is that of noncompartmentalization of experience. In Western experience it is common to separate the mind from the body and spirit and the spirit from mind and body. Within the Native American worldview this is a foreign idea. Most Native American people experience their being in the world as a totality of personality and not as separate systems within the person. This becomes more complex for the Western therapist/social scientist when the idea of the personality being part of all creation is discussed. Thus the Native American worldview is one in which the individual is a part of all creation, living life as one system and not in separate units that are objectively relating to each other. The idea of the world of creation existing for the purpose of human domination and exploitation – the core of most Western ideology – is a notion that is absent in Native American thinking.
- Platonic separation of ideas and physical experience; Cartesian separation of mind/body/spirit; Christian separation of earthly existence (less real) and heavenly existence (most real).
- Can a modern western person comprehend a non-fragmented kind of experience? It must at least be acknowledged in order for the oppressed to have a chance at healing.
- Disconnection from Nature leads to the disconnection from family, from the state, from all ‘others.’ Western individualism is a fundamental pathology.
(17) In no way does Western thinking address any system of cognition except its own. Given that Judeo-Christian beliefs systems include notions of the Creator putting humans in charge of all creations, it is easy to understand why this group of people assumes that it also possesses the ultimate way of describing psychological phenomena for all of humanity. In reality, the thought that what is right comes from one worldview produces a narcissistic worldview that desecrates and destroys much of what is known as culture and cosmological perspective.
- A predictable result is having a narcissistic sociopath as president, and having one of two dominant political parties reveling in the mess.
(18) “From Europe, that half island, the white man came in ships, bringing awful diseases and firewater, and even intentionally selling infected clothing to destroy the population, as they did in the South Seas. Wherever white man went, there was hell for the other nations; one has to be outside to understand. The white man is a very beast devouring the Earth, the whole world trembles at him. Such Christianity is a compensation, a hellish lie,” C Jung.
(18) Stephen Jay Gould refers to the practice of valuing cultural experiences which are Western and white over any other cultural experience as biological determinism [The Mismeasure of Man, 1981].
(21) In the San Francisco Bay Area there are presently 100,000 Native American people from at least 300 different tribal groups. The idea of being able to serve all these people in a relevant manner becomes extremely difficult..
- because the loss of place is seemingly unrecoverable. and loss of place is equivalent to / synonymous with loss of soul.
Ch 3. The Vehicle
(25) To assume that phenomena from another worldview can be adequately explained from a totally foreign worldview is the essence of psychological and philosophical imperialism.
(26) Foucault (Birth of the Clinic, 1973) brilliantly dissected what he called ‘technologies of power” authorized by the sciences of medicine. He illustrated that, far from objective statements of truth, the science of medicine emerged fully implicated in practices of domination.
- “When you mix science and politics, you get politics,” John Barry, author of “The Great Influenza.”
(28) Native American people have been subjected to one of the most systematic attempts at genocide in the world’s history. At the beginning of the colonization process in North America there were over 10 million Native American people living on the continent. By the year 1900 there were only 250,000 people left.
(29) Once a group of people have been assaulted in a genocidal fashion, there are psychological ramification. With the victim’s complete loss of power comes despair, and the psyche reacts by internalizing what appears to be genuine power – the power of the oppressor. The internalizing process begins when Native American people internalize the oppressor, which is merely a caricature of the power actually taken from Native American people. At this point, the self-worth of the individual and/or group has sunk to a level of despair tantamount to self-hatred. This self-hatred can be either internalized or externalized. [..into suicide, domestic violence, drugs and alcohol etc].
(30 It is safer for the [oppressed] perpetrator to cathart his/her anger on a helpless family member who represents the hated part of him/herself.
This aggression serves a dual purpose. The perpetrator of violence can achieve momentary catharsis and relief while at the same time destroying the part of him/herself that reminds him/her of that helplessness and lack of hope. In essence, the individual attacks his/her own projection in a person close by. Meanwhile, the person inflicting the violence may or may not be aware that he/she really would like to vent this rage on the oppressor.
(30) Many of the dynamics in effect in the Jewish experience are similar to those of the Native American experience, with the crucial exception that the world has not acknowledged the Holocaust of native people in the hemisphere. This lack of acknowledgment remains one of the stumbling blocks to the healing process of Native American people. The inherent denial keeps the colonial perspective trapped in an aura of secrecy and continuing alienation, since their acts continue to haunt them with guilt and existential emptiness.
- See American Holocaust (Stannard), The Conquest of America (Todorov), An American Genocide (Madley), Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (Brown), Facing West: The Metaphysics of Empire Building and Indian Hating (Drinnon), Going Native: Indians in the American Cultural Imagination (Huhndorf), Bad Indians (Miranda), among countless others.
(31) Many of the Native American people who survived the onslaught were not only physically abused but also psychologically tormented. The level of abuse could have easily provided a workshop on technique even for the most sophisticated diabolical minds in Hitler’s regime.
(37) The devastating effects of the internalized cathexis are no secret in Native American country. Suicide rates have been the highest of any ethnic group for decades. In order for the anger to be held in some sort of abeyance, the individual requires an anesthesia. The incidence of alcoholism among Native Americans over the last two hundred years shows the extent to which alcohol has served as a medicine that keeps this rage within some type of boundary.
(41) What gives [traditional] medicine its effectiveness is the cohesive community. Without community cohesion the medicine loses its power.
- This loss of local community cohesion, which begins with the loss of connection to Nature (the local environment – the first home of any individual and community – is what makes modern psychological medicine largely ineffective.
(45) Since the soul wound occurred at the level of myth and dream, it follows that the therapy or transformation of the wound should also occur at the level of myth and dream.
- Ie Jungian techniques, but this is difficult for a culture that does not have a “story,” a myth, and has become disjoined from Nature-Home. Hence, violent fanaticism arises. Or, the violent fanaticism is absorbed into the ideology of male-dominated conquest and oppression, or the ideology of the conservative right.
- the “level of myth and dream” is not accessible in a culture dominated Cartesian-Newtonian-Christian scientism/positivism. Only physically measurable phenomena count for anything.
(53) We fantasize that one day the DSM-III [Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders] will have diagnostic criteria such as ‘acute or chronic reaction to genocide and colonialism.’ Until that day comes there will be little honesty from the Western healing traditions in their relationships with Native Americans, and the ongoing ethnocide will continue under the guise of Western healing. Unless Western systems – which belong to the power brokers – began to accept non-Western forms of knowledge as legitimate, Western therapy will continue to be impotent.
Ch 4. Theoretical Concerns
(67) The psychological significance of religious rituals is rooted in what appears to be an unconscious need to assimilate god by the person in society. A symbolic and unconscious form of transformation occurs in the psyche as the rituals are enacted consciously. The ritual provides the death-rebirth transformative experience to the person or group; this experience actually transcends the field of temporality and places the event at another point in space/time.
- “the transcendence of space/time” is exactly something that the modern world claims as illegitimate experience, because it cannot fit in linear measured time. yet it is precisely the kind of experience that every person needs. the burden of self-awareness demands the ritualized experience of eternity.
- “what good is my journey if I miss out on eternity,” Gillian Welch.
(72) Westerners are always trying to change the physical world.
- The Anxiety of Progress
(86) Most students [of Native American psychology] find themselves wanting to quit the internship early since the fantasy of working with Native Americans is not the romantic process of enlightening the savages some would like to think. Instead, their own psychological process plunges them deep into a world of unknown forces which threaten the very existence of their ego reality.
Ch 5. The Spirit of Alcohol
(107) In 1492, more cultural and linguistic diversity existed on this continent than in Europe.
(118) Colins contends that at least the first twenty pictorial images seeking to present Native Americans…are ethnographically incorrect, depicting native men with long flowing beards accompanied by various monstrous forms of life. (Indian and Europe, 1987)
- Europeans first met what they thought they’d meet, monsters, ‘wild men,’ instead of humans.
- See also Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought (Friedman), Wild Men in the Middle Ages (Bernheimer), Beyond Geography (Turner), The Artificial Savage (Bartra), Savagism and Civilization: A Study of the Indian and the American Mind (Pearce).
(126) By postcolonial we mean the use of “a social criticism that bears witness to those unequal and uneven processes of representation by which the historical experience of the once-colonized comes to be framed in the West.” (Critical Fictions, H. Bhabbha, 1991).
(136) “Indian,” in its popular cultural meaning, is not an ethnicity but a stage in a social evolutionary ladder. This meaning precludes people of indigenous descent from ever living up to the image of Indianness and in the process inscribes a lost relations to nature or spiritual connectedness.
Ch 6. Intervention with Families
(159) Paolo Freire [in Pedagogy of the Oppressed] outlines the notion of internalizing the oppressor as one the by-products of colonialism. The oppressed group, by internalizing the oppression, may have a tendency to become like the oppressor because the introjected oppression has no place for expression. The anger and oppression can also be expressed in an unhealthy manner through domestic violence.
- Introjection: the unconscious adoption of the ideas or attitudes of others (ie a grown person realizing they’ve never questioned the values/ideologies they inherited from their parents or social groups).
Ch 7. The Problem of Suicide
(176) [Vine] Deloria is correct in observing that an “anthropologist comes out to Native American reservations to make observations. During the winter these observations will become books by which future anthropologists will be trained, so that they can come out to the reservations years from now and verify the observations they have studied.” The study becomes the end in itself, and few of these researchers know or care about the actual issues. (Custer Died For Your Sins).
- i.e., “when the anthropologists arrive, the gods leave the island,” Haitian proverb.
Ch 8. Community Intervention
(186) The Reagan and Bush administrations systematically and with no regard for human suffering delivered a mortal blow to all facets of community health in the United States. The rationale for this action was illogical because Reagan and Bush believed or said they believed that the need could be filled with volunteers and through funding from the public sector. They did not ask the basic question, When does a capitalist ever invest money from which s/he will not make a handsome profit? There is no short-term monetary profit in investing in poor, disenfranchised people who are also having emotional problems. Therefore, funding for helping Native American people – and other communities in need – in the area of community mental health was all but nonexistent.
America has become a country in which only a privileged few have access to health care. We have achieved parity with only one other nation in the world when it comes to dealing with the oppressed in this area. The only other nation in the world that does not have a national health plan is South Africa. It seems as if the United States is choosing the role models that will ensure that the oppressed and poor remain so, and for the most part (proportionately) the number of poor is greater among the people of color. The policy being dictated in this country can only be seen as one of white supremacy akin to apartheid.
Ch 9. Epilogue
(203) Most of the problems encountered in therapy by Native Americans are due to the fact that most therapies are deeply entrenched in linear thinking that is foreign to the Native American client. Within the Native American worldview there is room for a deeper experience of being in the world than the one measured by the linear yardstick provided by Isaac Newton.
(204) In any system where there is an unequal distribution of resources and power, systems of domination exist which act symbolically or instrumentally to reinforce that domination.