Department of Global Health and Social Medicine, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA.
Department of Anthropology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA.
Am J Community Psychol. 2019 Sep;64(1-2):172-184. doi: 10.1002/ajcp.12353. Epub 2019 Jul 11.
One of the chief questions confronting mental health professionals who serve American Indian communities is how best to offer genuinely helpful services that do not simultaneously and surreptitiously reproduce colonial power relations. To ensure that counselors and therapists do not engage in psy-colonization, it is crucial to recognize the sometimes divergent cultural foundations of mental distress, disorder, and well-being in "Indian Country." In this article, I will consider four excerpts from a research interview undertaken among my own people, the Aaniiih Gros Ventres of north-central Montana. At a superficial level, these excerpts seem to reinforce reigning sensibilities that are readily familiar within the mental health professions. And yet, closer analysis of these interview excerpts reveals several tantalizing facets of an indigenous cultural psychology that may well continue to shape life and experience among tribal members in this setting. I recover this distinctive cultural psychology through archival representations of cultural and community life, including analysis of an important tribal myth. This analysis makes possible an alterNative interpretation of these interview excerpts, grounded in an aboriginal cosmology, that yields important implications for conceiving a more inclusive knowledge base for psychology that only robust community engagement can reveal.
服务美国印第安社区的心理健康专业人员面临的主要问题之一是，如何最好地提供真正有帮助的服务，而这些服务不会同时隐秘地再现殖民权力关系。为了确保顾问和治疗师不参与心理殖民，至关重要的是要认识到“印第安人领地”中精神困扰、障碍和健康的文化基础有时存在差异。在本文中，我将考虑从我的族人——蒙大拿州中北部的 Aaniih Gros Ventres 人那里进行的研究访谈中的四个摘录。从表面上看，这些摘录似乎强化了在心理健康专业领域中很容易熟悉的主流观念。然而，对这些访谈摘录的更仔细分析揭示了一种土著文化心理学的几个诱人方面，这种心理学很可能会继续影响这个环境中部落成员的生活和体验。我通过文化和社区生活的档案表现形式来恢复这种独特的文化心理学，包括对一个重要的部落神话的分析。这种分析使得通过基于土著宇宙观的替代解释成为可能，这为构想一个更具包容性的心理学知识库提供了重要启示，而这种知识库只有通过强大的社区参与才能揭示。
