Developing a Response to Secondary Trauma for American Indian and Rural Service Providers

How can victim service providers, the organizations they work for, and the communities they serve help respond to the issue of occupation-based secondary trauma? Over the last few years, federal agencies in the United States have spent millions in research and programming to answer this important scientific and policy question. The current study builds on this work by describing and evaluating a community-based participatory research project focused on finding manageable, effective, sustainable, and ethical ways to respond to occupation-based secondary trauma in two separate communities: a rural American Indian community, Blackfeet Tribal Nation, and a predominantly white county in Montana, Gallatin County, United States. Findings from evaluation questionnaires (n=178; 80.10% women; 64.60% American Indian; 29.14% White) representing a wide range of occupations document that: (1) the implementation of the project was successful; (2) toolkits created for the project were useful to both individual participants and organizations; (3) training outcomes improved significantly; and (4) findings were consistent across the two different community contexts. Contributions, lessons learned, and future directions are discussed

Illuminating the Lived Experiences of Research with Indigenous Communities

The historical exploitation experienced by indigenous people in the United States has left a number of negative legacies, including dis- trust toward research. This distrust poses a barrier to progress made through culturally sensitive research. Given the complex history of research with indigenous groups, the purpose of this descriptive phenomenological study was to illuminate the lived experiences of both indigenous and non-indigenous researchers conducting cul- turally competent research with indigenous people. Interviews from 13 social science research experts revealed 6 underlying themes about their research with indigenous people, including respect and commitment, mutual trust, affirmation, harmony among multiple worldviews, responsibility, and spiritual/personal growth