Alternative Knowledges and the Future of Community Psychology: Provocations from an American Indian Healing Tradition

In the early years of this globalized century, alternative health knowledges and wellness traditions circulate faster and farther than ever before. To the degree that community psychologists seek collaboration with cultural minority and other marginalized populations in support of their collective wellbeing, such knowledges and traditions are likely to warrant attention, engagement, and support. My purpose in this article is to trace an epistemological quandary that community psychologists are ideally poised to consider at the interface of hegemonic and subjugated knowing with respect to advances in community wellbeing. To this end, I describe an American Indian knowledge tradition, its association with specific indigenous healing practices, its differentiation from therapeutic knowledge within disciplinary psychology, and the broader challenge posed by alternative health knowledges for community psychologists.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/135430/1/ajcp12046.pdfhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/135430/2/ajcp12046_am.pd

A Robust Method to Detect Concealed Weapons

Concealed weapons detection is a large problem that is faced by the Police Department nowadays. There are many disasters caused by poor detection of the weapons. Since public safety is at risk there is a need to design an efficient detector that can detect the weapons hidden under the clothing. This thesis presents a novel method for detecting concealed weapons under clothing using image processing techniques. In this thesis IR imagery is used to capture an image which works on the principle of law of black body radiation. Image thresholding is performed on the captured data using Sauvola\u27s adaptive thresholding algorithm. Then the next step is to perform edge detection depending upon the orientation of the pixels in the image. This step is performed to get an outline of the shoulders in the image. Then image classification is done to find the distance between the shoulders in pixel size which can in-turn be used to estimating the approximate size of the hidden weapon. Finally, we locate the object of interest by using a sliding window method, which scans the image looking for object pixels in it. Finally concealed weapons are detected under the clothing using image processing techniques

“It Felt Like Violence”: Indigenous Knowledge Traditions and the Postcolonial Ethics of Academic Inquiry and Community Engagement

In a 2014 presentation at an academic conference featuring an American Indian community audience, I critically engaged the assumptions and commitments of Indigenous Research Methodologies. These methodologies have been described as approaches and procedures for conducting research that stem from long‐subjugated Indigenous epistemologies (or “ways of knowing”). In my presentation, I described a Crow Indian religious tradition known as a skull medicine as an example of an indigenous way of knowing, referring to a historical photograph of a skull medicine bundle depicted on an accompanying slide. This occasioned consternation among many in attendance, some of whom later asserted that it was unethical for me to have presented this information because of Indigenous cultural proscriptions against publicizing sacred knowledge and photographing sacred objects. This ethical challenge depends on enduring religious sensibilities in Northern Plains Indian communities, as embedded within a postcolonial political critique concerning the accession of sacred objects by Euro‐American collectors during the early 20th century. I complicate these ethical claims by considering competing goods that are valued by community psychologists, ultimately acknowledging that the associated ethical challenge resists resolution in terms that would be acceptable to diverse constituencies.Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/141022/1/ajcp12183_am.pdfhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/141022/2/ajcp12183.pd

“We Never was Happy Living Like a Whiteman” : Mental Health Disparities and the Postcolonial Predicament in American Indian Communities

In the context of increasing attention to disparities in health status between U.S. ethnoracial groups, this article examines the dilemma of divergent cultural practices for redressing disparities in mental health status in American Indian communities. Drawing upon an ethnographic interview with a tribal elder from a northern Plains Indian reservation, a prototypical discourse of distress is presented and analyzed as one exemplar of the divergence between the culture of the clinic and the culture of the community. Situated in the context of continuing power asymmetries between tribal nations and the U.S. federal government, the implications of this cultural divergence for the efforts of mental health professionals, practitioners, and policymakers are identified as a predicament that only the conventions and commitments of a robust community psychology have the potential to resolve.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/117068/1/ajcp9136.pd

The Red Road to Wellness: Cultural Reclamation in a Native First Nations Community Treatment Center

This article explores how Native American cultural practices were incorporated into the therapeutic activities of a community‐controlled substance abuse treatment center on a “First Nations” reserve in the Canadian north. Analysis of open‐ended interviews with nineteen staff and clients—as contextualized by participant observation, program records, and existing ethnographic resources—yielded insights concerning local therapeutic practice with outpatients and other community members. Specifically, program staff adopted and promoted a diverse array of both western and Aboriginal approaches that were formally integrated with reference to the Aboriginal symbol of the medicine wheel. Although incorporations of indigenous culture marked Lodge programs as distinctively Aboriginal in character, the subtle but profound influence of western “therapy culture” was centrally evident in healing activities as well. Nuanced explication of these activities illustrated four contributions of cultural analysis for community psychology.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/117057/1/ajcp9373.pd

Research Reservations: Response and Responsibility in an American Indian Community

Community action research among the Assiniboine and Gros Ventre tribes of the Fort Belknap Indian reservation in Montana was undertaken to identify the cultural grounds for innovative mental health service delivery. As an enrolled tribal member investigating these matters in my “home” community, however, I encountered a series of challenges and limitations emerging from respondent reservations about sharing personal experiences of difficulty and distress, and the perceived means for redressing these. Focusing upon a difficult interview with a knowledgeable tribal elder, I enlist sociolinguistic analysis—the study of communicative norms governing who talks with whom about what (and under which conditions)—as one crucial means to making sense of this complex research encounter. Similar analyses would seem necessary to ensuring the cultural validity of research conclusions in cross‐cultural action research more generally.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/116959/1/ajcp9047.pd

Dialogue 2008

In the wake of European settler-colonialism, the indigenous peoples of North America still contend with the social and psychological sequelae of cultural devastation, forced assimilation, social marginality, enduring discrimination, and material poverty within their respective nation-states. In response to this contemporary legacy of conquest and colonization, a cottage industry devoted to the surveillance and management of the “mental health” problems of Native Americans proliferates in the United States and Canada without abatement. The attention of clinically concerned researchers, practitioners, and policy makers to an indigenous “patient” or “client” base, however, invites critical analysis of the cultural politics of mental health in these contexts. More specifically, the possibility that conventional clinical approaches harbor the ideological danger of implicit Western cultural proselytization has been underappreciated. In this special section of Ethos , three investigators engage the provocative cultural politics of mental health discourse and practice in three diverse Native American communities. Each provides a critical analysis of mental health discourse and practice in their respective research settings, collectively comprising an analytical and political subversion of the potentially totalizing effects of authorized, universalist mental health policy and practice. [mental health, American Indians, psychiatric anthropology, cross-cultural counseling, postcolonialism]Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/72110/1/j.1548-1352.2008.00016.x.pd

JAVA DESIGN PATTERN OBFUSCATION

Software Reverse Engineering (SRE) consists of analyzing the design and imple- mentation of software. Typically, we assume that the executable file is available, but not the source code. SRE has many legitimate uses, including analysis of software when no source code is available, porting old software to a modern programming language, and analyzing code for security vulnerabilities. Attackers also use SRE to probe for weaknesses in closed-source software, to hack software activation mecha- nisms (or otherwise change the intended function of software), to cheat at games, etc. There are many tools available to aid the aspiring reverse engineer. For example, there are several tools that recover design patterns from Java byte code or source code. In this project, we develop and analyze a technique to obfuscate design patterns. We show that our technique can defeat design pattern detection tools, thereby making reverse engineering attacks more difficult

Reactivity of Acyclic (pentadienyl)iron(1+) Cations with Phosphonate Stabilized Nucleophiles: Application to the Synthesis of Oxygenated Metabolites of Carvone

The addition of phosphonate stabilized carbon nucleophiles to acyclic (pentadienyl)iron(1+) cations proceeds predominantly at an internal carbon to afford (pentenediyl)iron complexes. Those complexes bearing an electron withdrawing group at the σ-bound carbon (i.e., 13/14) are stable and isolable, while complexes which do not contain an electron withdrawing group at the σ-bound carbon undergo CO insertion, reductive elimination and conjugation of the double bond to afford cyclohexenone products (21/22). Deprotonation of the phosphonate 13/14 or 21 and reaction with paraformaldehyde affords the olefinated products. This methodology was utilized to prepare oxygenated carvone metabolites (±)-25 and (±)-26

Effets comparés d’incuit de chaux et de dolomie sur quelques paramètres chimiques d’un sol ferrallitique et d’un sol organique au Sud de la Côte d’Ivoire

La dégradation continue des sols tropicaux est une préoccupation constante en agriculture dans les pays de l’Afrique subsaharienne. L’étude vise à évaluer le potentiel fertilisant de l’incuit de chaux, à travers l’amélioration des paramètres chimiques de deux types de sols. Il s’agit d’un sol ferrallitique et d’un sol organique. Un échantillon d’incuit de chaux a été prélevé sur un site de traitement des eaux souterraines de la Société de Distribution d’Eau (SODECI) dans le quartier de Yopougon, Abidjan. L’échantillon a été séché, broyé et tamisé à 125 μm. Les sols ont été incubés avec des doses croissantes d’incuit de chaux et de dolomie (pour comparaison) pendant 30 j, en vue d’étudier leurs effets sur le pH, la capacité d’échange cationique et la teneur en aluminium échangeable des sols. Les résultats montrent que l’incuit de chaux a eu un effet significatif (p = 0,05) sur les paramètres étudiés. L’augmentation du pH et de la capacité d’échange cationique des sols suite à l’addition de l’incuit de chaux a été plus importante que celle de la dolomie. A la dose maximale de 550 kg.ha-1, le pH du sol ferrallitique a été de 6,25 et 5,85, respectivement avec l’incuit de chaux et la dolomie. Concernant le sol organique, des pH de 5,33 et de 5,16 ont été obtenus à la même dose, respectivement avec l’incuit de chaux et la dolomie. Les réductions de la teneur en aluminium échangeable des sols ont été similaires pour les deux amendements, et cela quelque soit la dose utilisée. Ainsi, l’incuit de chaux se présente comme un amendement à fort potentiel d’amélioration de la fertilité de sols qui peut être valorisé en agriculture.Mots clés : Incuits de chaux, dolomie, sols acides, amendements basiques, Côte d’Ivoire