Mental Health and Substance Abuse Services Preferences among American Indian People of the Northern Midwest

This study examines factors that influence preferences between traditional cultural and western mental health and substance use associated care among American Indians from the northern Midwest. Personal interviews were conducted with 865 parents/caretakers of tribally enrolled youth concerning their preferences for traditional/cultural and formal healthcare for mental health or substance abuse problems. Adults strongly preferred traditional informal services to formal medical services. In addition, formal services on reservation were preferred to off reservation services. To better serve the mental health and substance abuse treatment needs of American Indians, traditional informal services should be incorporated into the current medical model

A review of protective factors and causal mechanisms that enhance the mental health of Indigenous Circumpolar youth

Objectives: To review the protective factors and causal mechanisms which promote and enhance Indigenous youth mental health in the Circumpolar North. Study design: A systematic literature review of peer-reviewed English-language research was conducted to systematically examine the protective factors and causal mechanisms which promote and enhance Indigenous youth mental health in the Circumpolar North. Methods: This review followed the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines, with elements of a realist review. From 160 records identified in the initial search of 3 databases, 15 met the inclusion criteria and were retained for full review. Data were extracted using a codebook to organize and synthesize relevant information from the articles. Results: More than 40 protective factors at the individual, family, and community levels were identified as enhancing Indigenous youth mental health. These included practicing and holding traditional knowledge and skills, the desire to be useful and to contribute meaningfully to one's community, having positive role models, and believing in one's self. Broadly, protective factors at the family and community levels were identified as positively creating and impacting one's social environment, which interacts with factors at the individual level to enhance resilience. An emphasis on the roles of cultural and land-based activities, history, and language, as well as on the importance of social and family supports, also emerged throughout the literature

Developing an Alternative Learning Trajectory for Rational Number Reasoning, Geometry, and Measuring Based on Indigenous Knowledge

Math in a Cultural Context (MCC)2 is a long-term curriculum and professional development project based on indigenous knowledge (IK) in Alaska. Collaborating with Yup’ik elders and teachers for approximately two decades, MCC has identified a powerful set of mathematical processes used in constructing everyday artifacts

Colonialism and Multicultural Counseling Competence Research: A Liberatory Analysis

The effort to advance the multicultural counseling movement has been hard-fought over the past few decades. In recent years, important work has been done to further advance the multicultural counseling movement through the paradigm of social justice. The social justice paradigm calls into question the colonial structure in which notions of counseling competence in general, and multicultural counseling competence in particular, have been defined and investigated. In this chapter, we attempt to shine a critical light on these colonial foundations as they pertain to researching the multicultural counseling competencies. The purpose of this chapter is threefold. First, we describe the colonial foundations of the counseling profession in general, and of the multicultural counseling competency paradigm specifically. Second, using liberation psychology (Martín-Baró 1994) as a lens, we detail the implications these colonial foundations have for research on multicultural counseling competencies. Third, we provide suggestions for decolonizing the process of research on multicultural counseling competencies. Ultimately, we aim to provide a map for rethinking multicultural counseling competencies and how the counseling profession might define and investigate such competencies in the future. Based on our analysis, we provide recommendations for counselors, counselor educators, and researchers. Specifically, our suggestions are aimed at rethinking our roles as professionals, and engaging marginalized and oppressed clients in the process of defining and researching multicultural counseling competence—a term that may not stand up to scrutiny when analyzed from a liberatory perspective in collaboration with oppressed clients and populations