Indigenous Adolescent Development

Psychological, Social and Historical Contexts

Les B. Whitbeck, Melissa Walls, Kelley Hartshorn

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780415716062
• eBook ISBN: 9781134744190
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Entwicklungspsychologie

This volume explores the first four waves of a longitudinal diagnostic study of Indigenous adolescents and their families. The first study of its kind, it calls attention to culturally specific risk factors that affect Indigenous (American Indian and Canadian First Nations) adolescent development and describe the historical and social contexts in which Indigenous adolescents come of age. It provides unique information on ethical research and development within Indigenous communities, psychiatric diagnosis at early and mid-adolescence, and suggestions for putting the findings into action through empirically-based interventions.

Part I

The Healing Pathways Longitudinal Study

1 The Reach of History

Our people were a spiritual people and we are a spiritual people and they will always be a spiritual people.

—Male Elder

Indigenous (American Indian/Canadian First Nations) adolescents grow up in historical and social environments unlike any others in North America. The adolescents who are the focus of this book come of age on geographically segregated rural or remote reservations/reserves. They must adjust to divergent messages from majority and traditional cultures. Even their experiences in their families, peer networks, and schools may be qualitatively different from their majority counterparts. The purpose of this book is to call attention to the unique developmental contexts of this often overlooked population of young people. We follow 746 tribally enrolled adolescents from early- (ages 10 to 12 years) through mid-adolescence (ages 13 to 15 years). The early chapters (Parts II and III) are devoted to risk and protective factors within specific developmental contexts, such as the adolescents’ exposure to and involvement in traditional culture, their reservation/reserve communities, and their families, schools, and peer groups. The model of Indigenous adolescent development we propose in Chapter 10 takes into account all of these developmental influences. The later chapters (Part IV) apply this developmental model to health and mental health outcomes. Throughout the book we employ the life course development approach to emphasize and interpret the critical role of Indigenous history in shaping the adolescents’ world.

Indigenous Adolescent Development in Historical Context

Regardless of what our history books tell us, there is not a shared North American historical narrative. Indigenous North Americans are embedded in a much different historical context than that of the dominant culture, one that includes relocation, starvation, isolation, removal of children, broken promises, and the denial of basic human rights. These experiences are not ancient history. The hard times of disease, hunger, and malnutrition associated with relocating tribes to reservations and reserves were going on less than 100 years ago and continue today in the form of persistent poverty and enormous health disparities. In the U.S., armed conflicts lasted into the 20th century with the vigilante killing of Mike Dagget and his family in Humbolt County, Nevada, in February 1911 (Mullen, 2011). The last U.S. military massacre of Indigenous men, women, and children occurred on December 29, 1890.

Overt government policies of ethnic cleansing of Indigenous people continued well into the 20^th century. American Indians were not recognized as U.S. citizens until the Snyder Act of June 2, 1924 (Bruyneel, 2004). The right to practice traditional religion on U.S. reservations was not formally reinstated until the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934. It was not until 1978 that the American Indian Religious Freedom Act codified rights of access to sacred sites, recognition and freedom of traditional worship, and rights of possession of sacred objects (American Indian Religious Freedom Act of 1978). Contemporary grandparents in the U.S. and Canada can recall being forced into boarding schools when they were children. Government-sponsored boarding schools were still operating in the U.S. in the 1940s and 1950s and, in Canada, boarding schools continued into the 1970s (Miller, 1996). Boarding schools in the U.S. are still operated by Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), though in different forms. The BIA currently funds seven off-reservation boarding schools, four of which are operated directly by the BIA and three are tribally administered (U.S. Department of the Interior, 2011).

The last formal U.S. government policy of ethnic cleansing was a movement during the Eisenhower years to “terminate” reservations and tribal sovereignty (Deloria & Lytle, 1984). During the 1950s and early 1960s, the federal government attempted to address reservation poverty by relocating approximately 70,000 people to centers in major U.S. urban areas. This last massive relocation program is now viewed as a misguided continuation of coercive assimilation policies, which tore apart traditional family systems, eliminated sources of social support, and undermined traditional beliefs and practices with isolation and distance. The return rate to the reservations is believed to be about 50% (Ablon, 1965; Sorkin, 1969; Steiner, 1968).

Historical Contexts of Indigenous Adolescent Development

All lives are situated in historical and social contexts that provide meaning and structure. Historical contexts frame worldviews and contribute to values through which we interpret contemporary events and experiences. Social contexts set the timing of important life transitions and developmental stages and, along with historical events, delimit opportunities (Elder, 1998). Developmental theorists have been very open to the effects of ethnically different social contexts on life transitions and trajectories. But what has not been considered sufficiently is that although ethnic groups may share the same time period, they do not share the same histories or interpretations of historical events.

The concept of unshared historical contexts is critical in understanding the life trajectories of Indigenous people. Ethnic cleansing has placed Indigenous people in an untenable position. If they accept the majority interpretation of history, the cleansing process is complete. But holding on to their historical context means attempting to preserve worldviews, spiritual beliefs, and social systems that are antithetical to the materialistic, individualistic belief system put in place by those who perpetrated the cleansing. The history of Indigenous ethnic cleansing has been detailed many times and need not be reiterated here (see Duran & Duran, 1995; Mann, 2005; Wishart, 1994); however, we highlight two critical historical events that continue to impinge directly on life course trajectories of contemporary Indigenous adolescents.

Confinement to Reservations and Reserves

The progressive military and economic campaign against Indigenous peoples left the federal government with the problem of what do to with the survivors. The solution, first implemented as the Permanent Indian Frontier policy in 1830, was to reserve parcels of land for them that were geographically separated and had no economic value to European Americans. Miscalculations where valuable land was included in the Indian frontier locations were sometimes made in the process. This resulted in moving whole cultures (e.g., Cherokee; Wolfe, 2006) or simply reneging on earlier negotiated treaties and changing reservation boundaries (e.g., the Lakota and the Black Hills; Lazarus, 1999). Some existing reservations were split to accommodate movement of tribes to various parts of the country (e.g., Omahas and Winnebagos in Nebraska). Other reservations came into being largely as penal colonies with no ancestral land base, a place to put “difficult” tribes or parts of tribes (e.g., the relocation of the Isanti people to the Crow Creek reservation after the Minnesota uprising of 1862). The reservation lands were further decimated by the Homestead Act of 1862 and the Dawes Act of 1887, which authorized the break-up of reservations into individual allotments that were subsequently sold to non-Indigenous people.

From their beginnings as penal colonies, reservations and reserves have emerged as sovereign, self-governed entities that are centers of existing tribal cultures. Nevertheless, they are products of their origins. By design, the reservations and reserves often are geographically very rural and isolated from population centers. Distances to services such as hospital emergency rooms and health clinics may be very great and transportation is often unreliable. Location and poverty undercut economic development. In 2005, 29% of all employed, tribally enrolled American Indians earned wages below federal poverty guidelines. Regional reservation unemployment rates that same year ranged from 25% to 77%, with an overall average of 49% (U.S. Department of Labor, 2005). Schools are small and often poorly supported. Almost all of the teachers are non-Indigenous people. Although progress is being made, school drop-out rates remain very high in some reservation/reserve communities (Bachman, 1992; Canadian Council on Learning, 2005; Devoe, Darling-Churchill, & Snyder, 2008).

Boarding Schools

Although religious Indigenous day schools existed long before, the first off-reservation school is dated to the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania, established in 1878. The quote “Kill the Indian, save the man” is attributed to its founder, Richard H. Platt. As this quote from a Carlisle graduation ceremony attests, the goals of cultural eradication were undisguised:

Let all that is Indian within you die. You cannot become truly American citizens, industrious, intelligent, cultured, civilized until the Indian within you is dead. (Rev. A. J. Lippincott, quoted in Adams, 1995, p. 274)

Beginning in 1869 government policy essentially apportioned known tribes among 13 Christian denominations for the purpose of establishing religious boarding schools for Indigenous children (Gooding, 1996). In 1882 the Secretary of the Interior terminated the church-government approach to education and established a unified system of federally controlled schools (Provenzo & McCloskey, 1981). There have been numerous books and articles chronicling the abuses endured in boarding schools (Adams, 1995; Ahern, 1984; Milloy, 1999). Children were taken from their families and involuntarily moved to boarding schools. Once there, their hair was cut, they were dressed in European clothes, and they were forbidden to speak their traditional language, even if it was their only means to communicate. Discipline could be harsh and arbitrary, and visits home were few. The effects on Indigenous families cannot be overstated. Generations of children were raised in harsh conditions and without parents or grandparents. When they returned to the reservations and reserves, they were “changed.” Often the traditional language was lost to them, they had been Christianized, and they had no family experience to guide them as parents of their own children. As a policy of ethnic cleansing and cultural eradication, boarding schools were very successful. The period spanned nearly 100 years, enough time for traditional family systems to erode, for traditional language use to diminish, and to replace traditional spiritual ceremonies and practices with European religions.

The Elders who guided our study recalled boarding schools either personally or through the stories their parents told them. One woman told us:

I was too, in a residential school. I lost a lot of things that I learned from my own parents. As soon as I went I was mistreated right away. But I would never forget that, because everyone else was that way, too. Our hair was cut. My hair was this long—to my waist. We couldn’t speak the language. It was hard because when you remove the child from the community, into a white society, it’s really, really hard. You’re blind … we don’t know how to motivate, or keep going. I picked up “yes” and “no” right away. And that’s all I used, maybe a week, maybe two weeks.

A male Elder summed it up with these words:

In the past children were spiritual, then with (European) contact, this was taken away. With contact, they were stolen away from the elders. Broken homes, broken families, physical and sexual abuse, and how could this happen? Because when the children would come back home from the residential schools, they brought some of these habits.

The anger is palpable when the Elders spoke of the boarding schools. Another male Elder told us that the schools were akin to concentration camps:

Now if you go back in our history, we had a building (residential school) here. A concentration camp, I call it. Here you were stripped of your identity and it still lingers.

The Developmental Significance of Historical Contexts

Historical contexts differentially shape lives by influencing values, beliefs, and identities. For example, people who came of age during the Great Depression tend to be frugal, hardworking, and distrusting of the future (Elder, 1974). But living through historical events does not affect everyone in the same way. The effects of the Great Depression were most acute for the economically disadvantaged. Boys from economically deprived households “were less likely to be hopeful, self-directed, and confident about their future” than those from non-deprived households (Elder & Caspi, 1988, p. 34). They also had lower aspirations and did not do as well in school as those from non-deprived families.

If the Great Depression, a period of about 10 years, had effects on a generation of young peoples’ hopefulness, mastery, and optimism, how do we weigh the effects of generations of ethnic cleansing? Have the effects been transmitted across generations, and, if so, in what ways? As with economically deprived adolescents of the Great Depression years, will some Indigenous people be more susceptible to effects of historical contexts than others?

Historical Cultural Losses

Researchers and clinicians have been aware of historical psychological distress among Indigenous people for decades (e.g., Duran & Duran, 1995; Jilek, 1981; Townsley & Goldstein, 1977). This distress has been variously conceptualized as historical trauma, historical grief, and historical cultural losses. Led by the seminal writings and intervention programs of Brave Heart and colleagues (Brave Heart, 1998, 1999a, 1999b; Brave Heart & DeBruyn, 1995; 1998; see Evans-Campbell, 2008, for a review), a grassroots movement has grown on reservations/reserves and among urban American Indians that seeks to understand the intergenerational psychological consequences of more than 400 years of ethnic cleansing and forced acculturation. The concept has struck a chord among Indigenous people, and culturally-based therapeutic, prevention, and healing programs are proliferating (for a recent review, see Whitbeck, Walls, & Welch, 2012).

As intuitive and appealing as the notions of historical cultural losses, historical trauma, and historical grief are, there remain some important challenges to disentangling the interrelated components of the concepts and to understanding what specific mechanisms are at work. In response to and along with Indigenous Elders and advisory boards, we developed a measure of historical cultural losses and their associated symptoms (Whitbeck, Adams, Hoyt, & Chen, 2004), which will be discussed in detail in Chapter 5 of this volume. We were surprised by the frequency of “daily or more than daily thoughts” pertaining to historical cultural losses among the parents/caretakers of 10- to 12-year-old children in our sample. Scores on the historical cultural losses measure are associated with distress (Walls & Whitbeck, 2011) and alcohol abuse (Whitbeck, Chen, Hoyt, & Adams, 2004) among the parents/caretakers in this study, and depressive symptoms among the adolescents (Whitbeck, Walls, Johnson, Morrisseau, & McDougall, 2009).

Proximal Versus Distal Effects

The most difficult theoretical and methodological challenge is to separate potential distal effects of historical cultural losses from more proximal stressors and risk factors. Children develop within shared histories that inform and explain social contexts. By adolescence they have lived through a very brief period of historical time. They are both products of and contributors to the contemporary period they are experiencing (e.g., the internet, video games, and television programs). However, the time they are living in may be interpreted through a shared past that provides a contextual framework for making sense of their world, values, and aspirations. Indigenous adolescents on reservations and reserves may not share the North American history of European adolescents, or they may share only parts of it. Their everyday environment is a reminder that their history is different and hence their place in society and life chances are different.

It is difficult to separate the proximal effects of contemporary economic and social disadvantage experienced on some reservations and reserves from the more distal effects of a history of ethnic cleansing, because the former is the product of the latter. Yet, the historical aspects may overshadow the more proximate social context. For example, regardless of economic and social hardship, how does one find one’s place in a society that, within the memory of your parents and grandparents, worked to wipe your people and their ways from the face of the earth? Moreover, traditional cultural ways are often at odds with the majority cultural ways. If one assimilates, the ethnic cleansing is complete. This dilemma has been expressed for years in the culture conflict and bicultural literature (e.g., LaFromboise, Coleman, & Gerton, 1993); however, the notion of historical contexts adds an important dimension. The cultural conflict is not merely between two competing cultures such as an immigrant culture and a maj...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Part I: The Healing Pathways Longitudinal Study
• Part II: Cultural Contexts of Development
• Part III: Family and Community Contexts
• Part IV: Mental and Physical Health
• Part V: Building on Cultural Strengths
• Appendix
• References
• Index