Strengthening Emotional/Behavioural Health through Cultural Identity:
Elder-led Curriculum for Alaska Native Students

While Alaska Native young adults demonstrate resilience in overcoming oppressive conditions, they have higher rates of emotional/behavioural health problems, including anxiety, depression, substance use, and suicidal ideation. These pronounced health disparities have been attributed, in part, to cultural loss and marginalization produced by generations of colonization and trauma and maintained in non-Indigenous settings. A strong Indigenous cultural identity is protective against a myriad of emotional/behavioural health issues, and cultural interventions based in local, Indigenous theories have been found to protect against emotional/behavioural health problems. However, there have been no such programs directed at Alaska Native university students of diverse cultural groups in urban settings. Higher education presents a unique setting and time in which students’ cultural identities are distinctively shaped, and unfortunately rather than strengthening Indigenous cultural identities, higher education often presents challenges to Alaska Native students. This presentation will detail the development and preliminary outcomes of a program that arose in light of these challenges, aimed at supporting Alaska Native university students’ emotional/behavioural health through promoting their Indigenous cultural identity development while at university. This project brought together university and community partners, and utilized community-based participatory methods to ultimately develop an Alaska Native Elder-led Indigenous cultural identity program that capitalizes on extant scientific literature, local data, and traditional wisdom. We will detail the creation process of this program that incorporates storytelling, experiential learning, connection, exploration, and sharing of identity and cultural strengths to remain grounded in one’s culture. Moreover, we will describe the preliminary outcomes of the first pilot test of the program with Alaska Native university students in an urban setting and the program’s impact on students’ cultural identity development and emotional/behavioural health. Implications and future directions in both the refinement of program content and implementation will be discussed.

An exploration study of the psychological meaning of VhaVenda ancestral callin

Traditional healing plays an important role in primary health care in many developing countries. In order to become a traditional health practitioner, an individual is chosen from within the family by the ancestors who were traditional health practitioners. The person has to accept the calling to become a traditional health practitioner, and has to go through the process by means of rigorous training. The calling usually presents itself in a form of a mysterious physical or psychological illness that will not ordinarily respond to western treatment. In this study I am problematizing and interrogating the views of the Eurocentric perspective which interprets the symptoms of ancestral calling and the resultant process to become a traditional health practitioner as a manifestation of some psychological disturbance. Thus, I will endeavour to a journey with traditional health practitioners to understand their lived experiences and explore the psychological meanings of Vhavenda ancestral calling with a view of identifying and documenting the psychological meanings embedded in this culturally-entrenched practice. Qualitative research method which was located within the interpretative paradigm was utilized. Descriptive phenomenological research design was adopted to explore the lived experiences of traditional health practitioners who have gone through the process of ancestral calling. Both snowball and purposive sampling methods was used to recruit 10 participants until saturation. The present study was guided by the Afrocentric theoretical framework. The findings of the study revealed that the process of ancestral calling in all the participants has some similarities and differences. The findings also revealed that after accepting the call there is healing, and if one does not accept the call there are consequences.

Intercultural preventive strategy of alcohol use in rural Mapuche communities

The research presented in this paper consists of a case study that analyses the elements that must exist in a culturally grounded methodological strategy for the prevention of problematic alcohol consumption in rural Mapuche communities in the Araucanía region. Oriented by the perspective of community-based participatory research, data is collected through group interviews with the local community, participant observation and in-depth interviews to people with alcohol consumption, recovered from consumption and non-drinkers. The results show key aspects that must be considered for the design, among which are: Strengthening the cultural identity, enabling spaces for shared reflection in places where the community converges (schools and rural health centres), problematizing alcohol consumption from their own conceptions of normal and problematic consumption. Therefore, there is a need to focus on strengthening intracultural processes in the community space, with a preventive strategy within the logic of action research, with increasing degrees of community participation.

Xolobeni goddamn! Rural resistance to roads that divide

The 100 kilometre coastline stretching from Xolobeni in the North to Port St Johns in the South traverses the coastal length of Pondoland. This place of rugged hills and sheer drops is also the ancient home of the Pondo people. In a bid to exploit the tourism and mining resources of the area, capitalist development discourses of large multinational corporations and government have been woven into those of community development. The coastal hillside rural communities have resisted attempts to build a modern toll highway across their villages. They argue that a highway will divide their land and disrupt their way of life including agricultural and livestock subsistence farming. Instead, they contend that current roads are built to support their way of life and to respect their ecologically sensitive environment. In this paper we explore publicly available archives such as social media write ups, images, videos and films released by the Amadiba Crisis Committee that has formed the bulwark of the community’s resistance. We demonstrate how this local resistance illustrates community psychological principles of partnerships, resistance through social movements, and environmental justice. Finally, we point to the possible pitfalls that face both development discourses and community resisters.