Posted on 08/04/2005 5:30:09 AM PDT by mbarker12474
Native Americans suffer from 'historical trauma,' researcher says
Maria Yellow Horse Brave Heart describes the negative impact of historical trauma on Native Americans today.
Maria Yellow Horse Brave Heart describes the negative impact of historical trauma on Native Americans today. Brave Heart is a research associate professor in the Graduate School of Social Work at the University of Denver. She spoke at the 2005 Native American Family Camp, held July 19-23 in Redlands, Calif., by the United Methodist Church’s Native American International Caucus. A Web-only photo by Edna Steinman. Photo #W05-093. Accompanies UMNS story #425. 7/27/05 July 27, 2005
By Edna Steinman*
REDLANDS, Calif. (UMNS) - The treatment given to American Indians as the United States pushed its boundaries westward has resulted in an ongoing emotional condition that a Native American social worker-researcher calls "historical trauma."
Maria Yellow Horse Brave Heart, research associate professor in the Graduate School of Social Work at the University of Denver, described her work at the 2005 Native American Family Camp, held July 19-23 at the University of Redlands. The annual event is sponsored by the United Methodist Church's Native American International Caucus.
Historical trauma has a layering effect and is the "cumulative emotional and psychological wounding over the life span and across generations, emanating from massive group trauma," she said.
Historical or intergenerational trauma is similar to that suffered by the Jewish people as a result of the Holocaust, the Japanese Americans interned in California at the beginning of World War II and African Americans suffering the aftermath of slavery, she said.
Native American history meets the 1948 Geneva Convention's definition of genocide, Brave Heart said, defining genocide as the intent to destroy a national, ethnic, racial or religious group. She said research has shown the U.S. government never intended the long-term survival of Native Americans.
During the Civil War period, Congress passed a resolution stopping negotiation of treaties with Indian tribes and decided to establish two reservations, one east and one west of the Mississippi River. Involvement in the Civil War kept Congress from implementing this plan.
Brave Heart cited the government-run Indian boarding schools as a major factor in the historical trauma. Congressional documents outlined the boarding school policy of forced separation of Indian children from the tribal communities. Gender roles and family relationships were impaired at the boarding schools, where the focus was on the European tradition of male-female relationships and not the Indian tradition of holding women and children sacred. The boarding schools compounded the trauma with a loss of parenting skills, a loss of the child's identification with the parents and other complex processes, she said.
Children of boarding school survivors passed the trauma on to their descendants, but not on purpose and not consciously, said the professor.
Type II diabetes was common among Native American people, fostered both by the overcrowded, deficient conditions in boarding schools and by trauma-caused stress hormones that wear out the body.
Historical trauma generates such responses as survivor guilt, depression, low self-esteem, psychic numbing, anger, victim identity, death identity, thoughts of suicide, preoccupation with trauma, and physical symptoms, Brave Heart said.
The positive outcomes needed to overcome this intergenerational trauma are a reduction in shame, a better feeling of self-worth, an increase in joy and health, a stronger sense of parental competence, greater use of traditional language, an improved relationship with children and the extended family, and increased communication, she said.
Brave Heart founded the Takini Network in 1992 as an avenue to help overcome historical trauma. It has sponsored workshops to help Native Americans.
Her recent work includes numerous book chapters and journal articles focused on historical trauma and parenting curricula. Her research was primarily with the Lakota reservation population in South Dakota. In 2001, she initiated an international conference for massively traumatized peoples, bringing together Native Americans, Jewish Holocaust survivors and descendants, Japanese internment camp survivors and others.
The annual Native American Family Camp, a five-day conference, brought together adults and youth from across the United States. Funding for some of the programs came from the National Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the United Methodist Board of Global Ministries and the Youth Service Fund, administered by the Division on Ministries with Young People at the United Methodist Board of Discipleship.
*Steinman is a freelance writer and former annual conference newspaper editor in Redlands, Calif.
News media contact: Linda Green or Tim Tanton, (615) 742-5470 or newsdesk@umcom.org.
12 percent of the UMC collection goes to fund and support this sort of thing.
Note this event was sponsored by the UMC's Native American International Caucus. Apparantly this or similar events were sponsored by the United Methodist Board of Global Ministries and the Youth Service Fund, administered by the Division on Ministries with Young People at the United Methodist Board of Discipleship.
Mike B.
Calling Ward Churchill, calling Ward Churchill
Mel Gibson's daughter?
Me no understand white man's guilt, but me take advantage of it. Gunga Galunga.
I thought Brave heart came from Scotland?
Don't tell Mel Gibson!
"Help, help, I am being oppressed!"
did you see him oppressing me just now?
I am continually amazed at the creativity of the human species! If we could bottle the thought process needed to think up yet another way to make a profit by claiming victimhood, we could sell that bottled "thought power" and make our own fortune.
I am even more amazed that methodists (or at least the UMC) have allowed themselves to be aligned with the United Nations. The following is just one of many examples of UN/UMC association; it IS an older article, but you'll get the idea.
UNITED METHODIST BISHOPS CALL SUPPORT FOR
THE CREATION OF AN INTERNATIONAL CRIMINAL COURT http://64.233.179.104/search?q=cache:woZYxO1BcnsJ:www.iccnow.org/romearchive/papers/RomeTreaty/UMCSupportICC.doc+The+UN+and+United+Methodist+Church&hl=en
The Council of Bishops of The United Methodist Church, voted at their semi-annual meeting from April 27 to May 1, 1998 in Lincoln, Nebraska, USA, to support the creation of a permanent International Criminal Court (ICC). Among other international issues, they also urged all United nation member states, especially the United States where most of the church’s members come, to pay on time and without condition, their financial treaty obligations to the United Nations.
The Council of Bishops is composed of all the active and retired United Methodist bishops (about 130) from the United States, Europe, Africa and the Philippines in Asia. The Council is tasked the general oversight and promotion of the temporal and spiritual interests of The United Methodist Church whose members all over the world total about 9.5 million.
This action of the United Methodist bishops follows a move made earlier by the church’s international social action agency, the General Board of Church and Society, to join the international NGO Coalition for the ICC. Since joining the Coalition, the Board’s United Nations Office based in New York City has been participating in the coalition’s activities, including meetings of one of its caucuses, the Faith-Based Caucus on the ICC.
"Bloody Peasant!"
I have read current materials used by the UMC in it's deaconess program. It's straight out of Marxist liberation theology and it's run by the Women's Division of the UMC.
If the little old ladies that have financially built the Women's Division of the UMC over the past four generations read the material, they would not find their "Church" in it.
Yet, go to many UMC Churches across the country and the one demographic group that will stand out as a sizeable portion of those attending is single older women.
These are the women who funded the UMC missions to Asia in their youth in the 1940s, married the men who fought in WWII and Korea, built the Women's Division with their $$ in the 1950s and 1960s and now, in their widowhood, as the growth of their church stagnates, Marxist liberation theology educates the young women who stand before them in the pulpit on Sunday morning and ask them to sign the antiwar petition on their way out.
I know what I speak of because I personally know and am well acquainted with people who work in the UMC HQ today as well as people who attend UMC churches.
There have been lots of books written about how socialists have a stranglehold on academia (at all levels)and government bureaucracies. Has anyone heard of any literature on lefty control of mainline protestant churches in north america? Must be something out there.
And they wonder why they're losing membership (and relevance).
A guy active in the Indian Movement told me something interesting about "Indian names". The more "Indian" the name, the less Indian blood they have. They usually identify ancestory by historical last name.
I don't recall any works which deal with the multiple churches.
My favorite for the Catholics was Monsignor Freddy Delgado's LA IGLESIA POPULAR NACIO EN EL SALVADOR and a series of newspaper editorials by the assasinated ex-Jesuit (still Catholic) Francisco Peccorini who the Left murdered (at age 72) on his way to give a television interview in El Salvador. As M. Stanton Evans wrote, it is funny how you never hear the term "Leftwing Death Squad".
The Methodist Church has officially taken the position: A woman has duty to submit to rape, instead of doing anything that might harm her assailant.
Perhaps, members of the Methodist clergy need to secure the services of a surgeon, to place eyeholes next to their belly-buttons. Why? So they can see out.
We left the methodist 'church' years ago and never looked back.
Such a shame. Wesly would be ashamed too.
It became the "Women's Division" in some sense of that word in the 1970s. But I think it was not until sometime in the 1980s before it lost all organizational independence and became just another element of the General Board for Global Ministries.
I am sure that from the UMC women's point of view, the bishops wanted the financial stake that the Methodist women had built on their own. Prior to becoming absorbed by the GBGM the "Womens Division", on their own, had been able to fully fund all their own programs, salaries and benefits for their staff operations and built and owned their own 17 story office building in Manhatten.
Of course, by then, the Women's Division had already become a fully functioning element of the leftward drift of the church, as that office building was built across the street from the United Nations and houses the UMC mission to the UN, besides other UMC groups.
The UMC to me is another denomination in which, institutionally, "belief" and "faith" have metamorphed into nothing but the intellectual practice of a religious philosophy. I am sure that many today who are comfortable in today's UMC actually believe that if Jesus were alive today he'd be a Marxist.
since communists killed over one billion people in the 20th century are we all suffering from a layering effect?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.