Today, many American Indians experience overwhelming social problems stemming from legacies of conquest and dispossession that have led to unremitting poverty. These problems include mental health inequities such as community epidemics of trauma, addiction, and suicide. And yet, conventional clinical approaches to helping individuals with psychological distress and disability are not well-tailored for American Indian communities. Dr. Joseph Gone, Professor of Psychology at the University of Michigan, collaborates with American Indian community partners to develop groundbreaking healthcare interventions that promote psychological wellness and prevent dysfunction for these vulnerable populations in culturally consonant ways. Drawing on indigenous traditional knowledge—especially knowledge stemming from spiritual, ceremonial, and healing practices—Dr. Gone and his research team tackle a host of challenges associated with advancing American Indian well-being in the context of mental health programs and services. By engaging in participatory fashion with knowledgeable and resilient American Indian community partners, he harnesses a versatile interdisciplinary expertise toward the development of innovative, culturally alternative helping approaches that promise to serve these communities with greater relevance and effectiveness.

For example, mainstream mental health services frequently rely on “talk therapy,” in which an educated and credentialed professional orchestrates a sequence of one-on-one interpersonal interactions with a vulnerable individual client. Typically the professional is a stranger to the client; the encounter is removed from the routines of everyday life; family and community members are absent from these confidential spaces; and the premise of therapeutic benefit is human ingenuity and professional expertise. In contrast, traditional American Indian therapeutic practices are more likely to depend on healers who are well-known within the community; rituals that are more publicly embedded within everyday life; participants that include family members and other well-wishers; and, above all, the actions of non-human powers and spirits who extend or enhance vitality on behalf of the suffering individual. Indeed, perhaps the single most important distinction between professional mental health services and indigenous traditional healing pertains to spirituality: mental health services are almost invariably secular in origin, while indigenous healing practices are sacred by design.

As an American Indian psychologist, Dr. Gone has a research team of clinical psychology Ph.D. students and university undergraduates. Together, they collaborate extensively with indigenous community partners in the U.S. and Canada to develop approaches and interventions that reconcile or transcend these differences. The results include innovative programs and services that are better tailored for addressing the wellness needs of American Indian communities.

Exemplary research projects at various stages of activity include:

• The Urban American Indian Traditional Spirituality Program - In concert with community research partners at American Indian Health and Family Services in Detroit (“Indian Health”), Dr. Gone and his team have developed a structured, twelve-week traditional spirituality program for urban American Indians who wish to learn more about Indigenous ceremonial practices. Built around the sweat lodge ceremony, participants attend once-weekly sessions (usually lasting 3 hours in duration) in which they learn from Native traditionalists the “basics” of Indigenous ceremony, including knowledge and practices association with prayer, smudging (i.e.,burning sacred incense), singing, dancing, sacred fires, the sacred pipe, the water ceremony, the sweat lodge ceremony, creation stories, consulting with elders, and so on. Never before have these practices been integrated into a comprehensive and coherent program curriculum that are structured in overtly didactic fashion. Created “by Indians, for Indians,” the program was developed in response to the expressed desire of many urban American Indians in Detroit for greater access to traditional cultural practices through Indian Health. Next phases of this project involve expanding the program to other American Indian agencies in other cities, and evaluating the impacts of this program on a variety of participant wellness indicators (such as cultural identity, cultural involvement, Native spirituality, social support, sense of community, quality of life, global distress, health status, etc.).
• Blackfeet Culture as Substance Abuse Treatment – A second project has investigated the claim in Native community settings that mainstream clinical interventions are irrelevant and ineffective on cultural grounds. Instead, many American Indians today assert that “our culture is our treatment.” And yet, empirical investigations of this Culture-as-Treatment hypothesis—namely, that a modern-day return to indigenous cultural orientations and practices is sufficient for effecting recovery from mental health problems for many American Indians—have yet to appear in the literature. In partnership with staff at the Blackfeet Nation’s substance abuse treatment program, Dr. Gone undertook a collaborative formulation of a culturally-grounded alternative to substance abuse treatment-as-usual on their Montana reservation. The resultant intervention—a seasonal cultural immersion camp designed to approximate the day-to-day experiences of pre-reservation ancestors (e.g., living in tepees, harvesting local resources, visiting sacred sites, practicing traditional spirituality)—was implemented in the summer of 2012 with a small number of clients from the community. The intervention activities resembled nothing like mainstream psychosocial mental health treatments, reflecting instead less psychologically-salient cultural orientations. The immersion camp has continued to be refined and offered by community partners each summer on the reservation, but a complete evaluation of the potential beneficial impacts of the Blackfeet culture camp depends upon additional funding.
• Enhancing Pathways for Transition-Aged American Indian Youth – American Indian youth today contend with multigenerational legacies of adversity and disadvantage as they prepare for adult responsibilities. For young American Indians who are transitioning from high school into early adulthood, many lack a clear pathway to maturity and success. This is particularly true for Native populations in areas such as Detroit, Michigan, where many youths are low-income and poorly-educated. With some of the highest rates of suicide, substance abuse problems, teen pregnancy, violence, trauma, and school dropout in the nation, young American Indians are at great risk for poor adult outcomes, primarily because current systems, institutions, and settings have failed them. Dr. Gone and his team are inaugurating a project to locate, engage, and partner with these urban American Indian young people to facilitate their transition to adulthood and their charting their own futures. Currently in its earliest phases, Dr. Gone and his team will listen carefully to these youth, and in collaboration with them develop novel opportunities for coming together, exchanging aspirations, offering support, investing in preparations for the future, and cultivating intergenerational ties, all in service to a robust and resilient transition to adulthood.
• Preserving and Publicizing American Indian Cultural Knowledge and Traditions - Dr. Gone’s great grandfather, Frederick P. Gone worked for the Montana Writers Project (MWP), a state-sponsored venture funded by the federal Works Progress Administration in 1941-42. As the Gros Ventre tribe’s “fieldworker” on the Fort Belknap Indian reservation, Fred Gone was employed to interview community members and document the pre-reservation traditions of his people for a projected publication about the traditional lifeways of Montana’s Indian communities. Gone wrote 400 pages of longhand script addressed to Gros Ventre History, 300 pages addressed to Gros Ventre Legends, and six sketches associated with this work, These writings engage many topics, from biographies of elders to tribal myths, with the crowning achievement being a life narrative of the famed Gros Ventre medicine man, Bull Lodge (ca. 1802-1886). Due to the onset of World War II, the projected MWP “Indian series” was never published; the current collection of Gone’s writing was reportedly rescued from the city dump in Butte, MT, and subsequently deposited in the Montana State University archives. Thus, most of this work has not been accessible to scholars or the public, despite the profound historical, cultural, and literary significance of this collection for exploring consequential questions in the study of Native North America. Thus, in response to a request by Fred Gone’s only surviving son (and his own great uncle), Dr. Gone is laboring to publish these materials as “Bull Lodge’s Life” and the Gros Ventre Narrative Tradition: The Collected Writings of Fred P. Gone (“Many Plumes”). Besides drawing on this work in his own scholarship, Dr. Gone expects that publication of this book should catalyze innovative scholarship in Native American Studies (and related fields), while simultaneously providing students, tribal members, and the public an exciting opportunity to delve more deeply into a remarkable treasury of Gros Ventre knowledge and tradition.