Hope in resiliency

How Indigenous Oklahomans are overcoming generational trauma

KOSU | By Katie Hallum (ᏧᏟ)   February 11, 2025

Ben Winters/First Americans Museum | Harold Meek on Indigenous Peoples Day 2024

Oklahoma was home to an estimated 83 Indian boarding schools — the most in the country. These schools were popular in the early 20th century and had a genocidal campaign known under its unofficial slogan, “kill the Indian, save the man.”

But according to tribal citizens, that ‘Indian’ was never killed.

As part of a collaboration with NPR and non-profit Cortico, KOSU held community conversations with Indigenous groups across the state and asked: where do you find common ground?

The answer? Resiliency.

READ AND LISTEN:  https://www.kosu.org/local-news/2025-02-11/hope-in-resiliency-how-indigenous-oklahomans-are-overcoming-generational-trauma

A BUFFALO STORY | BRING THEM HOME: Aiskótáhkapiyaaya | Restoring the Wild: Blackfoot People Reintroduce Buffalo to Ancestral Lands | Bring Them Home Doc

Trauma resilience key to advocacy

Provided by StrongHearts Native Helpline 

How Advocates Help 

In the field of domestic and sexual violence, an advocate’s work bridges the gap between a victim-survivor and service providers. They help their contacts recognize abuse, assess the risk of danger and to plan for safety. They offer peer support, crisis intervention and assistance locating resources. Ultimately, the work of an advocate can be lifesaving. 

The Impact and Vicarious Trauma 

Advocacy may sound like a rewarding job because saving lives is undeniably an honorable profession. That may be true, but the fact of the matter is the work of an advocate is steeped in trauma. Those who work in the field may even be victim-survivors and their work can be triggering. Nonetheless, advocates are committed to their work. Despite the risk of having to relive their own trauma — the desire to help others — is as important to them as it is to their contacts. 

Vicarious Trauma is work-related trauma exposure. It includes secondary stress, compassion fatigue and all the negative impacts of work-related trauma exposure. It is often experienced by people in the fields of child welfare and protection or domestic and sexual violence. It can leave advocates feeling overwhelmed with worry but hopeful they did enough to help. 

Resources, Support and Safety 

When it comes to Native Americans and Alaska Natives impacted by domestic and sexual violence, advocates are faced with resource disparities beyond compare. In StrongHearts’ database, there are 272 Native-centered service providers compared to more than 3,500 non-Native service providers. The picture is even bleaker when looking at shelters, where there are only 59 tribal shelters compared to more than 1,500 non-tribal shelters. 

When advocates realize that they are limited by available resources, they develop an even stronger desire to provide emotional support and lifesaving safety planning. In many cases, it’s all they can do. It’s what our relatives have done for centuries. 

Resilience, Transformation, Satisfaction 

By observing resilience in their clients and helping them to overcome challenges, advocates themselves can gain vicarious resilience, vicarious transformation and compassion satisfaction. 

Vicarious Resilience: Survivors are hearty and their ability to move forward and beyond their experience can encourage resilience in the work of advocacy.

Vicarious Transformation is about the engagement with survivors, what we learn and what we get out of it, and how it can transform us.

Compassion Satisfaction is about feeling good in the work of advocacy. It happens when advocates are able to help people efficiently and effectively. It may involve a policy change in the work environment that came as a result of an advocate's suggestion. 

The benefits of vicarious trauma are a sense of strength and resilience gained only through contact with survivors, what we learn through them, and the difference made not to one, but everyone impacted by domestic and sexual violence. 

Culture Is Key 

“Trauma resilience is a common bond between Native peoples,” said StrongHearts Chief Executive Officer Lori Jump (Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians). “Our advocates have the shared goal to eradicate violence and to help our people find a path toward healing. Our people have come this far because it is our way not to leave anyone behind. Culture is key to ensuring a better future for the next generation.” 

 

About StrongHearts Native Helpline

StrongHearts Native Helpline is a 24/7/365 culturally-appropriate domestic, dating and sexual violence helpline for Native Americans, available by calling or texting 1-844-762-8483 or clicking on the chat icon at strongheartshelpline.org.

Source: “What Is Vicarious Trauma,” Michigan Victim Advocacy Network. https://mivan.org/paper-to-practice/#vicarious

American Indian Children Still Removed From Homes at High Rates

 repost from 11/9/2015

By LEX TALAMO
 

Almost 40 years after the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) passed, American Indian children are still being removed from their homes in highly disproportionate numbers– at a rate almost three times higher than any other ethnicity, excepting African American children.

Minnesota leads the list of states with the worst rates of disproportionate removal– where American Indian children are overly represented in the foster care system– according to a June 2015 report from the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges.  Other states with high numbers of disproportionate removal include Nebraska, Iowa, Idaho, Wisconsin, Washington, South Dakota and Oregon.

Even in states without dramatic removal rates– like Arizona and New Mexico– many American Indian children find themselves removed from their families and placed in group homes, treatment centers or foster care.

In McKinley County, New Mexico,  American Indian children make up 73 percent of all children in foster care, according to a 2015  third quarter report from the New Mexico Children, Youth and Families Department (CYFD).  And in Arizona, over 1,300 American Indian children were in the foster care system as of March 31, 2015, according to a Department of Child Safety Child Welfare Report.

The Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978 applies to any child of American Indian descent who is an enrolled member or eligible for enrollment in any federally recognized tribe. When an American Indian child enters state custody, the state must contact the child’s tribe, and the tribe has the right to transfer the case to tribal court or to participate in court proceedings.

In order to help American Indian children stay connected to their tribal cultures and identities, ICWA also established a placement preference that starts with the child’s extended family and clan relatives and then progresses to enrolled members of the child’s tribe and enrolled members from any tribe– with placement of the child in a non-Indian family as a last resort.

“Any child who might be Native American, they have a [cultural] identity,” said Regina Yazzie, Program Director of the Navajo Nation Division of Social Services.  “It’s a benefit.”

Yazzie added that across the country, state agencies struggle to find American Indian foster families for children.  Finding placement families on reservation land can prove equally challenging.

Data from the Children, Youth and Families Department of New Mexico shows there are currently 43 American Indian foster care providers who have 79 placements available– nowhere near enough for the 262 American Indian children in New Mexico’s foster care system.  Melissa Otero from AdoptUsKids.org also said through an email correspondence that less than 1 percent of all AdoptUsKids placement families identify as American Indian.

When speaking with the Navajo Post, several tribal members mentioned hardships on reservations that negatively impacted families’ ability to foster– including poverty, poor housing, poor mental health care, suicide, and addiction.

“Part of what’s going on [is] drug and alcohol numbers are sky high,” said one tribal member, who wished to remain anonymous in order to be able to speak freely. “There are not a lot of healthy families. There are tons of families that care, but it takes structure, it takes money [to foster], and so many families are overwhelmed with the day to day living, how could they bring another child into their home?”

For the San Carlos Apache Tribe, methamphetamine poses a particular devastating problem.   Social services Director Terry Ross said that the reservation currently has an “epidemic of mothers with meth-exposed babies.”

“We try to work with the family, but when mothers are addicted to meth… it’s hard,” Ross said. “We can’t make people do anything. They have to want to change for their child.”

Many tribes offer social services like counseling, parenting classes, detox centers and emergency supplies to American Indian families in need. But representatives from several tribes mentioned that funding is limited and resources are stretched thin, so that American Indian children continue to find themselves in foster care– where many undergo significant trauma and loss of identity when growing up separated from their tribes, communities, and cultures.

Trauma Change Resilience

SOURCE

Monica Cassani

Trauma can be incurred in many different ways. This is only now becoming understood. Our culture has trauma and abuse that is often not recognized. There is, of course, too the sort that is obviously heinous and ugly. It can all impact the general well-being of those subjected to it.
As a social worker working with “the seriously mentally ill” for many years, I never came upon someone who didn’t have fairly severe traumas in their histories. Yes, I can say those who I encountered who were in that particular labeled segment had a solid 100% rate of trauma in their histories. Mental illness in large part is a reaction to trauma. It’s quite simple really. When we start listening to people’s stories of pain rather than numbing them out and effectively silencing them with neurotoxic drugs we will start healing them. Until then people will remain broken. One of the most basic needs for a wounded human being to heal is to be seen. Recognized. Validated. Yes.

There is a drive to not only survive but to thrive.
 
A very beautiful and profound talk and message.

Without appropriate care and integration trauma changes both our bodies and minds for many years and sometimes for our entire lives. Right now the mental health system knows virtually nothing about how to care for people who have been traumatized and in fact often traumatizes them further. It’s downright dangerous to subject a traumatized person to most social services. This is a tragedy that has to end.

The woman in the above video is not alone in knowing how to approach those traumatized. We need this sort of empathic and loving care system wide.

See also: Mental illness, addiction & most chronic physical illness is the result of childhood loss & trauma

More posts on trauma, PTSD and recovery.

Recovery stories too, right here — people get better all the time