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Yellow tipi in grassland set against blue sky with mountains in the background in Blackfeet tribal Nation, Montana. Credit: Joseph Gone.
In the late 1990s, psychologist Dr. Joseph Gone, a professor and member of the Aaniiih Gros Ventre tribe, returned home during his doctoral training to the Fort Belknap Reservation in north central Montana. There, he set aside eurocentric concepts of psychology he was learning in school and instead asked tribal members how mental illness is addressed using traditional Indigenous practices. What he learned changed the trajectory of his career. Listen to find out how he helped bring precolonial cultural and spiritual practices into substance use disorder treatment in contemporary Indigenous settings.
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[00:00:00]
Show button: Our system is, in too many ways, broken. The way we see the world shapes the way that we treat it. This is Making Contact.
(music)
Amy Gastelum: I’m Amy Gastelum. This week on Making Contact we’re sitting down with Dr. Joseph Gone, a psychologist and professor at Harvard University and member of the Aaniiih-Gros Ventre tribal Nation.
Dr. Gone: The goal of my work has been to try to rethink and reimagine, re envision, uh, mental health and helping services in ways that are more likely to reach a broader swath of our populations or communities, um, in Indian country.
Amy Gastelum: Stay tuned to hear how Dr. Gone has worked to bring pre-colonial Indigenous healing concepts to contemporary settings.
(music)
Amy Gastelum: I’m Amy Gastelum. You’re listening to Making Contact. [00:01:00] Today, we’re talking about how a return to cultural and spiritual practices may be one effective method of addiction treatment for some Indigenous people. Here’s our interview with psychologist, Dr. Joseph Gone. Enjoy.
Amy Gastelum: Thank you so much for making the time today to talk to me. And uh, let’s just get into it. I’m just going to ask you to go ahead and introduce yourself however you feel comfortable.
Dr. Gone: Well, my name is Joseph Gone, and I am a psychologist and interdisciplinary social scientist. I am a professor at Harvard University. I’ve taught also at the University of Chicago and at the University of Michigan for 16 years. And I’m from Montana originally. I’m an enrolled member or tribal citizen of the Aaniiih-Gros Ventre Tribal Nation of Montana. We’re on the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation, which is north of Billings, about a three-hour drive. And as a psychologist, I study and research, uh, the intersections of culture, coloniality, and mental health, among American Indian and [00:02:00] other Indigenous peoples.
Amy Gastelum: Dr. Gone says the mainstream way we frame addiction, that it’s a mental or psychiatric problem, a brain problem, is sometimes misguiding.
Dr. Gone: I’m not saying it’s not those things, but probably it’s better formulated as a post-colonial disorder, and therefore may be amenable to anti colonial approaches to solving our problems. And some of those might look like a return to ceremony and tradition. Um, those can also involve things like land back, um, regaining one’s resources, um, asserting one’s self-determination, and charting one’s own future and course for generations to come.
Amy Gastelum: Dr. Gone refers to this return to ceremony and tradition to treat substance use disorder as ‘culture as treatment.’ It’s developed by Indigenous people, for [00:03:00] Indigenous people. And I wanted to know where that idea came from. He said, back in the 90s, late in his doctoral training, he went home to the Fort Belknap Reservation in north central Montana.
Dr. Gone: To really set aside all that I had learned, all that I was being trained in in graduate school in mental health treatment, to instead ask in open ended and discovery-oriented fashion people in my own community how they conceived of mental health, psychological well-being, and especially if things go wrong, what one should do about it.
Amy Gastelum: He talked with a lot of tribal members, his own extended family, tribal administrators, service providers. Eventually, he sat down with a tribal leader, an elder named Traveling Thunder.
Dr. Gone: And Traveling Thunder was interesting because of all of the folks I was talking with, he probably had the least firsthand familiarity with mental health services, uh, with counseling, with psychotherapy, and those sorts of things. He was a cultural, a traditional [00:04:00] cultural, practitioner, um, someone who had the right to run certain kinds of Indigenous ceremonies. But what he told me and which really changed the shape of my career was that mental health services as typically offered, um, are not necessarily, uh, available and accessible and desirable among all of our people. In fact, he pointed out that, uh, some of the, uh, quote unquote white psychiatrists in the Indian Health Service Counseling Clinic, um, that we, uh, have on the reservation, um, in engaging in their helping activities might instead be inviting community members to basically brainwash them forever, was how he put it. Um, with the idea being that participating in counseling and therapy with clinicians who know minimally about the community and about our history and about, um, our cultural vantage points, perspectives, and orientations might be engaged in activities that are culturally [00:05:00] assimilative and ideologically suspect. So he sort of pointed out for me that mental health is not a necessarily, uh, in all conditions and circumstances, a helping endeavor, even though most mental health practitioners are trying to be helpful. And it’s not even a neutral endeavor, uh, that in fact, uh, because it prescribes certain ways of being and certain ways of acting and certain ways of recovering, uh, that it is a set of practices that, um, are anchored in some set of worldviews and cultural orientations and assumptions.
Dr. Gone: Um, and that those matter when it comes to colonial populations, uh, like American Indian people in the United States.
Amy Gastelum: Traveling Thunder explained that addiction for Indigenous Americans started because of historical wounds. He said that before Europeans came, it was like a paradise. But when Euro Americans dispossessed and subjugated Indigenous people, they didn’t just take their land and other physical resources. They also broke down and in [00:06:00] some cases completely decimated their traditional practices and spirituality.
Dr. Gone: So then we entered this period of kind of, um, psychological, uh, disorientation, or sometimes we say animy, which means you don’t know who you are and where you belong, what you’re supposed to do, what a good life is. Um, and that’s not conducive to well-being. And so, addiction, trauma, those kinds of things come in the wake of that. And fortunately, he felt like, well, um, that’s not the be all end all. There is a time since the 1970s, especially when the American Indian Movement, the Indian Rights Movement was so active, that we came, he said, to look back to a tradition and to recognize that the elders had things to teach and to go back to the sweat lodges to pray and to sweat. And so his view, um, was that the mental health concerns of Indian Country had arisen and, um, could find their solution in this history. And so at some point I said, okay, I think I gotcha, but under what [00:07:00] conditions would you take a loved one down to the Indian health service clinic and get them help? Um, if they’re in real crisis and he got really quiet and he said, you know, we don’t do that. We never did that. I said, well, okay, but what would you do instead? He said, well, you put up a ceremony, and so this set me on a path to want to be much more open, um, than I had been earlier. Not just to learning the latest, greatest professional mental health interventions that psychological science and psychiatric, uh, expertise can provide. But also for things that we might consider therapeutic that may look nothing like, uh, counseling, psychotherapy, other kinds of mental health services, but still might indeed be therapeutically beneficial for people.
Amy Gastelum: And so how would you say that led into this, uh, really innovative, um, research project that you did with the Blackfeet Indian Culture Camp? Can you talk about how that camp got inspired? And I have to tell you, I did read the research brief that you published in 2015- all about it. And I really loved the descriptions of the camp itself. There was a line- you’re gonna laugh. I underlined this because I’m also a writer and I appreciated it. “The tall grass was mown in a flat area to keep away mosquitos prior to the delivery of camp supplies. That’s just a beautiful detail. So can we get into the Blackfeet Indian Culture Camp?
Dr. Gone: [00:08:00] So, I approached, um, a colleague named Patrick Kafluking, who was then the director of the Blackfeet Chemical Dependency addiction Treatment Program. Um, Crystal Creek Lodge was the name of this treatment program at that time, and it was an accredited residential substance abuse treatment program, the only one in Montana that really served other American Indian clients, especially Blackfeet people, of course, but from all over the state and even the region. And it was a Minnesota model style addiction treatment program in which people would come and live there on premise for 30 or 60 or 90 or 120 days at a time. And their days would be spent going to group therapy sessions, psychoeducation, addiction orientations, and so on. Um, they did have a cultural counselor named Danny Edwards who offered some groups for people who were interested in that, but by and large, it was imported pretty much straight from how addiction treatment is managed in the broader U. S. [00:09:00] So I approached Pat and I said, look, you’re doing, uh, this important work. You’ve got a cultural counselor doing some stuff, but you know, that’s an interesting way to approach how we offer treatment to Indian people, given what I’d heard from Traveling Thunder, you know, years earlier. Um, what if we were to maybe invert how we think about uh, delivering treatment? What if we, instead of adapting the latest greatest or the whatever is prevalent and present around a broader society brought that in and kind of dressed it in beads and feathers, what if instead we started with Indigenous therapeutic traditions and practices, figured out how to organize those programmatically, and then secondarily worried about how to orchestrate that as treatment with the usual things that treatment programs have to do, like figure out who’s going to pay for it and how to observe the legal kinds of commitments and so on.
Amy Gastelum: Pat got excited about the opportunity to work together and to innovate. He put Dr. Gone in contact with the cultural counselor, Danny Edwards. Dr. Gone and Danny were connected [00:10:00] with leaders of the Crazy Dog Society.
Dr. Gone: The Crazy Dog Society was a grassroots group of, we could say, neo traditionalists, Blackfeet people, who were interested in establishing, or rather reestablishing, what they called the Old Blackfeet Religion, quote unquote. And so, of course, they had something to say about what might be therapeutically beneficial in the context of addiction treatment.
Amy Gastelum: So, Dr. Gone and Danny went to a ceremonial gathering of the Crazy Dog Society. They wanted to ask them if they would help develop the project that they were planning.
Dr. Gone: And, um, so we were in the ceremony for maybe an hour or 2 before, um, the floor, you know, opened up for us and, uh, the leader said, okay, um, how can we help you?
Dr. Gone: And Danny said, Joe, take it away. So I, um, felt immediately on the spot, because I hadn’t expected that I would be the one to explain this. But I told, uh, the leader and those assembled, probably 30 people in a ceremonial lodge, um, that we were interested in rethinking how addiction treatment happened on the Blackfeet Reservation.[00:11:00] Um, and also interested in doing some research about that in terms of innovative alternatives because even though many Native people, um, presume that these things are helpful, um, the scientific world doesn’t yet know that ceremonial and sacred practices can remedy addiction. And so, before I could get any further, the lodge erupted in laughter. People thought it was just hysterically hilarious that the wider world didn’t understand that these sacred ceremonial practices could remedy addiction. And once all of the, uh, uproar had subsided, the leader just kind of shook his head slowly and said, every single person sitting in this lodge is proof positive that these ceremonies and approaches remedy addiction. So I got a bit of an instruction around how we think about knowledge and you know, scientists and psychological scientists especially, are very concerned about how do we know something works.
Amy Gastelum: Together, Dr. Gone, Danny, and the Crazy Dog Society [00:12:00] came up with a plan, an alternative addiction treatment with Blackfeet cultural practices at the center. They called it the Blackfeet Culture Camp. They never intended the project to be considered gold standard by mainstream psychology. It was created as a proof of concept. They wanted to see if it was possible to get something together that could engage clients and be thought of as positive and beneficial. Four men from the Crystal Creek Addiction Treatment Center volunteered to participate.
Dr. Gone: It was two weeks in which addiction clients would come out of their residential program and live in the bush, um, like their pre-reservation ancestors to a certain degree. The Crazy Dogs had decided that really what people needed was to learn more about how pre-reservation ancestors lived. Um, and so, we first pitched a tipi camp, including a pretty complicated double tipi for meeting purposes that took a little extra time to do, but [00:13:00] now everyone involved knew something about how to put up a teepee. The very first thing we did once all the camp was established was to have a pipe ceremony, which is, you know, a sacred prayerful ceremony in which you share the smoking of tobacco in a pipe, um, which I think signaled that the sacred and ceremonial, the spiritual is really the foundation of this way of approaching addiction treatment.
Dr. Gone: The second day, the very next day, we all went out into the bush and basically built a sweat lodge from materials out there and had a sweat lodge ceremony together. Took pretty much all day. But again, really accentuating how important the sacred and spiritual is for therapeutic benefit. There were stuff going on every day for the next two weeks, um, that engaged, uh, clients and that also depended upon members of the Crazy Dog Society themselves to show up and to lead and guide and support.
Amy Gastelum: Some days there would be five or six members of the Crazy Dog Society present, but sometimes there are [00:14:00] as many as 30 members. And when they were out in these big groups, picking sage and sweet grass, sacred medicines used for prayer and purification, it was hard to tell who was who.
Dr. Gone: And I overheard people saying, you know, they didn’t really even know who the clients were versus the Crazy Dog members were and that any Blackfeet person could benefit from this kind of a program. So at the end of two weeks, I had a chance to interview all of the, um, men clients who had participated and, you know, in maybe an hour interview with each of them, in which I encouraged them to talk about things they liked and things they didn’t like, things to improve, you know, it was overwhelmingly positively received. I mean, that’s not to say they didn’t have critiques or things that could be improved, but you know, some of these guys have been to treatment multiple, multiple times. I think one over 10 times to treatment at various points, some of them court ordered, you know, those kinds of things. Um, but they all expressed a preference for this sort of approach to treatment compared to, you know, behind locked [00:15:00] doors at night, up at eight in the morning, you know, hour after hour of structured group activities, you know. So, um, it was, um, pretty remarkable in terms of, um, proof of concept, just being able to put it together and pull it off and engage clients and they at least were willing to share that they thought it was beneficial and preferable in some ways to treatment as usual.
Amy Gastelum: Here it was, culture as treatment. Interventions made by and for Indigenous people using culture to heal.
Dr. Gone: Underneath all of, um, Indigenous traditional notions of health is the idea of spirituality and religious understandings. You know, health is a condition of being in proper relationships with those around you, whether it’s humans or other than humans. You know the plant medicines we harvest, they’re persons and you have to, when you pick them, you offer tobacco perhaps to them or you’re trying to be in proper relationship with them. So the relationality with persons is really the underlying, [00:16:00] um, understanding of things and so, these ways then, um, get incorporated and practiced, um, because they provide opportunity to, uh, pray, to sacrifice, to petition non-human persons who have power to bring and circulate life, which drives out illness and infirmity and bad things. So there’s a, you know, broad religious structure and the one I’m portraying to you is sort of Northern Plains. There are going to be other religious systems. But in the work that I’ve done, you know, it’s really Northern Plains ideas and some Midwestern Anishinaabe ideas. And so those become foundational to culture as treatment, not how do we structure um, cognitive therapy using a thought record with homework for a client to meet for 55 minutes every week to change how they think, which will then change their feelings, and et cetera, change their behaviors. Nothing wrong with that. [00:17:00] And there are, there are Indian people who do and have benefited from that. And there are probably more who don’t get it, who would benefit from it. I’m not knocking that. There are Indian people though, for whom secular approaches to psychology and mental health are completely unintelligible. I’m going to go sit with a stranger for 50 minutes, we’re going to talk about things, personal things, and at the end I’m going to go practice some things and come back. It’s, that’s just not the logic by which therapeutic things are understood for some members of our communities, especially those who are more traditionally oriented, for whom health and well-being, you know, is religious.
Amy Gastelum: When Dr. Gone first approached Crystal Creek Lodge about this project, he says he was excited. It was the first project in his career that wasn’t just observing treatment that was really European at its core, and then tailored for Indigenous communities, or as he says, dressed in feathers and beads. Instead, this project inverted that approach. It started with Indigenous healing and cultural practices. [00:18:00] It required trust and partnership with community leaders. And it required a willingness to think outside the box. Something Dr. Gone says is crucial.
Dr. Gone: Because, um, let’s face it, the stuff that we’ve been doing all this time doesn’t seem to be working. Technocratic decision making and funding mandates propose that science develops almost universal style approaches for mental health problems that roll out and ideally everyone gets access to them and can recover. But of course, there’s a whole bunch of problems with that when it comes to Indian country. For one thing, Indian country is always the afterthought. Services for us are always underfunded. But even if there were adequate funding, then there’s the different orientations we’ve been talking about, and the truth is that there’s a real problem, um, with even how we [00:19:00] formulate mental health problems for American Indians and other colonized people. Which is to say that if it’s a medical issue, we’re really saying, well, this is a problem internal to you, you’re a patient, I’m a doctor, we live in a system, come see me in my office, let’s get you on medicine, let’s do surgery, let’s do some other medical technique and so, medicalization sections out each of us as individual patients, and Um, it often in mental health, especially as biologizing, um, because, you know, for decades, we’ve had leaders in this field saying all mental disorders are brain disorders, and we need to dedicate all of our research funding to unlocking the secrets of the brain so we can solve problems like addiction without really recognizing that, you know, Human experience is so much more complicated than that.
And within this medical frame of reference, um, you’re not really addressing the root causes. You know, so when I said addiction is [00:20:00] probably best formulated as a post-colonial disorder, that’s a problem frame that can suggest non-medical ways of trying to engage and help. And, um, you know, it has to do with things like livelihood, employment. educational access, opportunity to, um, a good life, the kinds of things that too many people on Indian reservations don’t have or can’t take for granted. And so as long as there’s these deep unjust, inequities in our society, the condition of coloniality will ensure that we’re contending with addiction, trauma, and suicide for the foreseeable future.
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Lucy Kang: You’re listening to Making Contact. Just jumping in here to remind you to visit us online if you like today’s show or want to leave us a comment. We have more information at radioproject.org. And now, back to the show.
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Amy Gastelum: Welcome back to Making Contact. I’m Amy Gastelum. After the Blackfeet Culture Camp project wrapped, Dr. Gone and his collaborators were left with a [00:21:00] big question. How could a project that’s culturally specific to the Blackfeet Nation be made appropriate for other Indigenous communities? And that’s when he partnered with the Urban Indian Health Center in Detroit. The director at the time, Jerilyn Church, a Lakota social worker, helped develop a way to apply traditional healing practices into an Indian Health Service funded health center that served indigenous people from over 100 different tribes. The diversity was a challenge.
Dr. Gone: So what we ended up doing in that program was settling on, um, a kind of Indigenous traditional spirituality orientation program. They commissioned me and my students at the University of Michigan at the time to develop a curriculum, um, that was based on the sweat lodge ceremony, um, and that would teach urban Indian people who had not been exposed to those traditions before, so pretty much naive to [00:22:00] traditional spirituality.
Amy Gastelum: Luckily, the sweat lodge ceremony actually incorporates several other standalone sacred practices, so participants learned several healing traditions at once.
Dr. Gone: So you can burn sage and sweetgrass or smudge as it’s called for prayer and purification every morning. Some people do that while they pray. Singing with a drum, um, is part of the sweat lodge, pipe ceremony is part of the sweat lodge. The water ceremony can be incorporated. So there’s lots of different elements of the sweat lodge that are also standalone practices, which meant that in a curricular approach to educating, again, to be clear, this was by Indians for Indians, because we’re really concerned about misappropriation by outsiders. But in a program like this, in a curriculum like this, um, the idea was you could build with, uh, instruction about each of these standalone kinds of ceremonies, and then they would be all assembled into the sweat lodge properly. There was a 12 session curriculum every Saturday for three hours when we piloted it, and, [00:23:00] they, um, had a chance to learn these things and then have sweat lodge ceremonies themselves in terms of it all coming together on two occasions. And the question in this is, um, can you actually first design a curriculum around this where it can be kind of didactic because that’s not how one learns these traditions back at home. So that’s the innovation. It’s very structured and very didactic. That not only has the opportunity to increase portability because once you have the curriculum, the curriculum could be shared and other people could offer the curriculum, you know, in fairly, uh, uh, identical fashion.
Amy Gastelum: Dr. Gone says the structure also means it can be more easily evaluated scientifically. This can help with things like funding and just more centers offering the program.
Dr. Gone: That was the extension of lessons learned from the Blackfeet Culture Camp, um, the Urban American Indian Traditional Spirituality Program, uh, curriculum that we designed with the Detroit Urban Indian Health Center.
Amy Gastelum: Is there anything that [00:24:00] you’re excited about or that’s giving you hope in this moment.
Dr. Gone: We have a lot more Indian and other Indigenous people entering into the mental health professions and in particular into mental health research. This is really important because once we enter these fields, we can harness perspectives and tap relationships and proceed in ways of knowledge generating knowledge, gathering, um, to, um center, highlight, accentuate Indigenous knowledge in the work that we do to better understand how mental health can be addressed in Indian country. So, it’s just crucial that there’s more and more people, um, who are not just trained clinically and in mental health, um, but also are in a position, whether it’s an academic, university appointment, um, or some other way, um, To engage in systematic inquiry about these [00:25:00] matters and to try new things out and to report what they learn in partnership with communities, it’s really important to recognize and appreciate the expertise of community partners in these matters, um, and to together figure out how to harness all the talent involved to solving our problems in our own way and on our own terms.
Amy Gastelum: Is there anything else that you think we should know?
Dr. Gone: It bears saying, uh, the usual stuff, which is that, um, American Indian and other Indigenous peoples in U. S. society are simultaneously everywhere and nowhere. You know, there’s sports teams, mascots with stereotypical performances, commercial products with logos and images, street names, mountain names, river names, you know, Indian people, [00:26:00] Indian influence um, is everywhere, um, but most Americans don’t take stock of that much, and of course those are typically historical and stereotypical representations, so they’re not accurate and they’re not current. Meanwhile, there are millions of Indian people, members of federally recognized tribes or citizens of tribal nations, who are living and working together to try and chart a future for our young people. We could barely get a hearing. So the paradox is punishing because what most Americans know about Indian people is, as I say, inaccurate and out of date. And almost no Americans know that they have talked with or engaged relationally with other Indian people. And that’s what we need to remedy. So anything that gets Indian people interacting with the broader society, talking about modern matters and [00:27:00] current issues and the future starting from here and now is really important.
Amy Gastelum: I’m Amy Gastelum. Thanks for listening to Making Contact. If you want to learn more about the Urban American Indian Traditional Spirituality Program curriculum, go to our website, radioproject.org, where you will find links in the show notes. We want to give special thanks to the estate of Darrell Norman, who provided us with his music for the show. Mr. Norman was a registered member of the Blackfeet Nation and of the Crazy Dog Society. He died in 2020. The music in this episode is from his album, The Return of the Buffalo Horses, which was composed and arranged by Ramon Kramer. Until next week, thanks for listening.
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