Fighting for our sisters: Community advocacy and action for missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls

Indigenous scholars and others who study the experiences of Indigenous communities have long criticized the psychocentric approach to trauma held by most clinical professionals. A recent example of this was the Canadian government's reparations for Indian Residential School system (IRS) survivors, which focused largely on individual psychological harms rather than broader effects of colonial oppression. Beginning in 1867 and continuing throughout the latter half of the twentieth century, Indigenous children were routinely removed from their home communities in Canada and placed into the IRS system, where they were frequently subject to physical, psychological, and sexual abuse. Using thematic analysis, this study draws on survivor testimonies from one residential school to explore how their descriptions of the effects and healing from IRS abuses differ from psychocentric understandings of trauma and loss. Results indicate that survivors describe IRS effects in sociocentric, ecocentric, and cosmocentric terms more so than psychocentric ones and place deep importance on healing through connection to family, culture, and community. To decolonize itself as a discipline and better serve Indigenous communities, the field of psychology must open up to understandings of trauma, loss, and healing that decentralize the individual, a difficult task given the discipline's psychocentric nature.

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Beyond trauma: Decolonizing understandings of loss and healing in the Indian Residential School system of Canada

Burrage

Momper

Gone

2021

“…Many of the articles consider the psychology of colonial violence among communities that were the targets of European imperialism. These include contributions from psychologists who work with Indigenous Peoples in North American settings to document and confront the explicit forms of colonial violence associated with the historical trauma of the residential school experience (Burrage et al., 2022) or the ongoing crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls (Ficklin et al., 2022), quantitative analysis of survey research to document implications of colonial mentality in Puerto Rican settings (Rivera‐Pichardo et al., 2022), ethnographic analyses of Black hair salons in the UK as spaces of decolonial resistance (Lukate, 2022), and participatory action research to document differently racialized experiences of recently arrived refugees in the United States city of Cincinnati (Dutt et al., 2022). Other articles consider the colonial violence of modern individualist ways of being that might otherwise appear unproblematic.…”

Section: Installment One: Decoloniality As a Social Issue For Psychol...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Psychology as a site for decolonial analysis

Adams

Ratele

Suffla

et al. 2022

This article provides a conceptual introduction to the second installment of a two‐issue collection of work on decolonial approaches to the psychological study of social issues. Whereas papers in the first installment consider decoloniality as a social issue for psychological study, papers in this second installment consider psychology as a site for decolonial analysis. In this article, we briefly review key concepts from decolonial theory (e.g., the coloniality of modernity, distinct from historical colonialism). We then discuss manifestations of epistemic violence in hegemonic psychology that require intervention. Epistemic violence is (not merely) a matter of epistemic exclusion of racialized others from the knowledge production process, imperialist imposition of white‐washed knowledge products as universal standards without regard to context, or pathologizing forms of explanation that construct racial others as deviants in light of white‐washed standards (i.e., epistemological violence; Teo, 2010). In addition, epistemic violence in psychology includes forms of harm (e.g., zero‐point epistemology and individualist lifeways) associated with its modern/colonial roots. Accordingly, a decolonial approach to the psychological study of social issues may require refusal of the discipline of psychology.

“…In contrast to the disciplinary decadence or “fetishization of method” (Gordon, 2014, p.81) that often characterizes mainstream psychology (see, e.g., Wilson, 2005), the contributions are methodologically pluralist. They include quasi‐experimental comparison and quantitative analyses of survey data (Dutt et al., 2022; Osei‐Tutu et al., 2022; Rivera Pichardo et al., 2022), as well as thematic analyses of video transcripts (Burrage et al., 2022), Foucauldian discourse analysis (Albhaisi, 2022), ethnographic‐styled participant observation (Lukate, 2022; Normann, 2022), and other techniques of qualitative research (e.g., Ficklin et al., 2022). As Atallah and Dutta (2021) note in their contribution to the second installment of the special issue, “Far too often, disciplinary criteria and standards of academic excellence work to silence critical questionings by colonized people” (p. 3).…”

Section: Overview Of Contributions To the First Installmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…For psychologists working in many Indigenous communities, the urgent task beyond treatment of historical trauma is to organize effective responses to this deadly violence. Such is the case with Ficklin and colleagues (2022), whose contribution to this section discusses the issue of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG). Although cases of MMIWG continue to ravage Indigenous communities, the problem receives little attention in mainstream media.…”

Section: Overview Of Contributions To the First Installmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

Decoloniality as a social issue for psychological study

2022

This article provides a theoretical introduction to a twoinstallment special issue on decolonial approaches to the psychological study of social issues. Decolonial approaches propose that colonial violence is not confined to the distant past (i.e., colonialism); instead, it persists as coloniality: racialized ways of thinking and being associated with Eurocentric global domination. Rather than characterizing modernity and its individualist psychological manifestations as progress, decolonial theorists use modernity/coloniality to illuminate the colonial violence inherent in the modern order and inseparable from modern individualist development. One implication of a decolonial framework is that colonial violence extends beyond physical space to psychological space, such that complete liberation requires forms of psychological decolonization. Accordingly, articles in this first installment consider decoloniality as a social issue for psychological analysis not only to address historical trauma, internalized inferiority, and other forms of psychological violence among the (formerly) colonized but also to recognize the coloniality in features of Eurocentric modernity-e.g., mainstream environmentalism, prevailing articulations of human rights education, or modern individualist lifeways-that appear liberal or progressive.