Stories are Medicine: Indigenous Sovereignty, Connection, and Healing

Institute for Ethnic Studies Author

09/08/2022 Added

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Melissa Tehee, Utah State University, gave this lecture August 31, 2022.

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[00:00:04.200]It's my pleasure on behalf of
[00:00:06.270]the Institute for ethnic studies at UNL
[00:00:09.030]to welcome you to our lecture this evening
[00:00:12.420]by our visiting distinguished fellow Dr. Melissa Tehee,
[00:00:15.870]and she's going to be giving the lecture,
[00:00:18.330]stories our Medicine, Indigenous Sovereignty,
[00:00:21.420]Connection and Healing.
[00:00:23.400]So a very warm welcome to all of you
[00:00:25.170]who made time to come tonight,
[00:00:26.580]both here in person and the over a hundred people
[00:00:29.280]who are joining us via Zoom this evening.
[00:00:33.510]I'm Dr. Joy Castro.
[00:00:36.090]And I direct the Institute for ethnic studies.
[00:00:38.430]I'm a professor of ethnic studies
[00:00:40.410]in Latinx studies in English.
[00:00:44.700]The visiting distinguished fellow series was begun in 2016,
[00:00:49.440]and it was the brain child of our professor James Garza
[00:00:53.070]who's here with us this evening.
[00:00:54.780]It's been a phenomenal series where we bring
[00:00:57.090]distinguished scholars in from all over the country
[00:01:00.570]for one week to do two things.
[00:01:03.810]One to give this lecture to our community.
[00:01:07.200]And two, to teach a course at the graduate level
[00:01:10.380]in an area of studies that our own faculty don't cover.
[00:01:14.520]So we expand the experience of graduate specializes
[00:01:18.450]in ethnic studies. It's ethnic studies 890.
[00:01:22.620]And so it's been going on this week and we thank Melissa
[00:01:25.590]for offering that course. It's been a wonderful series.
[00:01:29.250]We started with Dr. Michelle Wright, who was invited
[00:01:32.880]by the African and African American studies program.
[00:01:35.700]And last year, some of you will remember
[00:01:37.608]that we had Dr. Idelber Avelar
[00:01:40.440]who was invited by the Latinx
[00:01:42.150]and Latin American studies program.
[00:01:44.520]So every year a different program within the institute
[00:01:48.330]has the opportunity to choose a scholar
[00:01:51.210]and to invite that person to come to campus,
[00:01:53.550]to share their expertise with us.
[00:01:55.860]So this year it was the opportunity
[00:01:58.560]of the indigenous studies program.
[00:02:02.070]They chose Dr. Tehee and I'd like
[00:02:05.160]to invite Dr. Cynthia Willis-Esqueda
[00:02:08.670]our associate professor in indigenous studies
[00:02:11.370]and psychology to come to the lector
[00:02:13.170]and to introduce her. Thank you.
[00:02:21.480]That was a great introduction Joy, and I appreciate it.
[00:02:27.360]As she said, I am Dr. Cynthia Willis-Esqueda
[00:02:29.550]from the Institute of ethnic studies
[00:02:31.670]in the department of psychology.
[00:02:34.470]And it's with great delight and honor
[00:02:37.050]that I introduce Dr. Melissa Tehee.
[00:02:40.380]I greet each and every one of you
[00:02:44.070]as we come together to hear from Dr. Tehee.
[00:02:48.690]I would like to begin by acknowledging
[00:02:50.820]that the University of Nebraska Lincoln
[00:02:53.130]is on the past present and future homelands
[00:02:57.660]of the Pawnee, Ponca, Otoe-Missouria,
[00:03:02.294]Umaha or Omaha, Dakota, Lakota, Arapaho, Cheyenne,
[00:03:10.170]and Kanza peoples.
[00:03:13.170]Land acknowledgements are not a replacement
[00:03:17.130]for relationships with indigenous peoples,
[00:03:20.310]but they are a first step
[00:03:22.230]and I honor this indigenous foundation.
[00:03:26.340]I have known Melissa since she was a sophomore at UNL
[00:03:30.600]and I was her research supervisor.
[00:03:33.540]In some ways, our connection was not by chance.
[00:03:37.380]We are very similar. We have very similar backgrounds.
[00:03:41.160]We're both Cherokee from Oklahoma.
[00:03:43.770]We share common values and perspectives.
[00:03:47.220]And even today, we can talk for hours
[00:03:49.440]on just about any topic that you throw at us.
[00:03:53.790]Melissa was the best type of undergraduate research
[00:03:57.240]assistant who immersed herself in the research experience
[00:04:02.160]in the ivory tower, as well as in the indigenous community.
[00:04:06.600]By the end of her UNL career,
[00:04:08.850]where she received her bachelor's degree,
[00:04:11.340]we had two publications together
[00:04:13.710]focusing on indigenous interpersonal violence and trauma.
[00:04:19.260]So when it was time for her to enter graduate training,
[00:04:22.350]I was thrilled that she went to study
[00:04:24.990]with one of my beloved mentors,
[00:04:27.180]Dr. Joseph Trimble at Western Washington university.
[00:04:31.500]Joseph is an APA distinguished career fellow
[00:04:34.860]and the first American Indian man and second of all time
[00:04:39.120]to receive the PhD in psychology.
[00:04:42.060]I was extremely jealous when she showed me pictures
[00:04:45.420]of the ocean and the mountains in Bellingham
[00:04:48.508]and Melissa then went on to receive her master's in science,
[00:04:53.250]from Western Washington.
[00:04:56.460]Melissa's next move was to University of Arizona,
[00:05:00.210]where she completed the dual degree program
[00:05:02.310]with a PhD in clinical psychology and a JD.
[00:05:06.300]And she holds a certificate
[00:05:07.680]in indigenous people's law and policy.
[00:05:11.340]I also had family at Tucson. It just doesn't stop.
[00:05:14.220]She worked in the lab of Dr. Connie Beck
[00:05:16.440]and continued her focus
[00:05:18.270]on ethnic and racial minority violence and trauma.
[00:05:21.930]Her pre-doctoral internship was completed
[00:05:24.810]at the university of California, San Diego
[00:05:27.390]and the San Diego veteran's consortium.
[00:05:31.830]She continued to focus on lifespan trauma.
[00:05:35.940]Once again, I remember telling her
[00:05:37.770]how jealous I was that she was near the ocean.
[00:05:42.150]Melissa is an associate professor now
[00:05:44.400]at Utah state university and the department of psychology.
[00:05:47.790]And she's the director of
[00:05:48.750]the American Indian support project.
[00:05:51.390]For anyone familiar with indigenous psychology
[00:05:54.540]Utah state has a special meaning
[00:05:56.970]as it is the base for the annual retreat
[00:06:00.810]of indigenous scholars and the society
[00:06:03.000]of Indian psychologists of which we are both members.
[00:06:07.290]After all this time,
[00:06:09.210]Melissa and I are still working together.
[00:06:11.490]Currently, we are examining underlying motivations
[00:06:14.100]and content of anti-indigenous attitudinal bias.
[00:06:18.210]This type of knowledge would go a long way
[00:06:20.370]in explaining the disparities in health, wealth,
[00:06:24.240]and law experienced by us indigenous people.
[00:06:28.380]Today, Melissa has honored us
[00:06:30.098]to come full circle and agreed to be
[00:06:32.790]our ethnic studies scholar and residents.
[00:06:35.580]Melissa, I'm so very proud of you come by my office anytime.
[00:06:39.900]You know where it is.
[00:06:41.490]Please help me in welcoming Dr. Melissa Tehee.
[00:06:44.450](audience applauds)
[00:06:51.720]So I'm gonna talk today about how stories are medicine.
[00:06:57.330]And how we can use stories for connection and healing.
[00:07:04.470]I wanna start by recognizing the land
[00:07:06.450]on which a lot of this work
[00:07:08.220]has been happening known as Utah.
[00:07:10.950]And I am at Utah state university,
[00:07:13.920]which is the land grant university of the state of Utah.
[00:07:16.920]So we are spread across the entire state.
[00:07:21.660]We are on traditional homelands of the Confederated tribes
[00:07:24.840]of the Goshute Indians, the Navajo nation,
[00:07:27.750]the Ute Indian tribe, the Northwestern band of Shoshone,
[00:07:31.470]the Paiute Indian tribe of Utah,
[00:07:33.600]the San Juan Southern Paiute,
[00:07:35.250]the Skull Valley Band of Goshute,
[00:07:37.350]and the White Mesa band of the Ute mountain Ute.
[00:07:42.690]We recognize the traumas, the genocide that has happened,
[00:07:50.130]on these lands that allow us
[00:07:52.920]to come to these universities and study.
[00:07:58.110]So I just wanna take a moment to pause and to think about
[00:08:02.640]the benefits that we've all had from indigenous people.
[00:08:10.770]So I wanna start by talking about what happens
[00:08:18.360]when you don't have
[00:08:23.760]control over your narrative.
[00:08:26.760]What happens when others define you?
[00:08:38.550]Sorry for the noise for the people on Zoom.
[00:08:40.360]We'll get this worked out.
[00:08:43.650]So I'm gonna start by embodying a story of a girl,
[00:08:47.910]a young girl, just starting school.
[00:09:06.915](drum beating)
[00:09:14.074](indistinct conversation)
[00:09:36.240]So what happens,
[00:09:39.750]when we don't allow people to be their whole selves?
[00:09:45.300]So we're gonna revisit this story towards the end.
[00:09:50.850]I do wanna welcome you all for coming.
[00:09:53.250]You are taking time outta your schedules.
[00:09:56.520]A lot of people aren't doing a lot of in person things
[00:10:00.090]so much yet so there's a lot of people on Zoom,
[00:10:03.330]but I really am grateful for the time you're taking
[00:10:06.360]and spending here today to learn.
[00:10:09.060]So a lot of times people give academic talks
[00:10:11.970]and they introduce their sort of academic self.
[00:10:16.770]And I'm actually probably not gonna like read any of this.
[00:10:20.220]But I think it's important to introduce our entire selves.
[00:10:24.360]And so I make it a point at every talk I give
[00:10:27.420]to introduce my cultural self as well.
[00:10:30.480]So I'm a citizen of the Cherokee nation.
[00:10:32.610]I grew up here in Nebraska.
[00:10:35.970]I went to, did my undergrad here.
[00:10:39.300]I applied to one school. That's what I knew how to do.
[00:10:42.810]And this is where I came.
[00:10:45.810]I lived a lot of different houses growing up.
[00:10:48.960]We moved frequently after my parents got divorced.
[00:10:53.340]I helped raise my younger siblings.
[00:10:56.760]So my brother is 10 years younger than me.
[00:10:59.280]My sister is 12 years younger.
[00:11:00.960]So she graduated from her undergrad here 10 years ago.
[00:11:05.550]I've had a life partner for 22 years.
[00:11:08.070]Who's the person yelling in the audience.
[00:11:09.690]So he asked to not be kicked out. All right.
[00:11:16.560]And it's an amazing place to be
[00:11:21.150]to come back here and to be able
[00:11:23.250]to give this talk and have our families here.
[00:11:28.440]Both of our families live here,
[00:11:30.090]we come back frequently for holidays and time off.
[00:11:35.520]And it was the most stressful
[00:11:38.370]and nerve wracking part of this talk.
[00:11:41.490]So I can stand and give a talk to a thousand academics.
[00:11:45.420]And I mean, I still get nervous when I give talks generally,
[00:11:49.080]but I don't, like I kept having these waves of panic like,
[00:11:52.860]oh my gosh our family's gonna be here.
[00:11:55.650]And it's different.
[00:11:57.150]And it's an amazing place to sort of show some of the things
[00:12:01.050]that I do to my family, because they don't get to see this.
[00:12:06.780]I, when I'm not sort of in my office
[00:12:11.040]doing things on a computer, my goal is to get outside.
[00:12:15.060]So the things that rejuvenate me personally
[00:12:18.030]are being outside, being with animals, quiet time, downtime.
[00:12:23.220]So while I am, I have a very direct communication style.
[00:12:27.060]I'm loud and I'm outspoken. I'm really an introvert.
[00:12:30.480]So I like to spend time at home.
[00:12:32.220]It's hard to get me to leave.
[00:12:36.660]I also have a collective world view.
[00:12:39.510]And that is a, a thing that doesn't exist well,
[00:12:45.960]I think at times within our education system
[00:12:49.380]and within academia.
[00:12:51.960]And my collective worldview just,
[00:12:53.730]I'm constantly thinking about the decisions I make,
[00:12:56.430]how they're affecting multiple people.
[00:12:58.530]I'm constantly considering how other people are feeling.
[00:13:03.360]Like, hey, are you cold?
[00:13:06.870]Like I'm not gonna change the temperature
[00:13:08.160]until I check with everybody, right.
[00:13:10.440]And part of that was happening in my invitation here.
[00:13:15.270]It was like, okay, so what do you wanna teach about?
[00:13:16.928]And I'm like, what do they wanna learn?
[00:13:18.780]Like well, what time do you wanna teach
[00:13:20.190]what time works for the students, right?
[00:13:22.260]I mean, this is my worldview,
[00:13:24.240]but it is not quite so decisive.
[00:13:28.710]As I mentioned, though,
[00:13:29.543]I do have a very direct communication style
[00:13:32.700]and I say what I think most of the time.
[00:13:36.960]And that can be taken as rude at times,
[00:13:43.920]which is never my intention.
[00:13:45.690]I just, I don't have sort of the,
[00:13:48.450]it's also part of my introvert self as like,
[00:13:50.460]I don't have the, like all the niceties.
[00:13:54.450]I don't need the small talk all the time on things.
[00:13:57.300]So I'm like really direct into the point a lot.
[00:14:02.250]But as Dr. Willis-Esqueda mentioned,
[00:14:05.070]I was a first generation college student.
[00:14:08.520]I was here at UNL.
[00:14:10.110]I applied to this school. This is where I came.
[00:14:13.500]And I was part of the TRIO programs,
[00:14:18.000]part of what is now SSS.
[00:14:22.740]And then I became a McNair Fellow.
[00:14:25.320]I also had a, UCare grant.
[00:14:28.290]So while what Cynthia didn't say is that
[00:14:32.160]while she met me after, like I had in my second year,
[00:14:36.720]I stayed for a few more years.
[00:14:38.580]So I did my undergrad in six years.
[00:14:41.610]but I got the UCare grant
[00:14:43.080]and it's really a two year sort of grant cycle.
[00:14:46.500]And so I stayed longer to be able to do that.
[00:14:49.440]I also worked full time.
[00:14:50.700]I worked more than one job,
[00:14:52.350]almost all of the time that I was here.
[00:14:55.260]So I was not taking full course loads in the same way
[00:14:58.590]and really trying not to take out student loans,
[00:15:01.050]which let me tell you changed later.
[00:15:03.480]But while I was here.
[00:15:11.370]And I'm very thankful for my time here at UNL, right.
[00:15:16.620]So it seems like this like,
[00:15:18.223]I just I'll, I'll go to college at the place that's here.
[00:15:22.440]I didn't know how to apply.
[00:15:24.840]I didn't know how to move across the country.
[00:15:29.415]And so I stayed here.
[00:15:32.970]And as Cynthia said,
[00:15:35.880]I don't think it was by chance.
[00:15:38.160]So my meeting her, shifted who I thought I could be.
[00:15:44.670]What I thought I could do.
[00:15:47.820]And I had had the intention of getting
[00:15:50.220]the highest degree I could long before meeting her.
[00:15:54.600]But I didn't know what that was.
[00:15:55.980]I had no idea what all these letters
[00:15:58.770]meant or the order you got them in.
[00:16:02.460]And I didn't have a way of
[00:16:03.660]sort of getting that information, right.
[00:16:05.790]It is, academia is definitely a culture in and of itself.
[00:16:11.970]And there's a whole language that I didn't speak.
[00:16:20.040]So this is my academic family tree.
[00:16:23.490]So I started here with Dr. Cynthia Willis-Esqueda.
[00:16:28.830]This is Dr. Joseph Trimble, sorry.
[00:16:35.040]Somewhere in here is like a pointer.
[00:16:39.900]There we go. There he is.
[00:16:42.060]And then this is Dr. Carolyn Barcus and she is,
[00:16:47.460]she is the person who really started
[00:16:49.830]the American Indian support project
[00:16:51.300]at Utah State University.
[00:16:53.430]And in 1986, they brought a cohort of Navajo students up
[00:16:59.610]that they were having a shortage of school counselors
[00:17:03.510]in Navajo nation and so they brought a cohort of students up
[00:17:06.570]to train in the master's program.
[00:17:09.750]And a couple of them wanted to stay
[00:17:12.060]and go on to get their PhD.
[00:17:13.440]And really the program has developed into just the,
[00:17:17.400]really a PhD in combined clinical counseling psychology.
[00:17:22.320]And so she wanted to retire like in 2008 and she attempted.
[00:17:29.520]It didn't work out real well.
[00:17:31.620]And eventually I got a phone call
[00:17:34.620]when I was getting ready to graduate,
[00:17:36.270]which was many years after 2008.
[00:17:39.270]I got a phone call around 2014,
[00:17:41.070]asking if I would be interested in applying
[00:17:43.470]for a position there to take over running,
[00:17:47.460]directing the American Indian support project.
[00:17:50.280]And I was like, no.
[00:17:53.070]I don't wanna go into academia. That's not a life for me.
[00:17:57.030]I do not wanna feel like I am in school
[00:18:00.360]every day for the rest of my life.
[00:18:04.680]And here I am.
[00:18:06.720]So they asked, what do you wanna do?
[00:18:08.520]I said, I wanna do research.
[00:18:09.690]I wanna work with tribes.
[00:18:11.910]These are the things I wanna do.
[00:18:13.110]They said, great. You can do all that from here.
[00:18:16.560]And so I've been there and I have acquired
[00:18:21.390]quite a family there.
[00:18:24.150]So not only is Dr. Carolyn Barcus and Dr. Sue Crowley,
[00:18:29.370]who is in the psychology department,
[00:18:31.470]really part of my family, but I have had so many students.
[00:18:35.460]So I have Dr. Tammy Ellington,
[00:18:38.160]who is my first grad student to graduate.
[00:18:41.010]I have Erica Ficklin,
[00:18:42.630]Sally Mac and Devin Isaacs who were in the same cohort.
[00:18:46.710]Devin's currently on internship at Mizu.
[00:18:50.850]And Sally is at the VA in Atlanta.
[00:18:54.930]And I have Rachel Kilgore, Jennifer Yazi,
[00:18:59.790]and my newest incoming student who started on Monday
[00:19:03.990]and I've been here this whole time.
[00:19:06.630]Madison Whitten, Griffin Powers.
[00:19:10.260]This is the reason I stay in academia.
[00:19:17.220]So I wanna pause and talk about the purpose of stories.
[00:19:23.070]So I see some students in here and you know how this works.
[00:19:28.860]My family, I won't call on them,
[00:19:30.990]but they can raise their hand.
[00:19:33.030]I wanna hear from you.
[00:19:34.260]What do you think are some purposes of stories
[00:19:36.840]and you can just yell it out.
[00:19:42.090]And we will wait.
[00:19:44.086]To encourage others. Okay.
[00:19:45.163]Stories to encourage others. What else?
[00:19:49.643]Pass along history. Yeah.
[00:19:51.420]Say that one more time. To pass along history.
[00:19:53.340]Pass along history. Absolutely.
[00:19:57.000]What else?
[00:19:58.364](indistinct conversation)
[00:20:00.360]Okay. So to sort of like distinguish who people are.
[00:20:04.830]Yeah. That was like kinda your identity,
[00:20:06.955]like where you come from, your narratives,
[00:20:09.323]but also like of you narrate to popular people.
[00:20:11.490]Yeah. So who you are, right?
[00:20:13.260]That culture, that knowledge,
[00:20:16.320]I did some research on this topic,
[00:20:20.100]as I was thinking about this.
[00:20:21.570]This is not a topic I typically speak on.
[00:20:26.880]But it's a thing that keeps reoccurring
[00:20:28.710]in all the work that I'm doing and it's time.
[00:20:31.320]And this was the perfect time
[00:20:32.760]to be able to put all this together.
[00:20:35.100]So I did some really scientific study
[00:20:38.070]by typing in purpose of stories to Google.
[00:20:42.750]And I came up with quite a few things.
[00:20:45.090]So the transfer of knowledge and understanding, right,
[00:20:47.850]how we pass along cultural knowledge.
[00:20:50.550]Healing, meaning making, making sense of the world.
[00:20:55.650]We have escape. We have entertainment.
[00:20:58.740]We have the ability to imagine our possible selves.
[00:21:02.940]We have emotional connection and empathy,
[00:21:05.670]creating community and belonging.
[00:21:08.130]So stories are used in all sorts of ways,
[00:21:13.320]without us ever thinking about it, right.
[00:21:14.970]We engage in storytelling early on.
[00:21:17.790]Every single person engages in storytelling.
[00:21:27.330]And so I wanna talk about the importance
[00:21:30.990]of defining ourselves and in context of story.
[00:21:36.330]So in thinking about our identity
[00:21:39.360]and psychologists do a lot of work in identity development.
[00:21:44.280]People start developing their identities.
[00:21:46.740]I mean, you start to notice sort of
[00:21:48.570]similarities and differences around that 4, 5, 6 year old,
[00:21:53.130]is that because of the age solely or because that's the time
[00:21:55.890]you come into contact with people different from you
[00:21:58.700]in like preschool, kindergarten, that kind of thing.
[00:22:01.770]And then there's a lot of identity development
[00:22:04.740]that sort of happens in that
[00:22:06.090]like junior high, middle school.
[00:22:07.770]Like you couldn't pay me enough
[00:22:09.150]to go back to that time in my life, awful time.
[00:22:13.290]But that's a lot of identity development happening there,
[00:22:16.410]but we continue developing our identities, right.
[00:22:18.780]So sort of the K through 12, and then,
[00:22:21.540]here in the US the four years of college,
[00:22:24.810]there's so a lot of identity development.
[00:22:28.410]But we continue.
[00:22:29.310]So there's some growth spurts that happen in our identity.
[00:22:35.760]I also wanna take a minute to think about sovereignty.
[00:22:42.870]So sovereignty is our abilities
[00:22:48.510]if you think about it, I can give you the legal definition.
[00:22:51.210]That's what I'm trained in.
[00:22:54.540]Is our ability to govern ourselves, right,
[00:22:57.240]to set these sort of laws and how we govern ourselves.
[00:23:02.670]But I'm gonna push sort of how we think about sovereignty
[00:23:06.990]today and tribal sovereignty to something that
[00:23:11.250]Scott Richard Lyons said, wrote.
[00:23:14.377]"So sovereignty is the guiding story in our pursuit of
[00:23:18.030]self-determination the general strategy by which we aim
[00:23:22.830]to best recover our losses from the ravages of colonization.
[00:23:27.900]Our lands, our languages, our cultures, our self respect."
[00:23:35.880]Scott Richard Lyons,
[00:23:37.410]went on to write a lot about rhetorical sovereignty.
[00:23:43.260]And I struggled with,
[00:23:44.093]do I put this in the presentation title,
[00:23:49.230]because I don't want people to not come
[00:23:51.210]because they don't know what these terms mean.
[00:23:54.570]And I'm one of those people,
[00:23:56.100]like I have, I took a class
[00:24:00.360]in native women literature here at UNL by Tom.
[00:24:05.490]And, but I don't think I like understood
[00:24:09.510]rhetoric in the same way.
[00:24:10.800]I've started working with a grad student a couple years ago,
[00:24:15.060]and she's in the information technology
[00:24:17.370]and learning sciences, her name's Lee Lee.
[00:24:19.500]And she is from China.
[00:24:20.850]And she like knows all these really smart things
[00:24:25.560]that take me a lot, like take a lot to sort of study.
[00:24:29.130]But I started learning more about rhetoric from her.
[00:24:33.360]And rhetorical sovereignty is a fancy word
[00:24:36.780]of just saying the right to tell our stories,
[00:24:40.500]the right to tell the stories of who we are.
[00:24:44.760]And this is something that has come up repeatedly
[00:24:49.380]thinking about the education system.
[00:24:52.110]So whose stories are taught in K through 12,
[00:24:55.650]whose histories are being shared.
[00:24:58.830]Cause I remember going to class and sort of coming home
[00:25:01.860]and being like, this isn't how I understand things.
[00:25:07.020]Also I definitely got my lowest grades
[00:25:11.580]in history classes throughout.
[00:25:15.330]And for fun I failed government and then went to law school.
[00:25:21.270]So I just throw that out there.
[00:25:22.530]Failed government in ninth grade, took it again in 11th.
[00:25:26.490]But I didn't have an interest. It did not connect with me.
[00:25:29.850]These histories being taught.
[00:25:32.334]And now I have graduate students
[00:25:33.960]that are coming to work with me in Utah.
[00:25:36.330]And they have kids that are going to school,
[00:25:38.580]and their kids are coming home and saying,
[00:25:41.160]oh hey, for Thanksgiving, I can't believe we made these,
[00:25:45.570]these like paper feather head dresses.
[00:25:48.000]And I tried to tell 'em that our tribes
[00:25:50.820]never wore head dresses.
[00:25:54.240]And so this, this will come up later,
[00:25:56.880]but I've been doing work in this area
[00:25:59.580]because I want the community I live in
[00:26:02.730]to be better about this.
[00:26:04.440]For it to be more receptive
[00:26:05.940]to the students that I'm bringing in.
[00:26:08.070]But that's rhetorical sovereignty,
[00:26:09.510]the right to tell our own stories.
[00:26:14.100]So have you ever read anything written about you,
[00:26:19.500]not with you about you.
[00:26:22.290]So maybe you've read a doctor's note in a medical record,
[00:26:27.480]about you.
[00:26:29.190]Maybe you've read a police report about you.
[00:26:32.850]People aren't gonna raise their hand,
[00:26:33.870]but I have read a police report about me.
[00:26:36.210]So...
[00:26:37.202](audience laughing)
[00:26:38.880]How did you feel when reading your own story
[00:26:45.300]written by someone else?
[00:26:48.900]I have a feeling, it looks like this.
[00:26:57.300]I have been in a place since I became a professor
[00:27:03.750]where a story about me has been written,
[00:27:06.390]and I have been silenced.
[00:27:10.140]So I'm in a place where a lot of tragic things happened.
[00:27:14.880]And two years after these tragedies,
[00:27:16.890]a lawsuit was filed that I was named in.
[00:27:21.660]And the typical initial filing for a lawsuit is,
[00:27:26.970]I mean like eight pages, 10 pages,
[00:27:29.400]you have to just allege sort of what you are suing for.
[00:27:34.650]There has to be names for that, right?
[00:27:36.630]So the, like the causes of action that you're suing for,
[00:27:41.400]and you have to allege sort of how, what happened, met that.
[00:27:46.770]But in that initial document, there is no fact finding.
[00:27:51.750]A judge has not read it.
[00:27:53.730]All you have to do is pay money
[00:27:56.100]and have this document filed.
[00:28:00.060]And what happened in our case was that this group,
[00:28:07.800]this attorney and people wrote an 80 page document,
[00:28:13.020]and filed it and then pushed it out to the media everywhere.
[00:28:19.350]And hopefully you don't know this information,
[00:28:23.370]but as soon as a lawsuit is filed,
[00:28:25.590]you were no longer allowed to talk about
[00:28:28.170]the events that happened.
[00:28:30.030]So now I'm totally silenced literally on this topic.
[00:28:39.750]And as I mentioned, I tell my opinion, I'm loud.
[00:28:43.920]People don't question sort of like
[00:28:46.200]what I'm thinking in a space.
[00:28:49.230]And at that point I was silenced.
[00:28:53.880]And I really sort of didn't read the story
[00:28:57.420]that was put out there because it was very painful.
[00:29:02.640]And eventually years, lawsuits take years.
[00:29:07.590]And eventually I had to read through
[00:29:10.560]every single thing and give evidence,
[00:29:15.090]like either agree that it was true
[00:29:17.580]or give evidence against it.
[00:29:19.879]And it took a lot of time that I had to spend
[00:29:22.620]immersed in this narrative written by no one
[00:29:26.850]who was part of the story.
[00:29:33.480]And in the meantime,
[00:29:35.940]I'm getting phone calls to my work phone,
[00:29:41.250]telling me to kill myself. I'm getting emails.
[00:29:45.060]I mean hundreds of emails
[00:29:48.060]saying things like that repeatedly.
[00:29:50.520]I mean one message I got said,
[00:29:52.830]I hope you have to like go work for Domino's pizza.
[00:29:55.560]And I was like, cool.
[00:29:57.180]Like that's a like super worthwhile job, do you?
[00:30:01.680]But anyway, what people thought was terrible
[00:30:06.420]was maybe not thought that way by me so much.
[00:30:10.500]But that's a place where
[00:30:12.750]I didn't have the ability to tell my story.
[00:30:14.460]And my graduate students couldn't understand
[00:30:18.360]sort of why I wasn't speaking up
[00:30:20.550]at different places we were going.
[00:30:21.660]I stopped going to conferences as much.
[00:30:23.880]My phone got totally forwarded to the police department.
[00:30:28.080]I don't have that number anymore.
[00:30:30.450]And I have currently 9,000 unread emails,
[00:30:33.180]which I, the psychology part of me
[00:30:35.190]is gonna attribute to some of what happened.
[00:30:38.400]I'll tell you more about
[00:30:39.390]why my emails don't get read though.
[00:30:43.710]But this fact of having something written about you
[00:30:45.810]and not being able to tell your story,
[00:30:50.310]it was so painful and I've only started to regain my voice.
[00:30:55.470]So the lawsuit has been dismissed
[00:30:57.570]and nothing's ever gonna be covered
[00:30:59.550]about what actually happened.
[00:31:02.970]Also what actually happened doesn't matter,
[00:31:07.230]in the sort of big picture of like
[00:31:09.450]why this lawsuit was filed.
[00:31:11.070]The purpose was to get it out to the media.
[00:31:13.710]This is what happened.
[00:31:15.720]And they're not gonna cover the things, right,
[00:31:18.330]but they're not ever gonna see.
[00:31:21.120]I had every single email of mine subpoenaed.
[00:31:23.130]I had all my text messages subpoenaed
[00:31:25.530]and you're never gonna see the caring and the love
[00:31:29.490]in those things.
[00:31:32.970]And so this is the first time I'm talking about it.
[00:31:34.770]And the first time I'm sort of,
[00:31:36.060]I don't know if I'm allowed to per se,
[00:31:37.980]but it's the first time to bring that up.
[00:31:40.830]But I know personally what it's like
[00:31:44.970]to not be able to tell your story.
[00:31:49.290]And I share this quote in the undergrad class
[00:31:52.290]that I teach multicultural psychology.
[00:31:55.560]When we're talking about identity development.
[00:31:58.830]From Audre Lorde, "if I didn't define myself for myself,
[00:32:02.760]I would be crunched into other people's fantasies for me
[00:32:06.510]and eaten alive."
[00:32:12.990]Robert Burton is a neurologist
[00:32:18.750]and he's done work for good number of years now
[00:32:25.020]thinking about stories.
[00:32:28.410]And he thinks he talks about incomplete stories.
[00:32:33.330]So us as humans, if we get an incomplete story, wow,
[00:32:39.540]we love to fill that story like instantly.
[00:32:43.530]So why did Becky quit her job?
[00:32:48.840]Oh, I don't know, but let's talk about like,
[00:32:51.090]what's hypothesized, right?
[00:32:53.070]But the thing that we don't do in completing these stories
[00:32:55.770]is like, find out if those things are true.
[00:32:59.940]But completing stories is like completing a puzzle, right.
[00:33:04.170]We activate these dopamine pathways, these reward pathways,
[00:33:09.120]these same pathways that we activate when we eat
[00:33:12.810]really good warm cookies at night.
[00:33:15.360]These same pathways when we gamble and win money,
[00:33:19.380]these pathways are, are activated.
[00:33:21.240]And then they reinforce sort of filling this puzzle again.
[00:33:26.940]And we love stories.
[00:33:28.560]And we don't love and complete things as humans.
[00:33:31.740]So we're constantly filling those in.
[00:33:41.214]As Dr. Willis-Esqueda mentioned, we've done work
[00:33:47.190]thinking about bias towards American Indians, I mean,
[00:33:50.940]she was doing long before I was here.
[00:33:53.580]And there's a lot of,
[00:33:57.270]sort of types of racism that people show
[00:34:01.020]and that are experienced.
[00:34:03.990]There's covert, there's overt.
[00:34:06.360]There's the things that are obviously racist.
[00:34:08.490]There's the things that like have this underlying racism
[00:34:11.220]to it, you can't quite tell there's microaggressions.
[00:34:17.760]But one part that hasn't been a part of these theories
[00:34:21.870]that have developed over decades is omission.
[00:34:27.480]And Dr. Stephanie Fryberg and Arianne Eason
[00:34:32.250]wrote about sort of
[00:34:33.337]"omission is the modern form of bias
[00:34:35.730]against indigenous people."
[00:34:38.850]So when I was a student here,
[00:34:43.020]in a class may be called race and racism
[00:34:48.420]that Cynthia taught,
[00:34:50.730]she asked people in the class to write down
[00:34:54.690]10 American Indians, 10 native people.
[00:34:59.670]We did not have laptops at the time.
[00:35:01.740]We did not have phones that gave us any information,
[00:35:04.140]so you were stuck writing it in that space.
[00:35:07.650]It was me and one other native student in that class.
[00:35:12.030]And pretty much everybody else's lists were empty.
[00:35:17.670]So I still do this,
[00:35:19.470]but I ask students in my undergrad class to tell me about,
[00:35:26.010]to write down names of 10 modern native people,
[00:35:29.340]people living today,
[00:35:31.320]people who've influenced them in some way.
[00:35:36.270]And I frequently get, can I put down your name?
[00:35:40.350]No.
[00:35:42.060]The reason they ask is because
[00:35:43.410]I'm the only representation they have had.
[00:35:47.190]They have no other names to put down.
[00:35:51.870]And this invisibility is also part of
[00:35:56.400]not being able to tell your story.
[00:36:02.010]And Scott Momaday wrote a long time ago,
[00:36:07.207]"we are what we imagine.
[00:36:09.510]Our very existence consists in our imagination of ourselves.
[00:36:14.610]Our best destiny is to imagine,
[00:36:17.970]at least completely who and what, and that we are.
[00:36:23.520]The greatest tragedy that can befall us
[00:36:26.160]is to go unimagined."
[00:36:30.420]There's a lot of research in sort of child development
[00:36:34.170]and thinking about diversity, equity and inclusion
[00:36:37.920]and colleges as to how do you get people
[00:36:44.010]to see themselves going to college?
[00:36:47.160]How do you get people to imagine themselves as nurses
[00:36:50.280]or doctors or lawyers, for some reason,
[00:36:53.040]all the professional degrees, but people,
[00:36:55.980]people don't wanna don't imagine themselves being academics.
[00:37:03.990]And what we see in that research,
[00:37:06.240]what we can go and find is that students who don't have
[00:37:11.070]representations of people who look like them
[00:37:14.370]doing these things, don't imagine that they even can.
[00:37:22.350]So when I was here as an undergrad,
[00:37:26.430]I knew nothing about law school.
[00:37:31.710]So like the first types of things I wanted to be growing up,
[00:37:36.090]Wonder Woman, in the roller Derby.
[00:37:40.080]But when I was even younger than that, people would ask.
[00:37:42.780]And I would say a nurse doctor, I wanna do both.
[00:37:45.180]I want the skills of a nurse and a doctor,
[00:37:49.350]But never did I ever try to pursue that?
[00:37:54.060]I didn't see people like me.
[00:37:55.710]I didn't know that was actually an opportunity.
[00:37:57.870]I didn't know how to apply to medical school.
[00:38:00.900]Would've been a way shorter career in college.
[00:38:04.440]Let me tell you what, the path I took been here a long time.
[00:38:11.700]But not seeing people that represent you change.
[00:38:16.650]I didn't think I could go to law school.
[00:38:19.920]Dr. Willis-Esqueda would talk about, we talk about law.
[00:38:23.130]We'd talk about jurisdictional issues and how it matters,
[00:38:26.790]what land I'm standing on. Am I on tribal land?
[00:38:30.390]Am I on state land? Am I on federal land?
[00:38:33.000]Of which laws apply to me?
[00:38:35.250]If you are not native, you don't have that complication.
[00:38:38.520]You don't need to know what kind of ticket to ask
[00:38:41.850]the highway patrol officer for, if you are on tribal land.
[00:38:45.450]I do.
[00:38:48.510]And it was so complicated and we're,
[00:38:50.640]we were working on domestic violence, right?
[00:38:54.600]Intimate partner violence, and it matters what race you are,
[00:38:58.440]if you're the victim.
[00:38:59.640]What race the person who is perpetrated is
[00:39:01.950]and what land you're on if you're native.
[00:39:04.140]And this applies to no one else.
[00:39:07.080]And so this is what pushed me to want to learn more.
[00:39:10.290]And I went to a professor at Western Washington university
[00:39:16.290]who had her master's in legal study
[00:39:20.070]from the university of Nebraska.
[00:39:22.110]And I said, yeah, like I kind of,
[00:39:23.940]I kind wanna apply to law school.
[00:39:25.170]Like I don't if I'm gonna do that.
[00:39:27.720]She said, well, why wouldn't you do that?
[00:39:28.867]I said, I don't think I, I don't know.
[00:39:30.503]I don't think I'd get in.
[00:39:33.390]She said, what do you mean?
[00:39:36.630]She said,
[00:39:37.665]are you worried about getting into a PhD program
[00:39:40.020]that accepts six people a year? And I said, no.
[00:39:45.180]She said, but you're worried about getting into a law school
[00:39:47.430]that takes on average 150 students a year.
[00:39:51.030]Like you're a scientist, do the math,
[00:39:54.180]statistically speaking, should you be worried about this?
[00:39:58.920]But I didn't know.
[00:40:00.540]And so it's,
[00:40:01.410]it's coming across people that are willing to help me
[00:40:03.780]that represent the me and who I could be.
[00:40:10.380]So I wanna talk a little bit about how stories facilitate
[00:40:15.180]sort of our empathic perspective taking.
[00:40:18.420]And I use this in teaching cultural competence.
[00:40:24.180]So I started off by working, thinking about
[00:40:28.710]the American psychological Association's ethics code
[00:40:32.850]and working with the society of Indian psychologist on how.
[00:40:36.900]That code is rooted in values,
[00:40:38.820]that we don't all hold, but they think it's a-cultural,
[00:40:43.230]they think there's no culture within it.
[00:40:45.360]It equally applies to everyone it's universal and it's not.
[00:40:49.620]And we wrote an entire commentary.
[00:40:51.810]I mean, I didn't write it, I helped compile it.
[00:40:54.180]Everybody wrote it,
[00:40:56.070]wrote different stories about how it does matter.
[00:40:59.997]And there are values in there that don't apply.
[00:41:07.841]Then I went on to sort of start teaching
[00:41:10.560]about cultural competence of working with native clients
[00:41:15.060]and thinking about ethics and research as well.
[00:41:18.297]And I was doing a lot of CE workshops with psychologists
[00:41:22.080]around the country.
[00:41:23.640]Then I started teaching this to undergrads.
[00:41:26.850]I've taught that class for 14 semesters in a row.
[00:41:29.460]This is my first semester not teaching it, which is crazy.
[00:41:32.640]So apparently I have to talk about it here,
[00:41:34.320]'cause I can't not talk about it.
[00:41:36.540]And I've now moved to teaching faculty,
[00:41:43.800]teaching sixth graders.
[00:41:45.150]So I am again somehow covering the lifespan.
[00:41:51.960]So I wanna take a minute in thinking about stories,
[00:41:54.540]and I want you to watch this
[00:41:57.450]very short video and then I'm gonna
[00:42:00.150]ask a few people to share a story, what they see.
[00:42:08.364](bird chirping)
[00:42:18.900]All right. Who's gonna be the brave one.
[00:42:22.590]Yeah.
[00:42:23.935]Like a boy and his father walking.
[00:42:26.220]Yeah boy and his father walking. Tell me more.
[00:42:28.470]Why are they walking?
[00:42:31.765]I don't know.
[00:42:32.598]He might be holding like an ice cream cone.
[00:42:33.673]They might just be going for a walk in a park
[00:42:35.800]Okay. Just going for a walk in a park.
[00:42:39.600]Who else has a different story?
[00:42:44.220]Yeah.
[00:42:45.053]I see a boy with his grandfather
[00:42:47.010]walking, enjoying,
[00:42:50.700]one of those days where
[00:42:52.230]your parents drive at your grandparents' house,
[00:42:54.600]you hang out for the whole day.
[00:42:56.460]Your parents get some time off
[00:42:58.110]and you get to eat all the ice cream you want.
[00:43:01.740]Is there ice cream in this video?
[00:43:04.200]I have no idea. Some people say, yeah.
[00:43:06.450]I didn't...
[00:43:07.283]I've watched this quite a few times now,
[00:43:08.490]but I have not seen ice cream.
[00:43:11.640]So I asked you to do the thing
[00:43:15.799]then it just brought up, right.
[00:43:17.250]So now those who've shared the story
[00:43:19.140]like your dopamine is surging.
[00:43:21.870]But the other thing I want to point out here
[00:43:25.890]is that we can watch the same thing,
[00:43:28.290]experience the same thing and come away
[00:43:30.300]with a different story. Right?
[00:43:33.360]In this, I could talk about the bugs that are up here.
[00:43:38.880]Maybe I see this bench and I have sat on this bench
[00:43:42.630]and emotional connection comes up
[00:43:44.280]with something that I talked about
[00:43:45.930]with somebody on that bench.
[00:43:47.190]And my story becomes about the bench.
[00:43:49.830]It does not make my story about the bench,
[00:43:52.680]your story about the grandfather,
[00:43:54.570]your story about the father
[00:43:56.520]or the story about the bugs wrong.
[00:43:58.980]All of those stories can be happening at the same time.
[00:44:02.910]So it's not about necessarily a right or wrong,
[00:44:05.880]but it's are we taking time to take perspective?
[00:44:14.700]So as I mentioned, I teach about multicultural competence.
[00:44:17.430]And in teaching this,
[00:44:21.120]there are some sort of what we call
[00:44:24.240]like pillars of multicultural competence
[00:44:27.810]that have come about.
[00:44:28.950]And one is awareness. I actually think awareness is two.
[00:44:33.480]So I think the first one is awareness of yourself
[00:44:36.750]as a cultural being,
[00:44:38.310]because not everybody feels like they have a culture.
[00:44:41.700]Everybody has a culture.
[00:44:43.980]So the first part of awareness
[00:44:45.240]is recognizing yourself as a cultural being.
[00:44:47.700]And the second is recognizing other people
[00:44:50.310]as a cultural being.
[00:44:51.720]And recognizing that they probably have different values,
[00:44:55.950]different worldviews, all sorts of things
[00:44:58.620]that are different from yours.
[00:45:01.290]But the last part of awareness is recognizing those biases
[00:45:04.800]that you hold.
[00:45:06.750]Oh, you're taking a nap. You're not being productive.
[00:45:10.620]There's judgment in that, right?
[00:45:12.000]And there's judgment in that because that is something
[00:45:15.165]that's part of your worldview, right?
[00:45:17.790]But somebody else might just be tired
[00:45:19.350]or their worldview is that
[00:45:21.090]rest is where creativity comes from, right.
[00:45:23.520]So we interact in all these different ways
[00:45:25.620]and no way is right or wrong.
[00:45:27.570]We just have to allow other people to have other ways.
[00:45:32.280]The middle pillar is knowledge.
[00:45:34.350]So one the knowledge to know
[00:45:36.750]when you need to go look things up,
[00:45:38.430]because there's no way you're gonna have knowledge
[00:45:40.170]about all cultures in your head and accessible,
[00:45:43.530]but we do have access to so much information now.
[00:45:48.060]And then skills. How do I do things differently?
[00:45:51.510]How do I interact differently in a class
[00:45:54.000]when I know there are people who are introverts
[00:45:56.310]that don't wanna raise their hands
[00:45:57.570]or yell things out like I'm asking.
[00:45:59.640]And so I put up a way for students to type in anonymously
[00:46:04.110]to ask questions, right?
[00:46:05.550]I try to accommodate all of these things.
[00:46:08.370]Those are, those are competent skills.
[00:46:13.740]So I wanna talk a little bit,
[00:46:15.600]I talked about sort of this empathic perspective taking.
[00:46:19.200]Well to think about empathic perspective taking,
[00:46:21.480]we have to know what empathy is.
[00:46:24.150]And rather than me tell you about it,
[00:46:26.550]I'll let Brené Brown and her team
[00:46:28.590]who've developed this short, tell you about it.
[00:46:31.740]So what is empathy
[00:46:33.360]and why is it very different than sympathy?
[00:46:36.900]Empathy fuels connection, sympathy drives disconnection.
[00:46:42.480]Empathy it's very interesting.
[00:46:44.130]Theresa Wiseman is a nursing scholar
[00:46:46.980]who studied professions,
[00:46:49.440]very diverse professions where empathy is relevant
[00:46:51.570]and came up with four qualities of empathy.
[00:46:53.880]Perspective taking,
[00:46:55.800]the ability to take the perspective of another person
[00:46:58.020]or recognize their perspective is their truth.
[00:47:00.450]Staying out of judgment,
[00:47:01.980]not easy when you enjoy it as much as most of us do.
[00:47:04.476](audience laughing)
[00:47:06.390]Recognizing emotion in other people,
[00:47:08.070]and then communicating that.
[00:47:10.140]Empathy is feeling with people.
[00:47:13.980]And to me,
[00:47:14.813]I always think of empathy as this kind of
[00:47:16.470]sacred space when someone's kind of in a deep hole
[00:47:20.940]and they shout out from the bottom and they say,
[00:47:22.710]Hey, I'm stuck, It's dark, I'm overwhelmed.
[00:47:26.160]And then we look and we say, hey and climb down.
[00:47:30.660]I know what it's like down here. And you're not alone.
[00:47:34.350]Sympathy is, it's bad.
[00:47:39.185](audience laughing)
[00:47:41.610]No, you want a sandwich.
[00:47:44.105](audience laughing)
[00:47:46.590]Empathy is a choice.
[00:47:47.910]And it's a vulnerable choice
[00:47:49.200]because in order to connect with you,
[00:47:51.360]I have to connect with something in myself
[00:47:54.060]that knows that feeling.
[00:47:56.520]Rarely, if ever does an empathic response
[00:47:59.460]begin with, at least.
[00:48:01.933](audience laughing)
[00:48:03.360]I had a yeah.
[00:48:05.130]And we do it all the time because you know what?
[00:48:07.530]Someone just shared something with us
[00:48:09.300]that's incredibly painful
[00:48:11.190]and we're trying to silver lining it.
[00:48:13.170]I don't think that's a verb, but I'm using it as one.
[00:48:16.710]We're trying to put the silver lining around it.
[00:48:18.360]So I had a miscarriage, oh, at least, you can get pregnant.
[00:48:23.280]I think my marriage is falling apart.
[00:48:25.410]At least you have a marriage.
[00:48:27.458](audience laughing)
[00:48:31.320]John's getting kicked out of school.
[00:48:33.270]At least Sarah is an A student.
[00:48:35.460]But one of the things we do sometimes in the face of
[00:48:39.300]very difficult conversations
[00:48:42.390]is we try to make things better.
[00:48:44.550]If I share something with you, that's very difficult.
[00:48:46.920]I'd rather you say, I don't even know what to say right now.
[00:48:50.550]I'm just so glad you told me.
[00:48:53.520]Because the truth is rarely can a response
[00:48:56.730]make something better.
[00:48:58.200]What makes something better is connection?
[00:49:05.850]So one thing that sort of has shaped
[00:49:10.050]out of my time at Utah state is trying to make space
[00:49:16.470]and understanding of native students.
[00:49:19.770]So we have a grant from Howard Hughes Medical Institute,
[00:49:23.550]their inclusive excellence area.
[00:49:26.567]And in the grant they wanted to know how
[00:49:27.630]you were gonna make institutional change.
[00:49:32.490]They don't wanna know how you're gonna change
[00:49:34.170]the native student
[00:49:37.680]for college.
[00:49:39.150]How are you gonna change the universities
[00:49:41.040]so that they can be their whole selves there.
[00:49:46.260]So one of the first things that I did
[00:49:50.340]was think about the training that I was doing
[00:49:52.920]around the country.
[00:49:53.753]I'm doing it at medical units.
[00:49:58.830]I'm doing these trainings all over and I thought,
[00:50:03.090]I see a lot of microaggressions.
[00:50:06.330]I see a lot of ways of not allowing students
[00:50:10.140]to bring their culture in from professors.
[00:50:16.200]And sorry to like ruin the secret for all your students,
[00:50:21.390]K through 12 students are teaching cultural competence
[00:50:24.360]like to their student teachers, right.
[00:50:27.690]So as people are learning to be teachers
[00:50:29.910]also turns out they learn about learning science
[00:50:33.750]and like how people learn well.
[00:50:37.440]College professors get none of that.
[00:50:39.780]They've had exactly zero training
[00:50:41.640]and they say go teach a class titled this.
[00:50:46.650]So one of the things that I've done
[00:50:48.300]is develop this training, the teach training.
[00:50:51.270]Centering culture at Utah state,
[00:50:54.480]that we've had people take it from elsewhere.
[00:50:56.580]We've put it on the teachable platform
[00:50:59.730]'cause we had it on canvas,
[00:51:00.990]but then it wasn't accessible to everybody.
[00:51:03.090]We've taught people from the federal government, the USDA,
[00:51:07.530]all sorts of researchers in working with native students.
[00:51:14.100]Over 300 faculty and grad student mentors
[00:51:18.900]have taken the training at Utah state alone.
[00:51:22.950]And what we do is have this,
[00:51:26.730]there's a lot of stuff online
[00:51:27.840]and you get to learn most of it.
[00:51:29.190]It's five hours like five, one hour weeks,
[00:51:33.540]except the last week you have to come together
[00:51:38.640]to a group session and we engage in perspective taking.
[00:51:43.860]We engage in trying to see a situation
[00:51:47.040]from many different people's points of view.
[00:51:51.030]We don't problem solve.
[00:51:52.770]We work for understanding first
[00:51:55.800]and it's hard for people to do,
[00:51:59.310]but I think it's really meaningful overall
[00:52:02.490]because it gives people a moment
[00:52:04.260]to sort of pause when things do come up later.
[00:52:08.850]As I mentioned, we have been collaboratively
[00:52:11.850]redesigning cross-cultural field experiences,
[00:52:14.430]and it's moved long, far beyond sort of field experiences,
[00:52:18.780]but we've been redesigning how to,
[00:52:23.070]we've really been engaging
[00:52:23.970]in a culturally disruptive approach to pedagogy.
[00:52:27.600]And there's all these things we've been doing this.
[00:52:30.090]We've been working with these teachers in sixth grade for
[00:52:33.180]four years now. This is the start of the fifth.
[00:52:37.020]And there's all this talk right now
[00:52:39.540]about critical race theory.
[00:52:41.220]And we can't have this and we can't study it.
[00:52:43.200]And first off, nobody even knows
[00:52:44.430]what critical race theory is. It's a legal theory.
[00:52:49.110]It's not what's being applied in kindergarten.
[00:52:52.110]I tell you what, but these are the things
[00:52:54.990]that are being put out there, right? Incomplete stories.
[00:52:58.470]What we have found by having sixth graders engage
[00:53:02.430]with indigenous ways of knowing throughout the school year
[00:53:05.820]is they show more empathy as the year goes on.
[00:53:09.570]Right after they go on this river trip,
[00:53:12.930]to the San Juan river that borders Navajo nation,
[00:53:15.510]they show more empathy.
[00:53:17.730]When they learn about indigenous ways
[00:53:21.360]of knowing with plants, they show more empathy.
[00:53:27.270]And we've also found that
[00:53:29.100]when they learn about other cultures,
[00:53:33.300]their connection to their own culture increases.
[00:53:38.130]So the arguments happening about critical race theory
[00:53:40.920]are sort of like, you're gonna make kids feel bad
[00:53:43.650]and they're gonna wanna reject being white,
[00:53:46.170]'cause really that's what the focus is.
[00:53:48.180]And that's not what we're finding.
[00:53:49.710]And these classrooms are,
[00:53:52.200]80% white kids and they are feeling more connected
[00:53:55.890]to who they are and they can define their culture.
[00:54:01.680]And they're hearing stories and it's through these stories
[00:54:07.290]that we can heal.
[00:54:09.390]This is used in trauma therapy.
[00:54:12.360]This is used in cognitive processing therapy.
[00:54:16.530]That's done a lot at VAs.
[00:54:18.780]You tell the story of your trauma that you're avoiding,
[00:54:23.040]that really brings up anxiety, right?
[00:54:25.830]You brings up all these things.
[00:54:27.180]You tell this story more and more
[00:54:28.950]and it has less power over you.
[00:54:33.210]But you also engage in meaning making
[00:54:35.460]and telling that story.
[00:54:37.500]Narrative therapies have been used with indigenous people
[00:54:42.627]for a long time talking circles, right?
[00:54:46.020]What you're seeing here,
[00:54:47.220]this storytelling that happens that we pause and we listen
[00:54:50.670]to each other creates understanding.
[00:54:54.450]It creates belonging and it creates growth.
[00:54:58.590]And so as a psychologist, I'm often,
[00:55:01.860]psychology itself is really somewhat focused,
[00:55:04.980]not social psychology,
[00:55:06.030]but the rest of it is focused on an individual.
[00:55:09.240]And as I mentioned, that doesn't fit super well with me,
[00:55:13.500]but I can take these same things
[00:55:16.530]and see how we can heal communities.
[00:55:30.517]"So when we deny our stories, they come to define us.
[00:55:37.200]But when we own our stories,
[00:55:39.600]we get to write a brave new ending."
[00:55:44.070]So I would like to revisit this girl starting school,
[00:55:49.020]who doesn't have to wear these labels put on for her.
[00:56:08.430]Lets say it's time for school.
[00:56:12.300]Can I share a song with you?
[00:56:13.680]I, that I can I practice the song
[00:56:15.810]I wanna share today in class? Okay.
[00:56:24.750]Sorry.
[00:56:27.681]You have to take it farther away for the people on Zoom.
[00:56:33.030]So when I get to go to school and I get to share my culture,
[00:56:39.660]it shifts who I am, my excitement to be there.
[00:56:42.930]So I'm gonna share that song with you now.
[00:56:48.389](singing in foreign language)
[00:57:54.240]Thank you.
[00:57:55.979](audience applauds)
[00:58:02.220]So I realize some people potentially like
[00:58:05.040]assumed this was an hour,
[00:58:06.270]which isn't exactly written anywhere,
[00:58:08.550]but I'd be glad to take questions.
[00:58:09.840]So I know that like if you have the hour blocked
[00:58:12.870]and you've got things to do
[00:58:13.860]or your two other jobs to go to
[00:58:16.350]no shame in getting up and leaving,
[00:58:18.990]but I would be glad to take questions too.
[00:58:23.670]I do have a question. Okay.
[00:58:25.020]Thank you.
[00:58:26.310]You were talking about the ethical code used
[00:58:29.700]by psychologists that purported to be universal,
[00:58:32.640]but really was not universal.
[00:58:34.920]Yes. That there were many things
[00:58:36.240]that didn't apply to all cultures.
[00:58:38.790]Could you talk a little bit about some examples of that?
[00:58:40.900]Cause that's really interesting.
[00:58:42.900]Yeah.
[00:58:44.370]So there are things in the ethical code about sort of
[00:58:47.610]how you can pay.
[00:58:49.440]And that use, that bartering is not acceptable.
[00:58:58.020]So you then are only giving therapy
[00:59:01.470]to people who have money, right?
[00:59:03.510]And so maybe I need my yard done,
[00:59:06.600]sorry to the student who's doing my yard right now.
[00:59:11.670]I have a skill. They have a skill.
[00:59:13.500]We can exchange these skills, right?
[00:59:16.710]But that isn't really allowable in the way
[00:59:19.170]that the ethics code is written.
[00:59:22.710]The other part that's not allowed
[00:59:24.660]or not considered is sort of thinking about
[00:59:32.220]in the therapeutic realm, just the individual, right?
[00:59:35.880]I need an informed consent from that person.
[00:59:40.110]I signed documents that say that I,
[00:59:43.890]HIPAA documents.
[00:59:45.030]So this HIPAA is not totally from psychologists,
[00:59:47.640]but this idea that I don't sort of, that I act like,
[00:59:53.580]I don't know you if we run into each other in public,
[00:59:57.240]that's not gonna happen in a tribal community.
[01:00:00.300]Everybody knows that you're the therapist,
[01:00:02.940]but also why are we stigmatizing
[01:00:04.800]people going to therapy? Right.
[01:00:08.340]I have come across people that I,
[01:00:10.560]couples that I saw in San Diego, right.
[01:00:12.210]And then they're like, oh my gosh, like,
[01:00:13.890]this is our therapist. This is her.
[01:00:15.480]She told us this thing, right.
[01:00:17.130]And people are proud of this.
[01:00:18.480]And we sort of present these things in a way that people
[01:00:22.170]should feel shame or something,
[01:00:25.320]but in the conceptualization of sort of therapy,
[01:00:28.860]we're not considering the context
[01:00:32.010]of which people are coming from, right.
[01:00:34.020]So I can make some changes.
[01:00:36.240]But also like if my family knows
[01:00:38.520]some changes I'm trying to make,
[01:00:39.960]or if we could try something differently
[01:00:41.520]together as a group,
[01:00:43.200]A we're more likely to do it because we all know the plan,
[01:00:47.280]but B it changes how we are interacting.
[01:00:50.670]We are not individuals in this world.
[01:00:53.250]We function within systems.
[01:00:57.180]So those are two things.
[01:00:58.770]And I've yelled about it enough that APA finally said,
[01:01:03.540]fine, come on. We're rewriting the ethics code.
[01:01:06.660]So instead of yelling at us,
[01:01:08.400]just come and be a part of this.
[01:01:09.750]So I'm one of 11 people
[01:01:12.390]working on rewriting that code right now.
[01:01:14.460]But I think it's gonna be like a 10 year process.
[01:01:16.470]And I don't know, I feel like we're four years in,
[01:01:18.510]but maybe we're only three.
[01:01:20.700]So yeah.
[01:01:21.900]So we're working on getting
[01:01:23.370]some more cultural context in there.
[01:01:27.960]Other questions, comments, stories anybody wants to share.
[01:01:44.940]Yeah.
[01:01:45.773]So I guess I was wondering if you think
[01:01:48.360]that we talked a little bit about the lawsuit
[01:01:50.490]at the beginning.
[01:01:51.720]Do you think that there is ever a way
[01:01:54.510]for like an external entity
[01:01:56.370]to be able to tell an objective story
[01:02:00.150]of someone else's experience? Like, I don't know.
[01:02:04.590]I study journalism. So like I grapple with that a lot.
[01:02:07.980]Like, is it ethical to be telling these stories
[01:02:10.080]that are not ours?
[01:02:12.660]Yeah.
[01:02:14.040]I read stories in the news in a different way now too.
[01:02:17.850]Right. So I have this thought of like, yeah,
[01:02:19.920]we actually don't know.
[01:02:21.090]I also know from working in the legal system,
[01:02:23.820]that the things that make it as like evidence
[01:02:26.760]or are brought into trial,
[01:02:29.790]it's just not the whole story in any way, right.
[01:02:32.160]So the decisions that people are making on,
[01:02:36.120]sort of criminal things like the,
[01:02:39.240]'cause I've worked behind the scenes,
[01:02:40.590]you do not know the whole story in that courtroom.
[01:02:43.980]And the whole story will never be brought
[01:02:45.840]into that courtroom as well.
[01:02:47.457]And so, yeah, I've definitely,
[01:02:49.410]I don't have a good answer for you.
[01:02:52.110]I think there are ways to sort of
[01:02:53.760]think about those other perspectives though,
[01:02:55.860]while you're telling that story. Yeah.
[01:02:59.220]Thank you. Yeah.
[01:03:03.870]Cause also I read a lot of news, so.
[01:03:07.170]Thank you.
[01:03:09.480]Hi, I was wondering,
[01:03:13.440]I work with like high school students.
[01:03:15.660]And I was wondering how,
[01:03:18.930]I guess maybe I should provide some context,
[01:03:20.400]but like I coach them in debate
[01:03:22.920]and there's like maybe 25 of them.
[01:03:25.260]And I was wondering how I can better create an environment
[01:03:29.190]where students feel comfortable telling stories
[01:03:33.390]or where they feel more comfortable listening to others.
[01:03:37.620]And kind of just like in that whole realm of like,
[01:03:39.540]how can I take the concepts that you are focusing on
[01:03:44.640]and incorporate them on like a high school level?
[01:03:48.060]Yeah. Embody them. Yeah.
[01:03:50.430]Show them, right. Debate can look like this other thing.
[01:03:54.300]They don't know that.
[01:03:55.133]And so they're just doing
[01:03:56.490]the thing they've always seen, right.
[01:03:59.280]I don't know how many people get up
[01:04:00.570]and sing in their academic talks, right.
[01:04:02.340]But like we can do things differently.
[01:04:05.010]You just have to like be creative and try it out.
[01:04:08.550]But yeah, like kids in high school,
[01:04:10.830]there's a very like formulaic thing to debate.
[01:04:13.290]And so that's what they're following.
[01:04:15.210]So showing the difference, I think.
[01:04:20.970]Hi, so this is just me wondering
[01:04:23.400]a little bit more about like you as a person.
[01:04:26.730]Your tattoos are really cool.
[01:04:28.830]And I was just wondering if you'd be willing to share
[01:04:30.960]like, just more about your tattoos
[01:04:33.540]'cause I think they're really beautiful.
[01:04:35.040]I was like, oh, I'm finally in the play
[01:04:36.660]I get at, this comes up a lot and I'm like.
[01:04:39.570]I get them all in Nebraska.
[01:04:41.190]And everybody's like.
[01:04:42.326](Melissa groaning)
[01:04:43.159]But you guys, I get them all in Nebraska,
[01:04:44.910]like here in Lincoln at Iron Brush, Nate Deal.
[01:04:49.002](audience laughing)
[01:04:49.835]But yeah, I, yes. I love cats.
[01:04:54.000]This is my cat Wednesday.
[01:04:55.290]She was here when we were undergrads,
[01:05:00.090]and passed away last April so she was over 20.
[01:05:04.800]But yeah, this,
[01:05:06.480]I have cultural stories also tattooed on me.
[01:05:10.680]And tattoos and Cherokee people were not,
[01:05:16.290]it happened all the time.
[01:05:17.700]but yeah, I, this story you can look up,
[01:05:21.660]I'll just tell you to look up the story of
[01:05:24.720]how the be got its stinger or why the bee has a stinger.
[01:05:29.940]Cherokee story about that.
[01:05:33.000]It's definitely about setting boundaries
[01:05:34.290]and taking care of yourself. So I have it there.
[01:05:36.270]So I remember this every day.
[01:05:42.570]Anybody else?
[01:05:47.610]Hi. Yeah. Oh, sorry.
[01:05:49.380]Yeah, I think as I was wondering,
[01:05:50.670]you could tell us more of about the project
[01:05:54.210]you were doing with the kids.
[01:05:56.190]Its great like, because it was like interesting
[01:05:59.100]how they're also like decolonizing themselves
[01:06:02.490]from a very young age.
[01:06:04.260]Like actually getting in contact with people that sometimes
[01:06:09.810]we have like that imaginary vision of the other,
[01:06:13.770]what I'm not.
[01:06:15.030]So I don't know if you can tell me like a little bit more
[01:06:18.120]about the experience.
[01:06:18.990]Like if a student has told you something about that,
[01:06:24.118]or how you feel also like working with kids.
[01:06:26.850]And yeah, a little bit more about that.
[01:06:28.200]Yeah. So I do a lot of quantitative analysis.
[01:06:31.590]Carl Gaban here took four classes
[01:06:33.480]in stats from him, love stats. I've taken 14 stats classes.
[01:06:37.290]Doing a ton of qualitative work now.
[01:06:39.120]So learned that all since I have left college.
[01:06:44.910]But yeah, I think students recognizing
[01:06:47.130]that they have a culture,
[01:06:48.900]we make them sort of dig into that a little bit,
[01:06:52.170]but we've used like what is
[01:06:53.940]a culturally disruptive approach?
[01:06:55.470]So there's some types of pedagogy,
[01:06:56.850]there's culturally sustaining, culturally relevant.
[01:07:00.660]But when you are teaching to
[01:07:02.880]a majority white classroom, you're actually disrupting.
[01:07:06.210]And so we've really taken a culturally disruptive approach.
[01:07:09.360]So it's not the status quo.
[01:07:11.820]And we brought in tribal elders.
[01:07:14.640]We have brought in sort of different ways
[01:07:17.220]of knowing and thinking.
[01:07:18.510]We bring in a bunch of traditional plants that grow in Utah.
[01:07:24.660]So like Sage brush and then we have them smell it, right?
[01:07:28.680]Like this, I have an emotional reaction to this smell.
[01:07:33.120]And we have them smell it
[01:07:33.990]and we have them experience it with all their senses.
[01:07:36.030]And so then we tell 'em to taste it, and they're like, what?
[01:07:39.729]And at the end of the year they remember like, oh yeah,
[01:07:41.850]you came in here and we tasted those plants.
[01:07:44.340]That was so funny.
[01:07:46.530]But just engaging them in different ways
[01:07:48.690]and thinking about things differently.
[01:07:50.880]And the thing that's happened over these years
[01:07:54.090]that we've worked with the teachers is initially
[01:07:57.300]they do this river trip at the beginning of the year
[01:08:01.170]and then COVID hit
[01:08:02.010]and they didn't get to go that year until the end.
[01:08:04.080]And so we had to figure out ways to really infuse
[01:08:08.940]this centering culture throughout the entire curriculum.
[01:08:12.330]And the teachers we work with Jen Jenkins and Stu Bagley
[01:08:16.410]are amazing and have, are really interested in it.
[01:08:21.300]And so we collect data and we see what works
[01:08:24.000]and what isn't working and make adjustments.
[01:08:25.860]And yeah, it's really something and it's not,
[01:08:29.250]they're both white.
[01:08:30.300]And so it is definitely disruptive to them
[01:08:32.550]and they have engaged with it,
[01:08:34.290]the discomfort in that beautifully.
[01:08:47.070]Is it just in Utah that you do that program
[01:08:49.320]or do you do it in other places too?
[01:08:51.510]The teach training that I do, it's focused on students.
[01:08:55.080]We have one now that's like clinically focused.
[01:08:57.360]So thinking about like medical professions.
[01:09:00.300]Those are both online and so people can take those
[01:09:02.910]and then we do the group sessions over Zoom.
[01:09:06.480]But the stuff we're doing with kids,
[01:09:07.650]we're, our grant just ended.
[01:09:10.200]So anybody who's had this,
[01:09:11.700]like we had our end of grant report due yesterday.
[01:09:16.350]And so we are just starting to get that.
[01:09:18.240]So we'll get those publications out to,
[01:09:20.226]to make some of that knowledge known
[01:09:22.290]but we're trying to think about ways to do this
[01:09:28.170]with like how,
[01:09:30.990]what are ways teachers are gonna access this.
[01:09:33.030]Because journal articles and the waves that academics write,
[01:09:38.400]only a few people can read that, right.
[01:09:40.140]It's behind paywalls and all these things.
[01:09:42.330]So we're trying to figure out other ways to get
[01:09:43.770]that information out that's accessible to people.
[01:09:49.230]And not written in such a boring way.
[01:09:55.848]Okay.
[01:09:56.681]I think we have time for one more question, Trevor.
[01:10:02.730]Have you found ways to incorporate
[01:10:05.340]narrative into your own scholarship
[01:10:07.500]into any of your research or-- Oh yeah.
[01:10:09.330]What's your opinion on that? Oh yeah.
[01:10:10.800]I've totally switched up sort of how we write.
[01:10:15.480]So yes, I am consistently pushing,
[01:10:18.780]I don't wanna read another boring journal article.
[01:10:22.949]And so we are consistently trying
[01:10:25.200]to shift how we're writing.
[01:10:26.820]And we get push back at times and people are like,
[01:10:28.770]this isn't I don't know what to do with this.
[01:10:32.550]One was a call for like a decolonizing something, something.
[01:10:39.390]And then we gave them something
[01:10:40.830]and they were like, well,
[01:10:41.688]I don't, we don't know what to do with this.
[01:10:42.570]And I'm like, yeah, you asked for decolonize
[01:10:45.120]that's what we gave you.
[01:10:46.440]And then they worked with us really, really well on it.
[01:10:48.480]But yeah, I am starting to push that more and more.
[01:10:51.780]And who knew I was gonna like swing back around
[01:10:53.855]to this native lit class
[01:10:56.310]that I took here that I just took to,
[01:10:58.770]meet a requirement, but it all comes back so.
[01:11:04.860]Thank you. What a beautiful way to end.
[01:11:07.020]Thank you so much, Melissa.
[01:11:08.280]And thank you everyone for coming. Cynthia.
[01:11:23.103]Thank you very much.
[01:11:25.135]So (speaking foreign language)
[01:11:27.123]that is thank you and Cherokee.
[01:11:31.200]To Melissa for sharing with us.
[01:11:35.220]In American indigenous culture
[01:11:37.890]we honor people who have accomplishments
[01:11:41.520]that are good for the people.
[01:11:44.490]And as Ruben Snape of the Winnebago tribe of Nebraska said
[01:11:49.110]he since passed away some several years ago.
[01:11:51.510]But what he said was that
[01:11:53.550]when people do good deeds, we honor them in a public way.
[01:11:59.130]We stand them up before the community
[01:12:01.860]and we give them gifts and we extol their virtues.
[01:12:06.840]And this way they will be motivated
[01:12:08.370]to do more and the community will follow their lead.
[01:12:13.680]It leaves people with a connection.
[01:12:17.880]Melissa talked about that connection earlier today,
[01:12:20.490]and it's something that repeats itself
[01:12:22.470]within American indigenous culture.
[01:12:25.440]So we wish to honor Melissa today with a blanket
[01:12:28.470]and we hope that she will continue to succeed
[01:12:31.770]in all of her endeavors.
[01:12:37.500]Gonna put this over your arm
[01:12:39.167]or you can bring it over your shoulders.
[01:12:40.200]Shoulders.
[01:12:41.666]Okey dokey
[01:12:43.387]You get it.
[01:12:47.052]Thank you.
[01:12:47.885](audience applauds)
[01:12:53.730]I have a blanket up in my office
[01:12:57.090]and it's the one Cynthia gave me
[01:12:58.410]when I graduated with my bachelor's degree.
[01:13:01.980]And it's one of the only blankets I've ever gotten.
[01:13:05.640]So thank you. I get, I have two from you now.
[01:13:09.420]Thank you all.
[01:13:10.792](audience applauds)

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Stories are Medicine: Indigenous Sovereignty, Connection, and Healing

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