by Fred Fisher
I came to the National Native Children’s Trauma Center (NNCTC) two years ago with the goal of contributing to the Center’s efforts at preventing trauma in Tribal communities. The approach I brought to the NNCTC is one that I developed working with state agencies and nonprofits in Montana and then during my 15 years at Casey Family Programs, working nationally at the intersection of Tribal human services and community development.
In my early work in Montana, attempting to coordinate the delivery of prevention services across systems ranging from maternal and child health to highway traffic safety, our team’s working definition of prevention was “creating conditions in communities that improve the safety, health, and well-being of children and families.” I joined Casey in 1996, honored to work for an organization whose mission is “to provide and improve — and ultimately prevent the need for — foster care.” But it was the last part of this mission—preventing the need for foster care—that formed the core of my work. As Casey’s first Community Development Director and later as a Casey Fellow at USDA Rural Development and the Center for Indian Country Development at the Federal Reserve in Minneapolis, I developed an appreciation of how social determinants of health routinely result in entanglement with the child welfare system. I also learned that trauma-informed principles are an important lens through which a community can reconstruct itself into a “Community of Hope” through a sustained focus on equity.
Upon leaving Casey and returning to my home state of Montana, I hoped to pass along some of what I had learned along the way to an organization that might be able to carry this work forward. I have had the opportunity to do this as a Tribal Community Development Consultant at the NNCTC. In that capacity, I am delighted today to introduce a set of resources that I hope will live on as I wind down my tenure with the NNCTC: a Native Nation Building resource hub that will be part of the NNCTC’s website for years to come.
This collection of resources is the product of two years of collaboration between the NNCTC, the Native Nations Institute, and Casey Family Programs. Our goal was to develop a multi-faceted collection of resources that would not merely deepen the understanding of the insecurities that so many American Indian and Alaska Native children and families experience daily, but that would also point the way toward sustainable solutions. These solutions are rooted in Tribal sovereignty, self-determination, and effective governance, and they apply to all aspects of child, family, and community well-being. Rather than responses to trauma that occur after the fact or in siloed systems that focus on imposing mandates or culturally inappropriate interventions on Native families, the solutions I want to celebrate represent upstream approaches that are derived from the strengths inherent in Tribal cultures and that work across systems to create pathways to success and opportunity.
I encourage you to read through all of the articles on the different sub-pages of the resource hub, but I want to draw your attention to a few personal highlights that illustrate some of what we hope to achieve with this collection.
On the “General Connections” page, where our goal was to lay out some basic concepts and guiding principles for the overall collection, Stephen Cornell and Joseph Kalt’s “Two Approaches to the Development of Native Nations: One Works, the Other Doesn't” is a must-read. This article provides an introduction to the concept and principles of Nation Building with detailed examples of how diverse tribes have found sustainable success using this approach. Another important introductory piece, “The Context and Meaning of Family Strengthening in Indian Country” by Amy Beesaw, Joseph Kalt, and other collaborators, shows that sustained progress in improving outcomes for Native children and their families is possible when decision-making concerning families and children are Native-driven, sanctioned by Tribal leaders, and culturally responsive.
I would also like to highlight the collection of articles that focus on “The Role of Culture.” Culture influences all aspects of life in Tribal Nations, of course, and it does so in limitless ways: through language, tradition, spirituality, a shared world view, and through the many large and small interactions that give meaning to community life and the experiences of children and families. Culture should, accordingly, be a central component of effective Nation Building. Among the culture-focused articles in the collection, one of my favorites is the Native Nations Institute’s profile of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy’s success at engaging the entire community in its initiative to improve outcomes for their youth through the restoration of traditional Mohawk rites of passage, practices, and teachings with the goal of strengthening their cultural knowledge, self-confidence, and leadership skills. Attention to Tribal cultures isn’t limited to one page of the collection, however. Across topic areas, articles provide examples of how Tribal Nations have incorporated culture into specific programs and policies.
In the section of the collection that focuses on Housing, we make the point that housing security is associated with improved well-being. The case study from the Native Nations Institute on the Tsigo bugeh Village Ohkay Development by the Ohkay Owingeh Housing Authority illustrates how cultural responsiveness can be intentionally embedded into the design of housing. Tsigo bugeh Village, conceived of as “traditional living with a modern touch,” answered the Tribe’s urgent housing demands with 40 units for single and multi-generational living in a modern design that echoes millennia of traditional Pueblo living.
In addressing the subject of Health, we wanted to show that a focus on social determinants of health can yield more benefits than an exclusive focus on the health care delivery system. I would draw your attention to the article by O’Keefe, Cwik, and others called “Increasing Culturally Responsive Care and Mental Health Equity with Indigenous Community Mental Health Workers,” which shows one way that Tribes can exercise their sovereignty and self-governance to develop sustainable solutions to the unmet physical, dental, and mental health needs of children and families.
We hope that this collection of resources will be useful to Tribal leaders, administrators, and agency staff. We also hope that it might resonate with public policy makers, instructors, students, and anyone else who might be looking for new ways of understanding and redefining the root causes of trauma, loss, child maltreatment, food insecurity, housing insecurity, and other issues that too many communities today struggle to remedy. Ultimately, my hope is that policymakers and leaders across Indian Country and the U.S. will embrace trauma-informed principles that respond to questions such as: “What can we do to eliminate the conditions in the community that commonly result in trauma?” and “What can we do to build and sustain resilience at the community level?” We have tried to locate and share the best currently available material on the most pressing topics for many Tribal communities, but we are also aware that there may be perspectives we have missed and resources that we have failed to include. We invite all readers to help us improve and expand upon this collection over time by providing NNCTC with feedback and suggestions.