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T ransforming Trauma Episode 037: NARM and Healing Complex Trauma within Native Communities with Trilby Kerrigan On this episode of Transforming Trauma, our host Sarah Buino has an engaging conversation with Trilby Kerrigan, a NARM-trained Behavioral Health Therapist at a Tribal health clinic in Northern California. Trilby is a member of the Karuk Tribe of California and is deeply committed to supporting community reconnection through education and treatment of complex trauma. Throughout the...

Telling the truth about philanthropy is the first step to transforming it for generations to come. What would it mean to “decolonize” philanthropy? Language matters. As Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang have powerfully argued, “ Decolonization is not a metaphor ,” and shouldn’t be used to describe anything but fundamentally dismantling white supremacy. That means centering oppressed perspectives, supporting the rematriation of land, redistributing resources, shifting power and decision making, and...

The American Rescue Plan was enacted by Congress Wednesday and will be sent today to President Joe Biden to sign into law. The U.S Senate Committee on Indian Affairs pegged the total spending for tribes at $31 billion. Rep. Deb Haaland, D-New Mexico, tweeted that she would be voting for the measure to “get urgent relief to families in New Mexico and across the country.” This may end up being Haaland’s last vote as a member of Congress if she is confirmed soon as Interior Secretary. She is a...

Body, Mind, and Spirit. An indivisible combination that is the cornerstone for holistic wellness for Native Americans. It is also the slogan that appears beneath the medicine wheel on the sign for the San Diego American Indian Health Center . “Da'anzho,” said Ruben Leyva, standing at the corner in Bankers Hill where the clinic is located. “That means ‘hello’ in the Apache language. I am a Chiricahua Chíhénde Apache. I stand here honored and humbled to speak to you on Kumeyaay land.” In order...

“ Our fingerprints don't fade from the lives we touch.” - Judy Blume Hope, healing & help for trauma, abuse & mental health. The latest edition of the Surviving Spirit Newsletter is posted at the website - http://newsletters.survivingspirit.com/index.php & here's the PDF - http://newsletters.survivingspirit.com/pdfs/2021-02-The_Surviving_Spirit_Newsletter_February_2021.pdf “ Our brains developed along with music and singing as a survival mechanism.” - Tania De Jong To sign up for...

For many, America’s history of brutal experimentation on people of color is perhaps best summed up by the Tuskegee Experiment , in which doctors let African-American men suffer from syphilis over a period of 40 years. But another medical outrage is less well-known. Jane Lawrence documents the forced sterilization of thousands of Native American women by the Indian Health Service in the 1960s and 1970s—procedures thought to have been performed on one out of every four Native American women at...

January has seen major progress toward protecting the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge , thanks to the organizing power of three distinct communities—Indigenous activists, TikTok creators, and the makers of an unfinished documentary film—that came together toward a common goal. “To be honest, it’s not easy going into places, talking to people that will never understand how spiritually and culturally connected we are to our land, to our water, and to our animals,” says Bernadette Demientieff,...

As part of his racial and equality initiative, President Joe Biden on Monday signed a Presidential Memorandum that reaffirms tribal sovereignty through tribal consultation. Speaking in more general terms about the racial divide that exists in the country, Biden said the nation faces deep racial inequities in America. “In my campaign for President, I made it very clear that the moment had arrived as a nation where we face deep racial inequities in America and system — systemic racism that has...

We were really excited to stumble on the Towards Braiding project. The project looks at the troubled terrain of non-Indigenous people or organizations trying to develop relationships with Indigenous people. Questions for Non-Indigenous Organizations They have a worksheet for non-Indigenous organizations that includes reflections on a series of questions: What do you expect the Indigenous perspective to do for you? What kind of learning are you willing to do? What are the hidden costs and...

Organizational Change Process “There is no formula for how to align an organization’s commitment to racial justice with its policies, practices, culture, and ethos. Doing this work organizationally is also about building internal will. … It is about taking risks in word and deed. It is about working with integrity and being accountable to people and communities most impacted by structural racism” ( Operationalizing Racial Justice in Non-Profit Organizations ). Internal operations need to be...

The Dawes Act, while not a household name, was perhaps the single most devastating government policy of them all. Also known as the General Allotment Act of 1887, the Dawes Act resulted in the loss of 90 million acres (36 million hectares) of Native lands from 1887 to 1934 — the equivalent of two-thirds of all tribal landholdings at the time. Mark Hirsch is a historian at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C. He explains that many...

"In my campaign for president, I made it very clear that the moment had arrived as a nation, as we face deep racial inequities in America and systemic racism that has plagued our nation for far, far too long. I said that over the course of the past year that the blinders had been taken off the nation, the American people. What many Americans didn't see or had simply refused to see couldn't be ignored any longer." Today, President Biden spoke to these issues in straightforward language before...