Cultural identities, social memory, and collective meaning-making as healing for Indigenous youths
My team has the honor and privilege of working with the Urban Native Youth Association (UNYA), based in Vancouver, Canada, the native land of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples. Their mission centers around the collective psycho-social, physical, and emotional health of Indigenous youths through a powerful conglomerate of programming that (re)connect. Indigenous youths to their communities, land, and cultural practices. UNYA’s philosophy of care centers the significant impact of cultural identity, offering in many ways a counter approach to a tradition of individualism often seen in clinical and mental well-being in the Western canon. Thus, for my article, I looked into articles that focused on the importance of culture, identity, and history in the development and healing processes for Indigenous youths.
Initially, I had to sort through quite a few articles, as the first ones I encountered were not only problematic in their language and world-views, but they also failed to actually address how culture plays a role in healing. Lisa Wexler does a much better job in her article, “The Importance of Identity, History, and Culture in the Wellbeing of Indigenous Youth,” which is why I will focus on this text for the purposes of this essay.
Wexler recognizes the importance of culture on a child’s development, as it helps a child comprehend their positionality in the world and within their community. She denotes that a strong cultural identity is not only important for healthy and normal development, but that it is “a particularly important developmental task for Indigenous and other ethnic minority young people who experience discrimination, racism, and prejudice” (269). Indigenous youths are in the position of trying to establish a cultural identity in a spatial landscape of cognitive dissonance; on the one hand, the dominant colonial culture reiterates negative imagery (i.e. racist stereotypes of the “noble savage” and “drunk Indian”) (268). On the other hand, they encounter their traditional culture and the long-standing practices within their community working to maintain their history, present, and future.
As Indigenous young people negotiate these different (sometimes contradicting) notions of selfhood, they are engaged in a creative endeavor. They are constrained by ideas of the past and the present — those found in their traditional culture as well as those embedded in the dominant society. The outcomes of these processes — the development of a clear sense of self — can be fundamental in supporting healthy development. (Wexler, 269).
Wexler’s description of the wrestling Indigenous youths have to do with their identity as a creative endeavour, is a poignant and impactful statement. This highlights and uplifts the ways in which Indigenous youths encounter themselves in their environment and in their psyche. These children and adolescents are not only battling with the impact of colonial legacy in their communities (i.e. residential schools, the foster care and adoption systems, welfare, reservations and poverty, etc), but they may find themselves in spaces in which their families and communities cannot access the resources to heal from generational trauma. Wexler thus argues that the development of a collective/cultural memory is important, not only for the community, but for the individual: “the ways in which a people understand their collective, cultural history can have profound effects on an individual’s sense of identity” (270). She goes on to discuss Joane Nagel’s discussion of the Red Power Movement, and how a movement for civil rights, sovereignty, and identity strengthened the communities’ ethnic identity and empowered young Indigenous peoples.
“In this way, social memory functions as a historical interpretation that imbues individuals and communities with meaning and presents strategies for future collective action.* Collective/cultural memory helps individuals find their place in larger temporal and social contexts and situates them as actors in their community and in the world” (270).
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The concept of collective/cultural memory as cooperative healing and engagement in collective meaning-making is at the center of our imagination in regard to our design work. This article works to address how culture impacts the well-being of Indigenous youths, and through this lens, we can better understand the role and significance of collective memory and how to best incorporate it into our design for this community.
Sources:
Wexler, Lisa. “The Importance of Identity, History, and Culture in the Wellbeing of Indigenous Youth.” The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, Volume 2, Number 2, Spring 2009, pp. 267–276 (Article). Published by Johns Hopkins University Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/hcy.0.0055
“Commitment to Students and Student Learning.” Exploring the Standards of Practice for the Teaching Profession through Anishinaabe Art. Ontario College of Teachers. September 2017. https://www.oct.ca/-/media/PDF/Exploring%20Standards%20of%20Practice%20Anishinaabe%20Art/Exploring%20Standards%20of%20Practice%20ENG.pdf
