`So I Can Be Like a Whiteman': The Cultural Psychology of Space and Place in American Indian Mental Health

Abstract

Careful analysis of a single ethnographic interview demonstrates that profound cultural divergences in Western professional and American Indian therapeutic traditions may well emanate from easily overlooked sources of ethnopsychological orientation and intelligibility, namely distinctive cultural psychologies of space and place. Interview responses from a middle-aged Native American Traditionalist on the Fort Belknap Indian reservation revealed that robust `mental health' was seen to result from participation in indigenous ritual spaces enacted or performed in designated sacred places on or near the reservation. In contrast, this respondent observed that consultation by community members with `White psychiatrists' in the local Indian Health Service clinic was an open invitation to `brainwash me forever so I can be like a Whiteman'. For those American Indians who share the respondent's cultural standpoint, reservation-based mental health clinics, despite their intentional designation as therapeutic spaces, may be seen to function as sites of colonial incursion and Native resistance in cultural—and especially ethnopsychological—terms. This article explores the implications of this distinctive cultural psychology of space and place with regard to the interdisciplinary investigation of therapeutic landscapes and the promise of `culturally competent' mental health services.