North American Indigenous Research Articles

A longitudinal examination of the measurement properties and predictive utility of the Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale among North American Indigenous adolescents.

We examined the longitudinal measurement properties and predictive utility of the Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale (CES-D) from early to late adolescence among a sample of North American Indigenous youths. Participants were 632 North American Indigenous adolescents (n = 632; 50.3% girls; M age at baseline = 11.11 years) participating in an 8-year, 8-wave longitudinal study. Via in-person interviews, participants completed the CES-D at Waves 1, 3, 5, and 7, and the major depressive disorder (MDD) module of the Diagnostic Interview Schedule for Children at Waves 1, 4, 6, and 8. Confirmatory factor analyses indicated that responses to the CES-D were similarly explained by 2-, 3-, and 4-factor models, as well as a 1-factor model with correlations between the error variances for the positively worded items. Longitudinal measurement equivalence analyses indicated full structural (i.e., factor structure), metric (i.e., factor loadings), and scalar (i.e., observed item intercepts) equivalence for each factor structure. Substantive analyses showed that the CES-D was significantly associated with MDD both concurrently and prospectively, although these effects were smaller than might be expected. Finally, the CES-D negative affect and somatic complaints subscales were the strongest and most consistent predictors of MDD. Among our sample of North American Indigenous youths, the measurement properties of the CES-D were stable from early to late adolescence. Moreover, somatic difficulties and depressed affect were the strongest predictors of MDD.

Decolonization and Resilience in North American Indigenous History

Decolonization and Resilience in North American Indigenous History Thomas Peace The Indian Great Awakening: Religion and the shaping of Native cultures in early America. By Linford D. Fisher. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. The Memory of All Ancient Customs: Native American diplomacy in the colonial Hudson Valley. By Tom Arne Midtrød. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2012. Long Knives and the Longhouse: Anglo-Iroquois politics and the expansion of colonial Virginia. By Matthew L. Rhoades. Madison, New Jersey: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2011. An Infinity of Nations: How the Native New World shaped early North America. By Michael Witgen. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012. When I teach the history of colonialism, I use the canonical work of Frantz Fanon and Edward Said to break the subject into two interrelated paradigms. Fanon’s work is deeply anchored in an analysis of Indigenous people’s experiences of colonialism. His critiques apply directly to our discipline, which has been tightly bound to colonial projects and upholding the development of the nation-state. Underlying his arguments, Fanon calls for a radically different academic practice: a decolonization of knowledge and scholarly approach. Said’s work, particularly Orientalism, represents a narrower postcolonial approach. Though equally interested in decolonizing knowledge, Said is less focused on the experiences of Indigenous peoples, while more interested in understanding the technologies and representations of imperialism and colonialism that were enacted upon them. Targeting representations of the Other, this approach analyzes colonial processes and power structures without directly seeking and foregrounding Indigenous voices, self-representations and reactions. This is, of course, a false dichotomy. In practice, there is often no clear demarcation between these two approaches; the latter informs the former. The difference in subject matter, however, remains important to identify. It lies in each paradigm’s trajectory and purpose. As studies of the workings of empire, works like Said’s are more deeply anchored in contexts where colonialism is entrenched and technologies of power well-articulated; while scholars of Indigenous experiences seek a reevaluation of power dynamics in the meeting between colonial and Indigenous peoples, often questioning the assertion that colonies and empire were the single most important influence defining specific spaces and peoples. In marking this difference, it is critical to note that even as they seek to deconstruct, postcolonial studies sometimes risk reinforcing colonial representations and power structures. For Linda Tuhiwai Smith, author of Decolonizing Methodologies, the field of postcolonial studies is often “defined in ways which can still leave out indigenous peoples, our ways of knowing and our cultural concerns.”1 The books reviewed here fit into a spectrum between these two paradigms, emphasizing the resilience of Indigenous peoples in the face of colonial and imperial pressures. Michael Witgen’s An Infinity of Nations challenges historians of the seventeenth, eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to reevaluate the overall strength and importance of imperial structures west of the Great Lakes. For Witgen, this was a space dominated and defined by Anishinaabeg and Dakota peoples, a reality that histories of the region still need to address. Tom Arne Midtrød’s The Memory of All Ancient Customs takes a similar approach. Midtrød disentangles Hudson Valley peoples from the colonial world around them, demonstrating that some Indigenous peoples remained politically, socially and culturally distinct until the 1780s. Both books attempt to dig past the colonial legacy of early–North American historiography and its canon of source material. Linford D. Fisher’s The Indian Great Awakening is an excellent example of how both approaches can be better integrated. His study of Indigenous Christianity makes a significant contribution to our understanding of both colonial approaches to Indigenous peoples and their own repurposing of them. Matthew L. Rhoades’s Long Knives and the Longhouse is the most traditional of the four texts, arguing that Virginia’s westward expansion was possible only through the colony’s interaction with, and eventual use of, the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy. An Infinity of Nations implicitly argues for a comprehensive new narrative of early North American history. Witgen demonstrates that through a complex relationship involving both peace and conflict, the Anishinaabeg and Dakota forged a Native New World that ensured their continued place and influence...

Correlates of bullying behaviors among a sample of North American Indigenous adolescents

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between familial, educational, and psychosocial factors and bullying among 702 North American Indigenous adolescents aged 11–14 years. The study used multinomial logistic regression models to differentiate correlates of bully perpetration and victimization versus being neither and between being a perpetrator versus being a victim. Analyses reveal that being a bully victim had different correlates than being a perpetrator. Perceived discrimination was associated with increased odds of being either a victim or a perpetrator, relative to being neither. Several factors differentiated being a bully perpetrator from being a bully victim: adolescent age, parental warmth and support, depressive symptoms, anger, and school adjustment. These findings expand upon the limited understanding of the factors associated with bullying among North American Indigenous youth. Bullying intervention and prevention programs that target Indigenous adolescents should be culturally grounded and begin early within the family.

No evidence of increasing Haemophilus influenzae non-b infection in Australian Aboriginal children

BackgroundHigh, or increasing, rates of invasive Haemophilus influenzae (Hi) type a disease have been reported from North American native children from circumpolar regions, raising the question of serotype replacement being driven by vaccination against Hi type b (Hib). Indigenous Australians from remote areas had high rates of invasive Hib disease in the past, comparable to those in North American Indigenous populations.ObjectiveEvaluate incidence rates of invasive Hi (overall and by serotype) in Indigenous Australian children over time.DesignDescriptive study of Hi incidence rates by serotype, in the Northern Territory (NT) and South Australia (SA) from 2001 to 2011. Comparison of NT data with a study that was conducted in the NT in 1985–1988, before Hib vaccine was introduced.ResultsThe average annual rate of invasive Hi type a (Hia) disease in Indigenous children aged<5 years was 11/100,000 population. Although the incidence of Hi infection in Indigenous children in 2001–2003 was lower than during 2004–2011, this may be due to changes in surveillance. No other trend over time in individual serotypes or total invasive Hi disease, in Indigenous or non-Indigenous people, was identified. Compared to 1985–1988, rates in 2001–2011 were lower in all serotype groupings, by 98% for Hib, 75% for Hia, 79% for other serotypes and 67% for non-typeable Hi.ConclusionsThere is no evidence of increases in invasive disease due to Hia, other specific non-b types, or non-typeable Hi in Australian Indigenous children. These data suggest that the increase in Hia some time after the introduction of Hib vaccine, as seen in the North American Arctic Region, is not common to all populations with high pre-vaccine rates of invasive Hib disease. However, small case numbers and the lack of molecular subtyping and PCR confirmation of pre-vaccine results complicate comparisons with North American epidemiology.

North American Indigenous adolescent substance use

ObjectivesTo investigate growth in problem drinking and monthly marijuana use among North American Indigenous adolescents from the upper Midwest and Canada. MethodsPanel data from a community-based participatory research project includes responses from 619 adolescents residing on or near 7 different reservations/reserves. All respondents were members of the same Indigenous cultural group. ResultsRates of problem drinking and monthly marijuana use increased steadily across the adolescent years, with fastest growth occurring in early adolescence (before age 15). In general, female participants reported higher rates of substance use prior to age 15; however, male reports of use surpassed those of females in later adolescence. ConclusionsResults of this study highlight the importance of early adolescent substance use prevention efforts and the possible utility of gender responsive programming.

The North American Aboriginal Recording Industry

This review essay will focus on current structural conditions of what I will refer to as the "Aboriginal recording industry" and the specific historical, cultural, social, and economic conditions under which commercial recordings come into being. More specifically, I want to examine the particular economic institutions-record labels-responsible for the creation and distribution of these products. Record labels are unique kinds of North American industrial and social spaces producing a particular kind of commercial music. In reviewing the different kinds of products that these labels produce, we can more clearly see how musical styles and genres are actively imagined and created in response to various historical developments and within a specific set of social arrangements that stand in relation to (sometimes challenging, sometimes accommodating) practices that have been generated by the larger North American music industry.In focusing on record labels and their catalogs, I also want to explicitly acknowledge that recorded musical performances are very special kinds of performances, and the conditions of their production differ in important ways from other contexts for musical performance that occur during the regular flow of life. The creation of a commercial recording typically involves a very specific set of collaborations and negotiations between different parties with different musical and economic interests: musicians, songwriters, publishers, recording engineers, producers, A&R (artist and repertoire) people, graphic artists, salespeople marketers, and distributors all collectively negotiate how the final recorded product will look, sound, and how it will be brought to market. These social actors must collectively imagine the particular markets they wish to address with the music, they must grapple with the various recording and performance conventions of particular genres, deciding whether they will adhere to or attempt to challenge these conventions, and they must ultimately determine how the product will be advertised and distributed (see Scales 2002).Finally, in examining the catalogs of record labels and how they are developed and maintained, we can learn a lot about the place of Native American music recordings in the lives of Natives themselves as well as their place within the larger North American public. Because a great many of these labels exist to serve a mainly Native American audience, these catalogs can tell us about changes in the musical preferences of Native American record-buying publics. We can also learn from what is not in the catalogs, as these collections contain not only what is of interest to Natives, but also what is allowed to be recorded and consumed by a wider public. Thus there are many genres of Native American music that are purposely not recorded and not made available to a larger audience, often due to the sacred nature of the genre or text, or because the songs are tied too closely to a specific event, person, or instrument and are deemed impossible to "schizophonically" (Feld 1995:97) separate from their source. In this way, we can understand recordings as having their own "social lives" (Appadurai 1986) that exist quite apart from any particular song or performance.Sites of North American Indigenous Musical CreativityMusic industry scholars typically have categorized record labels as either "majors" or "independents." Major labels are large, multi-national media corporations characterized by both ver tical integration of all aspects of record production and horizontal integration with other media such as film, television, video games, radio, etc. Since the 2004 merger of Sony and BMG, there are currently four majors: Warner Music Group, EMI, Sony Music Entertainment, and Universal Music Group. In contrast, independent labels ("indies") are generally smaller in both scale and scope, and typically specialize in a narrower range of musical genres, catering to a more targeted, smaller market demographic. …

"We Might Go Back to This"; Drawing on the Past to Meet the Future in Northwestern North American Indigenous Communities

Turner, N., and P. R. Spalding. 2013. “We might go back to this”; drawing on the past to meet the future in northwestern North American indigenous communities. Ecology and Society 18(4): 29. https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-05981-180429

Transparency, Spectatorship, Accountability: Indigenous Families in Settler-State “Postdemocracies”

Transparency, Spectatorship, Accountability: Indigenous Families in Settler-State “Postdemocracies” Jennifer Henderson (bio) Transparency “Take the picture! Take the picture if vanishing is so beautiful!” These words are spoken by a Métis journalist toward the end of Marie Clements’s new play, The Edward Curtis Project. She is looking up from her prone position at a distressed Edward S. Curtis, the nineteenth-century photographer of North American Indigenous peoples who saw himself as a documentarian capturing images of waning peoples for posterity. His appearance in Angeline’s present-day world is in the form of a living trace. He is the ghostly originator of a vein of representations that exerts power through its claims to transparency and that continues to do its work in Angeline’s twenty-first-century world where the effects of her intimate experience of the ongoing production of spectacles of Indigenous waning is diagnosed as clinical depression.1 Clements’s play stages a complex unraveling of that ahistorical diagnosis through encounters with Curtis in which Angeline and other Indigenous characters speak back to the photographer and speak out from his fatalistic frames, which are themselves reframed by projections [End Page 299] from the contemporary Indigenous characters’ family photograph albums, asserting another conception of the beautiful. The event that is the ostensible catalyst for Angeline’s descent into depression is the freezing death of three Indigenous children, which she has dutifully reported in her job as an Aboriginal affairs reporter, providing the facts that—she realizes too late—do not so much speak for themselves as trigger a set of narrative codes and discursive positions. These produce a socially distanciated but empathetic spectatorship of Indigenous tragedy read as pathology: an alcoholic father has neglected his children. Never mind the father’s having to struggle to raise children under conditions rendered unviable. Angeline knows these preconditions for tragedy, but up to this point she has not really noticed that her métier does not render them speakable. Nor has she noticed in herself the accumulated somatic strain of continually being a spectator to such freeze-frames of tragedy or the violence that their conception of a beautiful “vanishing” does to her. These journalistic freeze-frames, like Curtis’s photographs, never imagine the Indigenous witness who, living on, may struggle to identify somehow, across the objectification, a subject position beyond the representation’s ordering of “the perceptible” (Rancière 55). In Clements’s play, this strain accumulates and settles in as a feeling of being cold and tired, a feeling that links Angeline metonymically to the frozen children. Clements’s play draws a parallel between the violence of decontextualized fact in journalistic coverage and the “notion of indexicality” from which Curtis’s nineteenth-century photographs derived their power: as Wanda Nanibush has put it, this indexical code seems to assert that “because the camera was really there recording ‘reality,’ its products point to reality” (np). When the twenty-first-century Angeline challenges Curtis to capture her own suffering for the sake of its beauty—“Take the picture if vanishing is so beautiful!”—the audience of Clements’s play is invited to consider what it means to be moved by a genre that requires some actual person’s suffering. If Curtis’s photographs, as Nanibush argues, offer a kind of aesthetically orchestrated affective relief through their transformation of settler-colonial guilt into nostalgia, what kind of affect, and what kind of spectator, is involved in the contemporary circulation of spectacles of broken Indigenous families? The play’s densely textured reflection on modes of making Indigenous lives visible condenses the issues that concern me in this article: interrelated technologies of transparency, renderings of spectacle and spectatorship around Indigenous families, “moral-affective publicness” (Berlant, “Epistemology” 49) and its place in contexts of impoverished [End Page 300] political engagement. In Canada in 2013, a play about the history and politics of claiming to represent Indigenous lives transparently resonates with a peculiar charge, especially (but certainly not exclusively) in the wake of media coverage of the 2011 crisis in living conditions in the northern Ontario community of Attawapiskat. That coverage included the attempt by national newspaper columnist, Jeffrey Simpson, to dismiss the “rhetoric surrounding...

Factors Associated With Growth in Daily Smoking Among Indigenous Adolescents

North American Indigenous adolescents smoke earlier, smoke more, and are more likely to become regular smokers as adults than youth from any other ethnic group yet we know very little about their early smoking trajectories. We use multilevel growth modeling across five waves of data from Indigenous adolescents (aged 10 to 13 years at Wave 1) to investigate factors associated with becoming a daily smoker. Several factors, including number of peers who smoked at Wave 1 and meeting diagnostic criteria for major depressive episode and conduct disorder were associated with early daily smoking. Only age and increases in the number of smoking peers were associated with increased odds of becoming a daily smoker.

Marijuana use development over the course of adolescence among North American Indigenous youth

This study investigated the links between marijuana use trajectories and marijuana abuse/dependence (DSM-IV) using five waves of data from 718 North American Indigenous adolescents between 10 and 17years from eight reservations sharing a common language and culture. Growth mixture models indicated that 15% of youth began using by 11–12years of age and that another 20% began shortly thereafter. These early users had odds of abuse/dependence 6.5 times larger than abstainers. Girls were also unexpectedly found to be particularly at risk of early use, and this did not reflect other background and psychosocial factors, including friend use. While the timing, patterns, and consequences of use were similar to those reported for alcohol use previously, the social influences on use differed in important ways.

Indigenous North American Ethics and Aldo Leopold’s Land Ethic: A Critical View of Comparison and Collaboration

Aldo Leopold’s land ethic is often compared to the ethics of many North American Indigenous communities, like Tribes and First Nations. Such comparisons can be considered important today because they are a potential option for bringing together environmentalists of all heritages in North America based on a common ethical orientation. At a theoretical level, the potential for comparison is certainly present. I argue, however, that there are at least three serious issues that must be reckoned with by any actual attempts to bring people together around the idea of a similar ethical orientation in Leopoldian and Indigenist ethics. The first issue is that Leopoldian ideas may be similar in the abstract to some Indigenous ethics, but Leopold’s own work does not provide a model of environmental stewardship that many Indigenous peoples would identify with or find useful. The second issue is that Leopold’s history of ethics is based on a narrative the plot of which goes in the opposite direction of the narratives many Indigenous peoples would provide of their ethics. The third issue is the tendency to prioritize Leopold as the interpreter and translator of Indigenous ethics, which can grant unsubstantiated and even offensive privilege to Leopold in relation to Indigenous ethics. If left unaddressed, each issue threatens to silence important dimensions of many North American Indigenous ethics that matter deeply to the Indigenous persons who adhere to them. I conclude the paper by arguing that a better exercise would involve approaching any potential comparison with a sobering acknowledgment of and openness to differences between Leopoldian and Indigenist ethics.

Exploring the Relationships of Perceived Discrimination, Anger, and Aggression among North American Indigenous Adolescents.

A growing body of research has documented associations between discrimination, anger and delinquency, but the exact nature of these associations remains unclear. Specifically, do aggressive behaviors emerge over time as a consequence of perceived discrimination and anger? Or do adolescents who engage in aggressive behavior perceive that they are being discriminated against and become angry? We use autoregressive cross-lagged path analysis on a sample of 692 Indigenous adolescents (mean age=12 years) from the Northern Midwest and Canada to answer these research questions. Results showed that the direction of effects went only one way; both perceived discrimination and anger were significantly associated with subsequent aggression. Moreover, early discrimination and anger each had indirect effects on aggressive behavior three years later, and anger partially mediated the association between discrimination and aggression. Perceived discrimination is but one of many strains related to their unequal social position that these Indigenous youth experience, and have important implications for the proliferation of disparities in later life.

Between Native American and Continental Philosophy: A comparative approach to narrative and the emergence of responsible selves

This essay explores some of the affinities between current theories of North American Indigenous trickster narratives and continental philosophy where they are both concerned with the question of responsibility in subject formations. Taking up the work of Judith Butler, Franz Kafka and Gerald Vizenor, the author works to show how both continental and Indigenous intellectual traditions work against any assumed stability for the ‘I’ in the narration of the self, yet toward responsible relationality. Such affinities, however, emerge from differing socio‐cultural and linguistic horizons that are not reducible one to the other. This is particularly so with regard to the natural world and the ways in which Indigenous narratives are developed to foster responsible subjects to a larger biotic environment. Through discussion of such affinities and differences, the author seeks to broaden and multiculturalize contemporary debates in philosophy.

Distress among Indigenous North Americans: Generalized and Culturally Relevant Stressors.

Stress process and life-course models of mental distress emphasize socio-cultural and historical processes that influence stress exposure and the impact of stress on mental health outcomes. Drawing from these theoretical orientations as well as concepts from the historical trauma literature, we examine the effects of culturally relevant and more generalized sources of stress on distress among North American Indigenous adults, and tests for the potential cumulative and interactive effects of stress on distress across the life-course via self-reported early childhood and adult/contemporary stressors. Results of OLS regression analyses reveal positive, significant associations between general stressors and distress as well as culturally-meaningful stressors and distress. In addition, we found evidence of the accumulating and interactive impact of stress on psychological distress.

Alcohol use trajectories and problem drinking over the course of adolescence: a study of north american indigenous youth and their caretakers.

This study investigated the links between alcohol use trajectories and problem drinking (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition abuse/dependence) using five waves of data from 727 North American Indigenous adolescents between 10 and 17 years from eight reservations sharing a common language and culture. Growth mixture models linking fundamental causes, social stressors, support, and psychosocial pathways to problem drinking via alcohol use trajectories over the early life course were estimated. Results indicated that 20 percent of the adolescents began drinking at 11 to 12 years of age and that another 20 percent began drinking shortly thereafter. These early drinkers were at greatly elevated risk for problem drinking, as were those who began drinking at age 13. The etiological analysis revealed that stressors (e.g., perceived discrimination) directly and indirectly influenced early and problem alcohol use by decreasing positive school attitudes while increasing feelings of anger and perceived delinquent friendships. Girls were found to be at risk independently of these other factors.

Knowledge, power, and tribal mapping: a critical analysis of the “return of the Truku people”

Over the past decade, Indigenous peoples in Taiwan have shown a strong desire for the “return of the Native”; this includes the Truku people in eastern Taiwan. Seizing a favorable climate of political opportunity structure in 2004, the Truku people first succeeded in obtaining the Taiwanese government’s recognition as an independent Indigenous nation—formerly considered a subgroup of the Atayal Nation. Then, riding on accumulated political resources, a few Truku elites started to engage in a government-initiated tribal mapping project. However, while tribal mapping originated in some North American Indigenous communities with a bottom-up process and spirit, the Taiwanese government sent both money (through the municipal government) and an academic expert team into the community to initiate and to assist (the elite group) with the tribal mapping project. These top-down government initiatives resulted in at least two major ill effects. First of all, two other subgroups of the Atayal Nation living in the same region were systematically excluded from the tribal mapping project, to the extent that their own traditional territories became part of the traditional territory of the newly formed Truku Nation. Secondly, possibly expecting a high political payoff on the part of elites, elite competition arose during the process of tribal mapping, with the interests of other community members largely ignored. As such, instead of establishing a decolonizing force, the “return of the Truku” appears to have achieved “colonialism from within.” This paper analyzes this process and considers ways to develop a more democratic strategy for the “return of the Truku.”

Sustainability of Natural Populations: Lessons from Indigenous Knowledge

Management schemes for wildlife are often unsuccessful in maintaining healthy, sustainable populations, especially approaches based on Maximum Sustainable Yield, which fail to account for variation in reproductive output. North American Indigenous hunters had considerable knowledge about the dynamics of local populations and were aware that they were subject to major fluctuations. These peoples developed the concept of “Keepers of the Game,” which suggested that if fish or game animals were not treated with proper respect, these “keepers” could remove their population, making it unavailable for human exploitation. The “keepers” concept may have represented recognition of exceptional individuals that had unusual influence on local population dynamics. Existence of such individuals has been established empirically through long-term studies that show that less than 10% of a cohort may contribute 75–90% of recruits to succeeding generations. Incorporation of this concept into management schemes might lead to increased sustainability of wildlife populations.

Tsonnonthouan, Colonialism, and the Commodification of Culture

During and following the Seven Years War, North American Indigenous people began to occupy a unique position in the British imaginary as compelling yet contradictory subjects, existing outside the culture of consumerism that was rapidly rising in Britain. The satirical novel Memoirs of the Life and Adventures of Tsonnonthouan (1763) mimicked both the ethnographic works that British people read in increasing numbers and the body of Grub Street texts imitating Tristram Shandy. The novel, which depicts “Indians” as consumers and worshippers of European commodities, negotiates the entanglement of culture and consumerism in both Britain and the colonies.

Consuming Indians: Tsonnonthouan , Colonialism, and the Commodification of Culture

During and following the Seven Years War, North American Indigenous people began to occupy a unique position in the British imaginary as compelling yet contradictory subjects, existing outside the culture of consumerism that was rapidly rising in Britain. The satirical novel Memoirs of the Life and Adventures of Tsonnonthouan (1763) mimicked both the ethnographic works that British people read in increasing numbers and the body of Grub Street texts imitating Tristram Shandy . The novel, which depicts "Indians" as consumers and worshippers of European commodities, negotiates the entanglement of culture and consumerism in both Britain and the colonies.

Depressed Affect and Historical Loss Among North American Indigenous Adolescents

This study reports on the prevalence and correlates of perceived historical loss among 459 North American Indigenous adolescents aged 11-13 years from the northern Midwest of the United States and central Canada. The adolescents reported daily or more thoughts of historical loss at rates similar to their female caretakers. Confirmatory factor analysis indicated that our measure of perceived historical loss and the Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression scale were separate but related constructs. Regression analysis indicated that, even when controlling for family factors, perceived discrimination, and proximal negative life events, perceived historical loss had independent effects on adolescents' depressive symptoms. The construct of historical loss is discussed in terms of Indigenous ethnic cleansing and life course theory.