Soul Wound Research Articles

From Hinengaro to Hineora: Tracing the origins of Intergenerational Trauma to attain Intergenerational Healing

In Aotearoa New Zealand, colonisation continues to impact Indigenous Māori lived realities. However, Māori have been steadily progressing towards reclamation of all that was suppressed during colonisation, including tūpuna (ancestor) understandings of trauma and healing, of which wairua (referring to spirit) is at the centre. My research aimed to understand the role of wairua in the intergenerational transmission of trauma and healing through exploring my own lived experiences of trauma and healing. My methodology was developed based on tūpuna knowledge, resulting in the implementation of a Rongo-ā-Wairua Framework, a Whakapapa Methodological Approach, Whakapapa Wānanga and Te Pūtake: An Origin Analysis. Through this application of tūpuna knowledge and the centring of wairua within the research process, I uncovered the origins of the soul wounds I had inherited, enabling me to transform from Hinengaro, The Obscured Daughter into who I am now – Hineora, The Daughter of Healing.

Overcoming the soul wound: Reflecting on experiences and resilience of intergenerational residential school survivors

BackgroundBetween 1883 and 1996, thousands of Indigenous children were apprehended into Canada's Residential School System. Survivors and their descendants have testified to genocidal harms caused across generations. Yet, Indigenous Peoples continue to exist and resist through inherent resilience described by intergenerational survivors in this paper. ObjectiveThis article focuses on stories demonstrating the strength, power, and resilience of intergenerational residential school survivors. Participants & settingCedar Project is an Indigenous-led cohort study that began as a HIV/AIDS response and contributes to healing among young Indigenous people who use drugs in British Columbia, Canada. It is governed by the Cedar Project Partnership, an Indigenous body of Elders, leaders, and health/social services experts. MethodsWe present qualitative research involving in-depth interviews carried out with Cedar participants who have experienced significant and complex adversities including childhood maltreatment and illicit drug use. Woven throughout, Indigenous scholars who are themselves intergenerational (children and grandchildren) of residential school survivors provide first-person reflections on the findings. ResultsAnalysis focused on narratives of resilience and resistance to stresses of intergenerational traumas across three broad themes: working to break cycles of intergenerational trauma; foundations of resilience and making positive changes and; hopes and dreams. ConclusionsFindings establish deeper understanding of processes that enable young people to cope with stresses of intergenerational traumas while facing institutional and structural barriers to wellness. Reflections provide context about how intergenerational experiences intersect with challenges that young intergenerational survivors continue to face. We highlight pathways to healing and sources of strength that inform recommendations for wellness.

Unearthing the Roots: White Privilege and Trauma in A. S. King’s Dig

Unearthing the Roots:White Privilege and Trauma in A. S. King’s Dig Beth Boyens (bio) The cover of A. S. King’s 2020 Michael L. Printz award-winning novel Dig features this tagline: “White isn’t just a color.” With that assertion, readers are invited into a young adult novel that explores the toxicity of white privilege in the lives of its five teenage and two elderly protagonists. King’s novel is unabashedly about being white in contemporary U.S. society; as such, it enters an ongoing (and, some might say, too-late emerging) conversation about white privilege and systemic racism. It seems no accident that this novel came upon the scene in 2019 as the political climate bubbled with rancor and division. The novel is also an eerie precursor to the demonstrations, protests, and Twitter storm following the murder of George Floyd and leading up to the January 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol—all while the young people of our nation looked on. Just two years earlier, Angie Thomas’s exploration of race, police brutality, and white privilege, The Hate U Give (2017), received a Printz Honor Award, behind Nina LeCour’s depiction of teenage depression in We Are Okay (2017). I don’t think it would be a stretch to suggest that these issues are related. The soul wound of our nation, the racism on which our country achieved its wealth and success, bleeds into the hearts and minds of this current generation—and they are feeling its effects. The link between racism/racial tension/political unrest and our young people’s mental health is apparent. Dig seeks to unearth the wounds at the root of the current milieu; in doing so, King identifies white privilege as its own sort of trauma. In his 1845 autobiography, former slave Frederick Douglass asserts that the institution of slavery was nearly as morally harmful to white owners as it was to black slaves. He describes his early interactions with a new mistress who had never before “had a slave under her control previously to myself” as amicable—even kind (1903). But since “power corrupts, [End Page 259] and absolute power corrupts absolutely,” Douglass identifies the corruption particular to a racist system: Slavery proved as injurious to her as it did to me. When I went there, she was a pious, warm, and tender-hearted woman. There was no sorrow or suffering for which she had not a tear. She had bread for the hungry, clothes for the naked, and comfort for every mourner that came within her reach. Slavery soon proved its ability to divest her of these heavenly qualities. Under its influence, the tender heart became stone, and the lamblike disposition gave way to one of tigerlike fierceness. (1905) The institution of slavery—and its parent, racism—wounds everyone, Douglass argues. The trauma is deep and long lasting. The reviews of Dig highlight its depiction of this trauma. The Kirkus Review describes the novel’s Hemmings family as having been “poisoned by virulent racism” (“Dig”), and Deborah Stevenson’s review in the Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books calls the novel “the most haunting exploration in youth literature to date of the advantage and poison that is white privilege, and the resentment of young people at the toxicity of what they inherit” (301). Indeed, the novel is about the roots and rootedness of racism and white privilege. Featuring three generations of the Hemmings family, the oldest of which lives in upper-class wealth acquired from a family potato farming business, Dig suggests (and not especially subtly) that the family’s racist roots tunnel deep into their history and collective psyche. Marla and Gottfried Hemmings, the family’s matriarch and patriarch, are at turns explicitly and implicitly racist. Marla, for example, reflects on what her father would “say about people who ate fried chicken” (187) and worries that she is “going to die because Gottfried had to have his soul food . . . I’m going to die in the farmers’ market surrounded by immigrants and Amish people. This is not where I want to die” (188). Gottfried’s racism is expressed in his inattention to the...

Soul wounds among combat trauma survivors: Experience, effects, and advice.

Soul wounds among combat trauma survivors: Experience, effects, and advice.

THE WAR CAME ALIVE INSIDE OF THEM

AbstractIncreasingly, scholarship on moral injury is expanding to include non‐military personnel, and considers a violation of bodily integrity—for example, of civilian women who are targeted for sexual violence in warfare—as a particularly egregious harm. Moral injury discourse also extends beyond the individual to the social context in which moral injury arises, its relational effects, and its utterly devastating impact on personhood, an impact frequently characterized as a “soul wound.” The intersection of genocidal rape—both as an individual and a group harm—with religion, as facilitating moral injury and restorative “soul repair,” exemplifies these trends. Although moral injury research rarely addresses the detrimental influences of religion or references the “soul” with precision, the discourse of moral injury does provide an opportunity for exploring the relationship between personhood and agency from the perspectives of those who inflict and are subjected to harm.

Soul work in social work

ABSTRACTThe field of social work has seen an increasing interest in approaches that utilize the integration of the physical, cognitive, and spiritual components of practice. Social workers are looking for innovative and integrative approaches to help clients reconnect with their deepest and truest selves. If the soul represents the total self, mind, body, and spirit, it is important for social workers to help clients heal from soul wounds through evidence based practices meant to emphasize the whole person, not just the mind. In this paper, we explore the function of the soul in clinical practice, identify key social work skills and evidence based practices that heal a wounded soul, and discuss implications for its use in practice, research, and social work education. Social workers who tend to soul wounds can facilitate internal discoveries and transformations that enable people to live their best lives.

From Generation to Generation: Rethinking “Soul Wounds” and Historical Trauma

If Elizabeth Warren, often referred to by me as Pocahontas, did this commercial from Bighorn or Wounded Knee instead of her kitchen, with her husband dressed in full Indian garb, it would have been a smash!—Donald Trump (1)

Contra Rambo’s “Theology of Remaining”: A Chalcedonian and Pastoral Conception of Trauma

Trauma and moral injury are horrific psychological wounds of war. In this article, Tietje argues they are also overwhelming soul wounds of war. Following Deborah Hunsinger’s use of Barth’s Chalcedonian pattern, Tietje argues for a conceptual distinction between the language worlds of psychology and theology and argues for understanding moral injury and trauma as conceptually distinct soul wounds (as well as psychological injuries). Along the way, Tietje offers a thick account of Barth’s Chalcedonian pattern. He then uses the pattern to critically engage with Shelly Rambo’s Holy Saturday “theology of remaining” (a promising partner in the task of theologizing trauma). Finally, Tietje applies the Chalcedonian pattern to moral injury and trauma in order to carve out a space for understanding them as conceptually distinct soul wounds.

Памяти И.М. Никольской

Deep and unhealed soul wound was the news of the death of the doctor of psychological sciences, Professor Irina Mikhailovna Nikolskaya. Light image of Irina Mikhailovna will stay forever in our hearts. It’s impossible to imagine, that with us there is no man, that was light, bright, open, unique and cheerful.

Constructing Identity Spaces for First Nations People: Towards an Indigenous Psychology of Self-determination and Cultural Healing

Indigenous psychology as a global movement includes First Nations people who were colonised and live today as minorities amidst European majorities in their homelands. This creates the imperative for a psychology of self-determination and cultural healing. The six articles in this Special Issue (SI) articulate different strands of such a First Nations psychology; they are grounded in a liberation psychology of protest, woven together with less confrontational forms of emancipation involving the construction of alternative identity spaces. The articles employ theories and practice that can be grouped into two themes: (i) psychological resistance and endurance and (ii) social relations for psychological creativity and generativity. Based on (i), two articles in this SI develop a historical trauma paradigm for First Nations people to narrate psychological trauma as the product of intergenerational ‘soul wounds’ inflicted by colonisation, which require empowering collective action. Based on (ii), the remainin...

Moral injury themes in combat veterans’ narrative responses from the National Vietnam Veterans’ Readjustment Study.

Spiritual changes, or “soul wounds,” have long been described as expectable consequences of combat, useful in understanding the profound changes in many surviving warriors. However, moral injury as a research construct has only recently been introduced into the combat trauma literature (Drescher et al., 2011), and it is in the early stages of construct validation. To extend validation efforts, the current study examined National Vietnam Veterans’ Readjustment Study (NVVRS) veterans’ narrative responses to questions about the lingering effects of their combat participation for themes consistent with moral injury as reported by combat trauma experts in the Drescher et al., (2011) study. Findings confirmed key experiences involving civilian deaths and betrayal as themes among NVVRS participants’ responses about their troublesome combat experiences.

Guest Editor’s Introduction

Guest Editor’s Introduction Alison Fields (bio) This special issue of American Indian Quarterly examines indigenous cultural tourism in both theoretical and practical contexts. The articles critically address the practices of spectatorship and participation at work in world’s fairs, Wild West shows, photography, cinema, museums, cultural performances, commemorative events, and public sculpture. By addressing this diverse subject matter from a range of disciplinary perspectives, the contributors in this issue add to current scholarly conversations about self- representation and identity, national and transnational negotiations, and personal and cultural memory. To open the issue, Melissa Rinehart examines an act of resistance at the World’s Columbian Exposition. When Native performers showed up to the exposition with short hair, organizers felt that they appeared “too civilized” and insisted that they wear wigs. When spectators openly discussed ugly stereotypes in front of Antonio Apache, the young Native American organizer of the Indian pageant, he threw out the wigs in frustration. The tourists, who thought the wigs were scalps, fled. Rinehart writes, “This resistance ultimately spoke to their resiliency as an unconquered people directly countering the progressive theme of the Exposition.” Next, I address trajectory of the Miller Brothers’ 101 Ranch Real Wild West show. Native participants in the Real Wild West show performed on national and international circuits and subcontracted with organizations such as Germany’s Sarrasani Circus and southern California’s early film studios. Through an analysis of these sites, I suggest that the transition from live to filmed performances in the early twentieth century was a fluid process, leading to new viewing positions for both performers and spectators. [End Page vii] Moving into the present, Michelle Jacob draws on interviews with members of the Wapato Indian Club, a dance troupe based on the Yakama Reservation in Wapato, Washington, to “articulate the lessons about identity, representation, and resistance contained in the narratives about participation in [the club].” By revitalizing cultural traditions of dancing and intergenerational exchange, Jacob argues that “the Wapato Indian Club represents a community-based educational effort that seeks to heal the soul wounds of colonialism.” Jennifer Adese questions “the nature of Indigenous involvement” in the 2010 Vancouver Olympics Opening Ceremony and the broader implications of such participation for conceptions of Canadian nationhood. Jon Daehnke addresses the Confluence Project, a series of contemporary art installations along the Columbia River primarily designed by Maya Lin, created for the Bicentennial of Lewis and Clark’s Corps of Discovery. Envisioned as a collaboration between civic groups, Pacific Northwest Native American tribes, and architects and landscape designers, the project emphasized environmentalism and the Corps of Discovery as “part of a larger shared heritage.” However, Daehnke argues: “Rather than transforming and reimagining the story of Lewis and Clark, I suggest that the messages of shared heritage and sustainability found in the Confluence Project serve to further assimilate the Native American story as one more component of the American master narrative, create a false equation of indigenous and settler experiences on the landscape, distance and erase the tragedies of colonialism, and perpetuate stereotypes of pristine nonanthropogenic landscapes.” Doctoral student Jeff Fortney’s essay further examines commemoration and remembrance, considering how a statue of a Civil War soldier on Main Street in Norman, Oklahoma, reflects an often-silenced historical narrative in former Indian Territory. In closing, Doreen Martinez calls for a theoretical and methodological (re)mapping of “previous expectations and imposed understandings of Indigenous cultures” to “more fully illuminate the landscape, terrain, and meaning of lives” in a global society. [End Page viii] Alison Fields Alison Fields is the Mary Lou Milner Carver Professor of Art of the American West, an assistant professor of art history and affiliated faculty in film and media studies at the University of Oklahoma. She also serves as the managing editor of American Indian Quarterly. Copyright © 2013 University of Nebraska Press

“We Wanted Those People to See That Indians Aren’t Stupid”: Identity, Representation, and Resistance in the Cultural Tourism of the Wapato Indian Club

“We Wanted Those People to See That Indians Aren’t Stupid”Identity, Representation, and Resistance in the Cultural Tourism of the Wapato Indian Club Michelle M. Jacob (bio) In the 1970s a group of American Indian junior high school students requested that their public school, located on the Yakama Reservation, provide them with opportunities to learn traditional Yakama and powwow-style dancing. They found an advocate in their school counselor, a Yakama woman who helped them form the Wapato Indian Club dance troupe, a form of cultural tourism that sought to bring intercultural understanding and increased self-esteem among American Indian youth through the club’s performances. The club became a vehicle through which students learned ethnic pride and leadership and how to be cultural ambassadors to largely non-Native audiences in the Pacific Northwest and across the United States. In this article, I draw from qualitative interviews with club alumni, parents, and advisors who have participated in the Wapato Indian Club from its founding in 1973 to 2011. I analyze interview data to articulate the lessons about identity, representation, and resistance contained in the narratives about participation in the Wapato Indian Club. I discuss the study findings utilizing the theory of historical trauma and argue that the Wapato Indian Club represents a community-based educational effort that seeks to heal the soul wounds of colonialism. Background The theory of historical trauma is useful for understanding the ways in which contemporary social problems within indigenous communities are rooted in the violent legacy of colonialism.1 American Indians have endured many forms of epistemic violence, including within US educational systems.2 However, indigenous peoples continue to resist policies [End Page 465] that are rooted in genocidal and assimilationist agendas and are reclaiming their cultural traditions and demanding that educational systems recognize the importance of indigenous sovereignty. As part of these resistance movements, Native peoples are actively shaping curricular and extracurricular opportunities for Native youth to develop a strong sense of indigenous identity and cultural pride. This article articulates the importance of one such effort, the Wapato Indian Club, based out of the Wapato Middle School (formerly the Wapato Junior High School) in Wapato, Washington, on the Yakama Reservation. The Yakama Reservation is home to the fourteen Confederated Tribes and Bands of the Yakama Nation and was established by the Treaty of 1855. The reservation is a remnant of traditional Yakama homelands, as over 90 percent of traditional lands were ceded during forced treaty “negotiations” with the governor of Washington Territory. Click for larger view View full resolution Fig. 1. Map of Yakama Reservation. Originally published by the Yakama Nation Wildlife Program and reprinted here by permission of the artist, Christopher Andersen. In this article, I argue that the Wapato Indian Club is an important example of grassroots indigenous activism that revitalizes the cultural traditions of dancing and intergenerational teaching and learning. Cultural revitalization activism and indigenous resistance go hand in hand.3 The Wapato Indian Club teaches Native youth a vision for social change that is rooted in cultural traditions and intergenerational teaching and [End Page 466] learning. Wapato Indian Club members are expected to internalize the positive messages about their indigenous identities and to emerge as leaders who are grounded in important cultural teachings. As such, the Wapato Indian Club carries on a tradition of cultural tourism that challenges long-standing negative stereotypes of marginalized communities and resists assumptions that disempowered communities have nothing to offer to the “outside” world.4 As indigenous peoples, our collective well-being depends on the restoration of our traditional cultural practices to guide our leaders and daily practices. Cultural tourism allows indigenous peoples the opportunity to carry on traditional practices in a contemporary way, resisting notions that indigenous peoples and cultures are fixed in a previous historical era and instead claiming and revitalizing cultural practices in a way that can benefit both the performers/artists as well as their audiences.5 I argue that the Wapato Indian club provides a model of education that is represented as a “gift” to all those involved teaching youth, and their audiences, about a cycle of reciprocity that is at the core of indigenous traditions and elders’ explicit...

Warrior Spirit: Soul Wound and Coping Among American Indians in Law Enforcement

This qualitative, exploratory study examined the role vocation played for American Indian non-Tribal law enforcement officers in adaptively coping with historical trauma, or Soul Wound. Participants’ views of career in relationship to its perceived congruence with their Nations’ warrior societies and how this vocation may facilitate or constrain the management of Soul Wound or historical trauma issues was examined. For this study, 12 participants were interviewed and data were analyzed utilizing extended case method. Results indicated 11 of the 12 participants believed their vocation was congruent with their Nations’ traditional warrior roles, particularly related to the role’s value of mentorship and modeling well-living for the community. Participants’ interests and satisfaction, as well as facilitating and constraining factors of their roles, are discussed. The authors elaborate on existing theoretical understandings of Soul Wound and coping using the results. Limitations, implications, and future directions are described.

Liberation Psychology as the Path Toward Healing Cultural Soul Wounds

Oppression resulting in soul wounding has afflicted indigenous communities and the counseling profession. Internalized oppression has become part of oppressive practices inflicted on communities served. The authors delineate a liberation psychology that leads toward the psychological and spiritual emancipation of individual clients, communities, and the counseling profession.

Review of Healing the soul wound: Counseling with American Indians and other Native peoples.

Review of Healing the soul wound: Counseling with American Indians and other Native peoples.

Radical Wisdom: A Feminist Mystical Theology

Reviewed by Joan M. Nuth John Carroll University Radical Wisdom: A Feminist Mystical Theology. By Beverly J. Lanzetta. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2005. 262 pp. $22.00 This is a brave and timely book, daring to take up a question that has plagued psychologists, anthropologists, historians, and theologians for decades. Is there something uniquely different about women's experience in contrast to that of men? Further, is it possible to talk about women's experience in any universal sense, encompassing the historical and cultural diversity in which women participate? While Lanzetta is aware of the complexity of such questions and attempts no facile solutions to them, she instinctively sees something similar in all (at least Western) women's experience of grappling with what she calls their "soul wound," the damage to the female psyche caused by the evils of patriarchy. Thus she justifies using the mystical experiences of medieval mystics, notably Julian of Norwich and Teresa of Avila, as helpful exemplars for what contemporary women experience today. This resonates with my own experience. In my work on Julian of Norwich I was surprised by the conjunction between her treatment of sin and that of Valerie Saiving, who objected to the western tradition's focus on pride as the root of all sin, suggesting that women's temptation is grounded rather in negation of the self, the polar opposite of pride ("The Human Situation: A Feminine View," Journal of Religion 40 [1960]). Six hundred years earlier, Julian too bypassed an explication of pride as the root of all evil (an odd thing to do in her day) and focused instead on despair as the sin that most plagues God's lovers. She writes: "You know well [End Page 275] that you are a wretch, a sinner and also unfaithful. . . . It is our enemy who wants to retard us with his false suggestions of fear about our wretchedness. . . . For it is his purpose to make us so depressed and so sad in this matter that we should forget the blessed contemplation of our everlasting friend" (Showings, Long Text, ch. 76). Lack of self-worth makes one feel unworthy in God's eyes, and thus remain distant from God. Added to the fact that Julian understood "sin" more as something we suffer from than something we are totally responsible for, her description reflects well what Lanzetta describes as women's "soul wound." Lanzetta claims that the oppression women suffer materially and socially leaves a deeper wound on their spirit; and that even when the former is remedied, "there continues to exist a spiritual wound that requires recognition, healing, and transformation." It is a "soul fracture" which "blocks women's ability to claim and name themselves as subjects in their own right apart from structures of consciousness that oppress them." Women internalize the misogyny directed against them, viewing themselves as "temptresses to be feared," unable to live up to the ideal of "immaculate virgins of divine purity and beauty" (10). Lanzetta believes that the healing of the soul wound is possible only through mystical experience. Her book is an effort to link the insights of feminism with the mystical tradition, influenced as well by her experience as spiritual director to women. Part One handles the theory and historical background by means of which Lanzetta sets her agenda and defines her terms. The first chapter introduces via feminina as a spiritual path unique to women, which parallels and combines to some extent the classic via positiva (kataphatic contemplation) and via negativa (apophatic contemplation). Lanzetta focuses on the negative path, particularly the experience of the "unsaying of woman," described as "a mystical path that enters into and moves through a woman's "nothingness"—that is, what diminishes, injures, humiliates, or shames her—to a positive affirmation of her dignity and worth. By negating all that falsely defines her, a woman steps outside the symbolic order of culture, religion, and God, giving up and subverting her capacity to be...

Science and spirituality.

Although several articles in the October 2002 issue on Complementary and Alternative Medicine reflect the interest in spirituality that exists in the field, they appear unable to discuss it directly. One of the reasons for this may be that scientific medicine has its roots in a rift from spirituality. Before Western medical practice and research began to involve what was considered to be an unnatural curiosity about the human body, medicine was intricately involved with a person’s spirit or soul. It was during the 16th century in Europe that men began to commit the heresy of stealing dead bodies from graves and actually looking at bones, muscles, and organs. “Laws against dissecting human corpses began to relax during the Renaissance; as a result, the first truly scientific studies of the human body began.”1 The dissecting of bodies has become such a basic feature of medical school education, it may be difficult to imagine the historical sacrilege of this act initially. The Church condemned these “body snatchers,” contributing to Western medicine’s alienation from the spirit. Larry Dossey writes, From the sixteenth century on, mind has been progressively expunged from the phenomenal world. . . . Scientific consciousness is alienated consciousness: there is no ecstatic merger with nature, but rather total separation from it. Subject and object are always seen in opposition to each other. . . . The logical end point of this world view is a feeling of total reification: everything is an object, alien, not-me; and I am ultimately an object too, an alienated “thing” in a world of other, equally meaningless things. 2 As an American Indian, I am aware of an entirely different tradition of healing that never split from spirit world. There is no difference, for example, between Navajo religion and Navajo medicine. American Indian medicine consists of spoken prayers, songs that are prayers, rituals, and instruments of prayer. Even herbal medicine comes with prayers for a person’s spirit. It is interesting to me that modern providers have recently “discovered” holistic medicine. It is something like the way Columbus “discovered” America. Suddenly our spiritual practices exist, though they have been practical for centuries. We also experience alienation as a byproduct of would-be spiritual genocide, what Eduardo Duran calls the “soul wound”: “The notion of ‘soul wound’ is one which is at the core of much of the suffering which Indigenous peoples have undergone for centuries.”3(p127) When modern public health and medical practitioners are able to talk about the spirit and understand what they themselves have lost, I think their wound will begin to heal. Perhaps then they can help the rest of us.

Reconceptualizing native women's health: an "indigenist" stress-coping model.

This commentary presents an "indigenist" model of Native women's health, a stress-coping paradigm that situates Native women's health within the larger context of their status as a colonized people. The model is grounded in empirical evidence that traumas such as the "soul wound" of historical and contemporary discrimination among Native women influence health and mental health outcomes. The preliminary model also incorporates cultural resilience, including as moderators identity, enculturation, spiritual coping, and traditional healing practices. Current epidemiological data on Native women's general health and mental health are reconsidered within the framework of this model.