January 30, 2024 • 57 mins
In this episode we visit with Dr. Náakw Latseení Tina Woods, Senior Director of Community & Behavioral Services at Central Council Tlingit & Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska. Dr. Tina shares her perspective on Indigenous healing centers, living in wellness, and dealing with historical and personal traumas while on a lifelong language journey. This episode contains sensitive material that may trigger traumatic responses within folks, so while healing is needed for decolonization and language reclamation movements, listeners are encouraged to take care of themselves and reach out for help when needed.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
This episode contains sensitive conversations about historical and personal trauma, recovery,
and Indigenous led behavioral health programs. If you are triggered,
please reach out to supportive people in programs, and if
you are in crisis, please call the care line at
nine eight eight or one eight seven seven two six
(00:21):
six four three five seven For emergencies dial nine one one.
Stay safe, Know you were loved, Help each other out
and be strong in these movements of decolonization and language reclamation.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
Tay he.
Speaker 1 (00:38):
Docta he. They try to colonizs, try to genocidis. Yet
we're still here with the tongue on pro but to
(01:03):
cut you hanyata. This is the tongue unbroken. Season two,
episode three, and I am excited. Today we're having a
conversation with doctor Tina Woods Nakkasini, and we are going
to be talking about mental health wellness, Native communities overcoming
(01:26):
historical traumas. So there there will be some sensitive things
perhaps in this episode, but the intention here is to
build strength, build community, build capacity, and to continually overcome
historical and current and individual and collective traumas and work
towards a decolonized community that is embracing wellness and health
(01:51):
and hopefully sobriety, and just being open and honest, and
especially as you come into your work and decolonization, language revitalization,
checking in with each other, checking in with yourself, maintaining
a good sense of balance and well being is tremendously
important to avoid burnout, to avoid lateral violence, to avoid
(02:14):
creating hierarchies that make it difficult for people to come
into language spaces. So I'm excited for this conversation. These
are things that we need to be talking about. And
I'm here with a brilliant and talented individual. And will
you introduce yourself?
Speaker 3 (02:31):
Sure on on Hello, Hello, I'm Tina Woods. I am
Unanga originally from Saint Paul Island, otherwise known as Alute.
I am the daughter of the late Maria Sheishnikoff. My
mother was Unanga and my father, the late Wan Lungeruro
is tomorrow from the island of Guam, so I come
from two islands. I was also recently adopted into the
(02:54):
Coogwantan clan and my name given is Noctusini and I'm
a licensed clinical community psychologist with the rural Indigenous emphasis.
And I'm happy to be here.
Speaker 1 (03:06):
Go, Jeesh. Half a day. I was in a language
program in Hilo and one of the members of our
cohort was Chamorrow, and so we used to talk about
language programs that are over there in Guam, and everything
was cold to him. And so it's really great to
visit with you and to have some time to spend
(03:26):
with you as we talk about wellness and as we
talk about your work. Also, I just want to acknowledge
there's multiple places in Southeast Alaska where Ononga people were
brought here during World War two, and so we always
want to acknowledge when we're interfacing and talking with each
other are shared histories, and some of our histories is incredible.
(03:49):
Displacement and removal from your lands for protection is what
some people say, but just in terms of the way
people were housed and the way people were treated was
really inhumane, and it happened in our lands. But there
was an elder I did a lot of work with
her name Jesse Johnny, and she talked about the people
of Huna and how they used to go to Funder
(04:11):
Bay and make sure that they brought food and they
chatted with people and they said, this is how you
hunt here. This is how you fish here, and they
really wanted to make sure that people were comfortable. And
if I think that people were hosting, no one would
have been treated like that. So we just want to
acknowledge the harm done two Anong people on our lands
and the work that's been done to acknowledge that in
(04:33):
the places that it happened. So, doctor Tina, can you
tell us a little bit about the work that you
do here in our community.
Speaker 3 (04:40):
I act both as an administrator and a clinical psychologist.
I mostly identify as a community psychologist. I really believe
in bringing people together to heal through each other. Through
my training in a rural, remote community setting, I feel
strongly that programs don't heal people well, it's people that
(05:00):
heal people. We heal through relationship. We tend to see
each other, see ourselves through each other. And so some
of the work that I started doing here at Clinket
and Haida is creating the foundation for a healing center,
so community and behavioral services healing center. And while we
do many of the same outpatient services that you would
(05:22):
find at other clinics throughout the state, in addition to that,
we really do try to do work that is based
on the foundation of our tribal values, and we try
to create space really meeting people where they're at and
breaking down the barriers. In our field, it can be
highly regulated and there's a lot of administrative paperwork that
(05:43):
comes with coming in to see someone for help, and
so that's one of the areas that we really focus on,
is just really being with someone and removing that piece
of paper, really getting to know them and build relationship,
build trust before we start gathering information, making sure that
they feel comfortable in our setting, offering them a cup
of coffee, and just getting to know them, getting to
(06:05):
know who they are. Many of us are trained as
Western providers, and many of us grew up native, and
so we combined who we are as native people with
some of our training. The foundation of our work is
our tribal values, however, and just treating people with respect
and really acknowledging that it's scary task for help. So
(06:27):
when people come in seeking support from us, we pay
attention to their affect we pay attention to their body language,
we pay attention to their words to ensure that we're
meeting them and ensuring that they feel like they can
trust us. Because when we are in such a setting,
(06:47):
it can be very intimidating. Sometimes people want to come
and ask for help, and we remind them, et eat,
it's you know, it's within us, it's within you to
heal yourself. So we really see a creating space for
people to heal themselves. But we use some of the
tools from our training to help them and to help
them explore some of the cognitive distortions or some of
(07:11):
the trauma that continues to live in their nervous system,
to help them understand why they might be triggered by
certain sound or smell, to understand the history of trauma
that our people have been through. We serve children to adults, elders.
We love when elders come in for therapy. There was
(07:32):
a time in my practice where it was kind of
a foreign thing for an elder to say I need help,
And today it's probably my most favorite population to work
with because I'm so inspired by people who recognize that
forever we are healing ourselves and learning. And there's nothing
(07:52):
more enjoyable to sit with an elder who's looking to
us to heal themselves and for us to create the
space for them to do that. And so we do
a lot of community work. We tend to host opportunities
for men to heal together, for women to heal together.
And we have an opportunity coming up to host gathering
(08:16):
for children to heal from significant loss, a grief and
loss camp for children and addressing their grief and loss
so that they don't take some of what they experience
at this young age into their adulthood. Working with children
on that note is really important to us. I think
we underestimate their ability to feel, We under estimate their
(08:40):
ability to have emotions and to have thoughts about what's
happening around them. So we also create space for them
to at their cognitive level to explore some of the
challenges that the world presents to them.
Speaker 1 (08:52):
That's amazing, that's amazing. I was thinking of this thing.
Get word, it's cut to duke, and cut to duke
means it's solid like this, there's a table in front
of us, and that table is solid. Or if you
had a rock that you think it's not going to
break apart if you put it in the fire, you know,
like some rocks are, they'll explode if they get too
(09:13):
hot and stuff, and so cut to duke could refer
to that, but it could also mean like the fortress
or the village is impenetrable, like it's got solid defenses.
And it also means for a wound to heal up completely.
And so I think about this kind of stuff because
as we look at living in wellness and living in
(09:33):
an indigenous sense of wellness, I really admire that you're
looking at bringing bringing together methodologies that are maybe external
to Indigenous peoples and then methodologies that are internal to
indigenous peoples. Because one of the things that we found
I was giving testimony at the state legislature and a
legislator said, well, how do you balance the ancient of
(09:55):
the Alaska Native language and the modern of English? And
I said, well, there's a bit of a stereotype there
is that we're ancient and English is modern. And that's
a dangerous stereotype to think because behind that is these
concepts of primitive and advanced. But at the same time,
our cultures and our languages were prohibited for probably eighty
(10:16):
years in Alaska, and so we were not allowed to
bring our knowledge into science and into medicine and into
all these different sort of fields. And so what we're
looking at now when we revitalize our language and we
really try to look at what it tells us. We
tried to bring some of those concepts into things like
medicine and healing therapy, and so as we do that,
(10:39):
it's really exciting to think about what the future could
look like. I was involved with our healthcare organization years ago,
and we used to have these conversations about trying to
transform what a hospital is. So a hospital isn't a
place where you go when you're hurt, but it's a
place that radiates health. Right, It's this place that sort
of acknowledges things, and it has conversations because we're continually
(11:02):
trying to convince our own peoples to say, talk about
your pain and talk about your things that hurt. Because
as we look at this the approach from being a
Native man identifying as a Native man, I've been told
sometimes like you're not supposed to be sad. You're supposed
to just be tough, and you're supposed to just you know,
you never cry and you never do this. And I
(11:22):
think sometimes there's also a stereotype of what indigenous peoples are.
And so I thought of this because I was teaching
Clingett one time, and someone said, I didn't realize everybody
could learn clinget. She was an older white lady, and
I do think she was getting some dementia and perhaps
her filter was eroding a little bit, because she said,
(11:42):
my dad was a teacher for a long time at
a boarding school. Right. I was like, okay, And she said,
and I didn't realize that everybody could learn Flinget. And
I said, well, everybody should who lives here, because that's
how the language stays alive. It'd be great if you
go to France, if you're going to live there, you
should learn French, and if you're going to live here,
you should learn Slinget. And then she's and it was funny,
and I didn't realize that. I think that people laughed,
(12:04):
and I didn't really know how to respond to this.
So I said, ah, well, I guess when you were young,
like white people were taking everything from us, taking the land,
taking the children out of the homes, taking everything, and
so it wasn't a very fun time. But we were
still over here telling jokes, you know, so but like
just trying to sort of think of laughter and respect.
(12:25):
And it's a challenge, you know, as we talk about
serving different ages within our population as well to serve elders,
because we've been in meetings sometimes and we've been in
language gatherings where we've seen someone who is an elder
treat someone very badly, and that creates a very confusing
situation for us because that's an elder. We respect them,
(12:47):
we'd understand the knowledge they have, they can speak the language,
but we just witnessed an act of violence and all
of us know that, like, that's something that shouldn't have happened,
but we didn't really have the tools to stop that.
And so some of the things that we've been trying
to do with our language work is to be more
active in the concept of bringing in healing, bringing in
harm reduction, to the point where we were working on
(13:11):
a form where people would sign it to say I
will not cause harm and if I do, I'll be
sent home, like and we never got to a point
where we had to sort of enforce that, But the
hope was if people could see that and see that
harm has been caused, that maybe there could be some
harm reduction.
Speaker 3 (13:29):
You're bringing up so many thoughts to mind around language
and around harm and around mental health and around our
history and so I want to talk about a couple
experiences that can can demonstrate that. So I had mentioned
I'm ellute, and I'm one of eleven siblings, and my
(13:52):
late mother spoke fluent alut and she never taught any
of us. I know a few words. I try to
explore learning the language, and I was corrected for not
pronouncing something right and my feelings got hurt. But I
think it goes a little deeper. And because I'm a
(14:13):
psychologist and I've studied this, I have a better understanding
of me in that context, and I want to share that,
just to take it to another level of what that
feels like. So when I was growing up, I did
experience emotional, physical, mental abuse, and so I would say
(14:35):
that I was what you call classically conditioned to where
if I got scolded, so if somebody's voice and tone raised,
then I knew what was coming next. So my body
was conditioned to not make a mistake, and I was
conditioned to always be good and do the right thing.
(14:57):
And so that follows you later in life, and so
later in life, anything I did in my upbringing, once
I left that environment, I was living with that trauma
in my body and that memory, and so for me,
the classical conditioning came from just knowing as soon as
someone raised their voice or used a certain tone with me,
(15:20):
I would go back to that place, believe it or not,
because trauma lives in the body. And so that really
shut me down from wanting to learn, and being criticized
for being a leader and not being able to speak
my language. It creates a lot of emotional pain for me.
It hasn't stopped me from hoping. I really have rephrased
(15:42):
reframed that I don't know how to speak yet being
adopted into the clinkic culture, I am excited to learn
the language. And this is very complex because if you
think about my mother, who actually was a young woman
during the internment, my mother was removed from the provlofs
(16:04):
to fund Bay and so her life led into many
things that involve mental health behavioral health issues. And so
that's when we start talking about intergenerational trauma and transmission
of that trauma. And so when I think about language
and I think about how we are impacted today the
things that prevent us from learning. I love hearing what
(16:26):
you have to say about setting guidelines and a group
agreements about creating a psychologically safe space to learn our language.
Our language is so powerful, and one thing I do
know is you cannot translate the English language directly into
our native language. And our native language has so much
depth in what we say and how we conduct ourselves
(16:48):
as people. When I was teaching at the University in Anchorage,
I remember a class where I invited an elder and
we were talking about language, and this elder said the
English language is stupid. She is an elderly elder, and
it really offended my students, and I thought, oh my gosh,
I'm going to have to repair this. So I found
(17:09):
it very humorous because this is a very loved and
respected elder. And the next time I invited another elder
to my class and I had told him here's what happened,
and he laughed and laughed, and then he created a
conversation in the class. And I had a student who
comes from another country, and she said, you know, you're
making me really think deeply. When I talk to my
(17:30):
children in English, they don't listen. But when I talk
to my children in my language, they recognize, and they
recognize and they offer respect. She said, there's a different
meaning when we speak in our language, and those are
just some of the stories that come to mind.
Speaker 1 (17:45):
I want to thank you for sharing some of your
truth and some of your experiences, because I think there's
a lot of people out there who've experienced that they
worked up the courage to say, I'm going to go
learn this language. I'm going to go access something that
was denied to entire generations of my people. And then
you go into a room and then sometimes, whether it
(18:06):
was intentional or not, you're treated like you've done something incorrectly,
just right at the beginning. And so one of the
things that we talk a lot about in language learning,
we being folks at the university and folks who are
working in sling it right now, and language teachers that
I really relate to is making sure that your language
space is a safe space and that you have a
(18:27):
lot of room to grow. And this one elder, she said,
her name is Pakashat Florence Shakeley, she said, You're going
to be born again in this language. You're going to
be a baby again. And I was really excited. But then,
like after I've been learning the language and speaking it
and teaching it, I make sure to let students know
it's like you will be born again. But that means
it's exciting because you get a new start, which is fun.
(18:48):
But also you're going to have a little baby Indigenous
brain and you're going to have this full grown English brain,
and they're going to be battling for time and space.
And English is a colonizing language and so that you're
always going to be going back and forth and how
you think about these things. And one of the things
that's really important in language learning environments is to say,
I'm going to have these adults and they're going to
(19:09):
sound very different because they're coming now. They're not just
baby speakers. They're coming from English to an indigenous language,
which is the purest act of decolonization, I think. But
that means you're going to have to give them time
and space to sound. They're going to sound inaccurate, and
they're going to sound inauthentic. But that's okay because if
(19:29):
you presented the wrong way, they might feel like they've
failed before they even started. And so for us, like
we're dealing with all of these traumas, all these these
different things, and as we come back to it, and
we're going to take a little break here, but I
just want to make sure that if you listen to this,
you're taking good care of yourself, you're thinking good, positive thoughts,
(19:50):
like we're going to do the hard work that it
takes to heal and to recover, and to create safe
spaces and to create places where decolonization and language revitalization
are not just possible, but they're pretty much guaranteed. But
in order to do that, we have to make sure
that we're practicing self care. So if you're feeling near crisis,
if you're feeling triggered, make sure that you're taking care
(20:11):
of yourself and making sure that you know you're not alone.
There are rising numbers of people who are making moves
towards wellness and health. We'll take a short break and
we'll be right back to cheese.
Speaker 2 (20:35):
One are two or three times you try any friends,
you run all around without joy, struggle yesterday, you struggle
still new day now, but you'll find a broader away.
(20:59):
My brother said, just don't you know.
Speaker 4 (21:02):
What about the way too?
Speaker 2 (21:05):
Wait it back for those who came believe in yourself Now,
Bullie in somehow dona DEI call.
Speaker 1 (21:18):
Theasy and we're back. So thinking of this next part
of our conversation. There's a couple of little stories I
was thinking of. One is this concept of manifest destiny.
(21:41):
And so there was a T shirt company. I'm not
going to name them because I'm angry at them and
I think they never fixed their mistake. But they had
an advertisement and in the advertisement there was a white
male model who was jumping joyously with a T shirt
that said manifest Destiny on it. A lot of Indigenous
people's out against it and said, this is not a
(22:02):
good thing to put on a shirt. This is not
a great concept, because what manifest destiny is for indigenous
peoples in Native America is this concept that God was
guiding people over here to correct everything that was here.
And so it gave them a lot of a superiority
complex that they had the authority to come and just
annihilate people for the greater good. And so what was
(22:24):
really interesting is the person, someone from the T shirt
company then had some social media response which was a
survival of the fittest, Survival of the fittest, and that
was their response. And so it's like, oh, this is
like a white supremacy T shirt company. I don't really
get it. But another sort of thing and linking these
thoughts together. I was going to teach a class and
I saw a young Native man come out that I know,
(22:47):
and I said, Hey, how's it going And he said,
I've never felt bad about being Indigenous until right now.
I said, Okay, tell me what's going on. And he said,
I just came out of this class. And it was
a class on sociology and they said, if you're Alaska Native,
you're born disadvantaged. And so sometimes, like if you look
at any of the statistics that are out there, it's
really bad for us. We lead the nation and suicide
(23:10):
rates and incarceration rates, and violence, police attacks against our peoples,
on and on, like sexual violence against women, missing and
murdered indigenous women. So if you look at the statistics,
it's very dangerous because sometimes if you combine the statistics
with manifest destiny, you might think it's already over, but
it really isn't. And so we deal with this in
(23:30):
language revitalization. When people start looking at the numbers how
many speakers are left, Well, there's less than ten. Okay, well,
I wish we could have done something. So sometimes people
resign themselves to thinking like this is the destiny that
was there, and so sometimes we have to push back
against some of these concepts. No, this is a story
that is happening right now, this is our lives. We're
the ones who are in control. So as indigenous peoples
(23:53):
take more control of healthcare, of mental health, of wellness,
a lot of those things are going to be involving
so determination, which means we will be aware of these statistics.
We'll be operating from a place of distinct intention to
create change or a different reality. And so that's different
than sort of like coming at it saying, Okay, all
(24:14):
these people are broken and we're just going to have
to be careful because they are broken. I think we're
looking for a different sort of approach, and I'm curious
what your approach is for those things.
Speaker 3 (24:24):
Again, you're bringing to my attention a lot of my
own experiences with focusing. Folks like to focus on and
we tend to be putting out fires constantly. And so
when I think about the work I do here, I
think about how we have people coming in needing services
(24:48):
because they're in crisis. What our team does is we
really try to remember that it's more than just the crisis.
So we really that's where we aim to do community
events to let people see each other, to see the strengths,
to see the power that we have as Indigenous people.
(25:10):
I think about some of the work I did again
at the university where there was a class that was
going to be dismissed from an opportunity for people to register.
There was a series of classes. They were all Alaska
NAA focused. The registrations were low, and I remember being
handed these classes as a student in psychology and told here,
(25:35):
you know, if you would like to teach these, rather
than us completely removing them as an option, you're welcome
to teach them. And I remember thinking I never taught
at a university, and I just remember thinking, can I
teach it how I want to teach it? And they said, sure,
it's your class, you could teach it however you want
to teach it. So I knew I wanted to teach
it in a circle, not in rows. And I knew
(25:58):
that I actually didn't have the information to teach around
many of these topics. I knew that I had to
bring in elders to help teach these courses. So I
considered myself more of a facilitator, and there were so
many stories from those experiences, and one in particular was
when a student approached me and said, you know, Professor Woods,
(26:20):
I just don't even understand. You know, domestic violence must
be something cultural. It's culturally accepted. And I said, no,
it's not. And if you can imagine, there were a
lot of students in there who were shocked by this statement.
But what I did was I always created a psychologically
safe space for people to learn. And so I asked
(26:40):
the student to take a book home and to read it.
And the quickest book at my hands where it was
The Way of the Human Being by Harold Napoleon, And
I said, just read this book. It's a really quick read,
and then come back and ask me that and she did,
and she came back in tears. There's so much about
our history that we don't know. There's so much about
our history that we don't even know as Native people.
(27:00):
And if you don't know, but you feel something, you
feel something, but you don't always have the words to
put to it. So these classes I was teaching, they
ended up with waitlists. It ended up growing big and fast,
you know, and there were waitlists. And I taught it
for about a year, and the students were mostly Alaska
(27:20):
Native students, and many times these students would say, I
just don't know why I feel this way. I don't
know why I feel this way. I don't know why
my parents never talked about something I don't understand. And
so I created an environment, a safe environment for people
to talk about these real the hidden we're still living
(27:42):
with it today and we don't have the words for it.
We don't have the words to express what we're feeling
and carrying in our veins from our ancestors, and so
the way we address these topics is safe space to
have the conversation. This woman had no clue. No, this
is not cultural. This is there's a whole history here,
(28:06):
and it's important for us to know the history in
order to talk about present day. So those are just
some of the things that come to mind.
Speaker 1 (28:13):
Geeesh, and you had brought up earlier in our conversation
this concept of it too, ye ye tea, which I
think is really important because when we talk about healing
and mental health and well being and gaining strength and
being courageous, I think it is important for people to
know that this isn't something they're going after externally. It's
(28:34):
not like you have to go find this concept of
well like, this concept of strength and this concept of
courage is inside of people already and so I think
those are really important from an Indigenous perspective of wellness
to look at things to say, Okay, there's a bunch
of stuff that happened, and there's a bunch of stuff
that maybe you have done, but that doesn't mean that
you are this type of person, like a bad person
(28:56):
or a harmful person. It means like there is work
to do, and some of that work can be repair work.
So there are really difficult conversations that need to happen.
So we've done there's groups of us that have done
some work with Indigenous men recently and just really trying
to call attention to say there's been a lot of
harm that has been done and that it continues to
(29:18):
be done to Indigenous women by Indigenous men, and that
means there's we're creating places that are not safe. And
if we go back to the warrior days, like our
role was to really protect each other and make sure
that we had safe spaces, and to engage in those
conversations is really challenging. It's very very challenging. And again,
we have these external stereotypes about how our people are.
(29:40):
We have all this other stuff, these historical traumas, and
we have pain. Every single Indigenous person, every single Indigenous family,
just has tremendous, tremendous amounts of pain. And so as
we look at reconnecting with the land, reconnecting with the language,
I think these concepts of wholeness and starting with what's
there is really important. And so I was hoping you
(30:01):
could touch in that a little bit more.
Speaker 3 (30:03):
Yeah, I will start by saying, half the battle is
being able to feel safe to explore self. That's half
the battle. That's most of the battle. Because while I
can tell you all day long that I trust the
people that I work with beautiful healers, not everyone chooses
(30:23):
to have a therapist. In fact, it's important to have
someone in your life. And it doesn't have to be
a Western therapist. You know, for some of us, it
could be a friend, it could be a family member,
it could be a mentor the bottom line is finding
someone you can trust. The point that I really need
to make is you know we can. It goes back
(30:46):
to we can create space for people to heal themselves
and there are ways to help someone feel safe enough
to start exploring that. And you know, for some people
they go to maybe if they're with a substance use addiction,
they might go to AA. They might turn to AA
and that might work for them. And for some people
(31:07):
AA doesn't work, and maybe a clinician, a mental health
therapist who can address both trauma and substance use works
for them. You have to find somebody that you can
trust and hopefully what will happen in that relationship is
that you are willing. You have to have willingness. You
have to be willing to heal yourself. You have to
(31:29):
recognize shame and guilt. Many times, shame and guilt keep
us sick as people, and shame and guilt are very
powerful forces against somebody saying I need help and I
want to share maybe something that I did that I
have regrets and I want to address it. So creating
what we do is we create space for people who
(31:52):
want to change and we journey with them. We have
to heal with each other, and healing is not meant
to be done alone. You know, as our people, you know,
way back we held each other up and we did
not tear each other down. And many of those that
caused harm or cause harm are also individuals with history
(32:15):
of harm caused to them, and so it gets very
complicated because that does not make a wrong right. And
that's another conversation that we tend to have when people
are ready to go there and when somebody I have
witnessed it in very miraculous ways, when somebody is ready
(32:36):
to own the harm that they've caused, it is the
most incredible thing to observe them transform. Creating safe psychological
space is the key to that, and that can be
challenging with the history that we've gone through when it
comes to providers that might be a stranger. And so
here that's why I mention it's really important that the
(33:00):
foundation of our work in CBS Healing Center is to
really remember our tribal values, to really make it safe
for somebody to be them their authentic self, honest, and
to be ready to address the shame and guilt.
Speaker 1 (33:16):
Yeah oh wow. And as we sort of engage in
these conversations, like I continue to think about a number
of different things from from my personal experience and also
just from talking with elders, Like when when I were
to record them. A big question I would ask them
is and I would ask him in the in pling,
I would say toku and what hung kdnique eat cook?
(33:41):
Question two, what do you want your grandchildren to know?
If you tell me, I will try to teach it
to them. And when they kept talking and they talked
about things about how we are as a people and
what our values are and what we do, I continue
to come back to things, and I'm always trying to
sort of continually analyze our own people to think about
(34:02):
what kinds of things do we need because we are
collectively battered peoples. I remember this one educator. He said,
it's battered people's syndrome. Colonialism just beats people and beats
people and beats people. There's a quote by a Maori
scholar which is something along the lines of one of
the most dangerous things that colonization did was got us
to stop believing in ourselves. And so we're looking for
(34:24):
these external solutions sometimes or sometimes we're engaged in behaviors
that might be enabling more harm. Like someone once said
to me, hurt people, hurt people. And I said, well,
I think I get what you're saying, but you could
also say hungry people eat babies right like that. It's
not a necessary thing. It's not just because someone harms
(34:45):
you doesn't mean you now have to harm someone. Like
the cycle has to break somewhere, it has to stop.
But in order for it to stop, we're going to
have to have these hard conversations about you touched a child,
you did something to someone when they were in a
state when they couldn't really say yes to what you're
trying to do. You did these things, you said these things,
and so to sort of name these harms and to
(35:06):
think about what they do and not come to a
place of just the sort of toilet bowl effect of
guilt and shame and how that can just sort of
create this destructive environment for a lot of people. It's
a huge, huge task to sort of look at transforming
these things. And so we've mentioned a couple times where
you work, so maybe we can talk a little bit
(35:27):
about like specifically, what is the program? How did it grow?
I think you're the one who's watering the plants and
building the forest, which is just really amazing, And I
know that's a lot of pressure on you, but what
I see is that you're building something powerful and something lasting,
and I want folks to know what it is.
Speaker 3 (35:46):
Yeah, thank you. When I think about the work that
we're doing here, let me just back up and say
when I was trained, I was trained as a clinical
community psychologist with a rural Indigenous emphasis. And when I
first applied to the program, I was actually in Sitka,
and I applied to the program because of those last
(36:07):
words rural Indigenous emphasis, because honestly, I didn't know what
a PhD was. I mean, I knew it was a
terminal degree. I knew that you could be called doctor
when you're done, but that was not what I was
After I heard the words rural Indigenous emphasis, and I
thought about my hometown. So that's just something that I
wanted to mention. I knew where my passion lied from
(36:27):
years of doing community based work in my region and
the illusions and provoofs. I also felt very passionate about
the field of behave for health due to the history
of my mother and the Elliot Internment. I didn't know
anything about the Elliot Internment. I turned eighteen and I
got a check from the federal government that was eighteen
(36:50):
thousand dollars and I had no clue what it was,
and my family didn't tell me what it was. I
just knew that kids on the island would say, are
you turning eighteen? You're getting your corn beef money. And
I remember thinking, I don't know what that is, and yeah,
I turned eighteen soon and then I got the money,
and I still didn't know. No one explained to me
or I just had no clue. So I started to
(37:12):
train to become a psychologist. And there was a flyer
on the wall and it said the Elliot Story, the
Untold Story, and I remember thinking, I'm going to go
check that out. And around the same time, one of
my professors said, who knows what historical trauma is? Does
anyone want to share? And you could hear a pin
drop in the room. And this was around two thousand
and seven, and I just remember thinking, I want to
(37:33):
say something because I just watched the Elliut story and
I know my own family, and so I shared the
story of my family. But when I walked into that
Bear Too Theater and pub to watch the Elliut story,
the until story, which is where they played it there,
my grandpa was testifying to the federal government in Unana,
(37:53):
and I just was so confused because no one told
me what this was, where it came from the history was.
And afterwards I asked an elder. Many of those elders
have now passed on, and I said, why didn't my
mom ever talk about this? And she said, because it's
not in the textbook. And we were told we're liars,
and so what we did is we forgave and we
(38:15):
moved forward. And I said, what does that do psychologically
to our people? And she said, well, when you hold
it in, it does manifest into disease, such as addictions,
such as cancer, such as many things. And so all
of that really pushed me hard because there were many
times in my academic journey that I wanted to quit,
(38:38):
and I just kept remembering elders saying, you started it,
finish it, and times when I said I feel like
I'm alone. I remember when elder said, imagine a forest
of hundreds of trees and you're one of those trees,
and he said, you're not alone, but you feel alone,
and you need to finish this for our people. So
I share those things because I am driven no matter
(39:03):
how hard it is, and I do not think it's hopeless.
I still believe that there is so much hope, and
there's so much opportunity and I can see it in
my own children of breaking the cycle. I have two
children ten years apart, and my children can say I
had a really good life, Mama, and that means the
(39:24):
world to me. They don't have to suffer some of
the things that I've suffered. So breaking the cycle is
really important. So the work that we do here is
really important for helping people to see themselves, to have
a sense of belonging, and to recognize that their full
future and potential is in their hands. And it really
(39:44):
starts with us. It starts when people start to lose hope.
I like to remind them it starts with you. It's
never too late. Look at the elders that come to therapy.
They are ever so cute working on themselves. Elders, elderly elders,
working on themselves in therapy is the most beautiful part
(40:05):
of my job. And it's even more fun when they're
willing to try a tool that is introduced by Western society,
western psychology to help themselves. But also we tie it
back into what did our people do? What did our
people do for this thing called mindfulness? What did our
(40:25):
people do? You know, it's really the foundational approach of
respect for each other, respect for elders, respect for self.
It goes back to our tribal values. Everything we learn
in Western psychology, our people have already been doing for many,
many years, thousands of years, and so we tie that back.
So the work we do here is we do mention
(40:45):
our tools and skills that we learn from education, but
we tie back in how it already exists within us
through our tribal values. Probably one of the best stories
I've ever heard as an individual suffering from addiction, and
the short story is it was during being out on
the boat and away from the community for weeks at
a time that they found the most healing just being
(41:08):
on the water, having their mind clear from technology and
from noise and from pain. That was their true medicine.
And so we really tried to bring that. We bring
those those thoughts and what already exists in us as
Native people in this space, these four walls of our
healing center.
Speaker 1 (41:31):
May your spirit be like water that has settled clear.
That's a metaphor that I was thinking of that was
taught to us. It's like if you just went and
scooped out some water from especially a river that's coming
from a glacier. If you just scooped that water up,
you'd see all these particles and sediments floating around in there.
But if it wasn't a clear container and you just
(41:52):
left it long enough, it would just settle nice and clear.
And so that's a concept and thing get for just
being with yourself and being steady and just allowing yourself
to just relax into a state of calmness. And so
that's what I'm hoping for you as you're listening to this,
and we'll be right back. We're gonna take our second break,
(42:14):
and then we'll close out this conversation on healing and wellness.
So you are your best self and you are the
thing that Indigenous people's need. So stay strong, be good.
Speaker 4 (42:25):
Gheeeshyuhyah God say God he kinnor is away.
Speaker 1 (43:31):
He and we're back uns t. That translates to where
the dream of our ancestors. One time we recorded this
speaker's name was kaw Cyril George. I was so amazing,
(43:55):
so wonderful, and we asked him to record some stories
with us and cling it and he said, gonna chiesh
artu yey Ti ya ya gi ya achinhiyad at. He said,
I feel thankful today my grandchildren touched my arm and
(44:17):
led me here. They are my courage. And just like
to hear this ninety year old, wonderful person who has
so much wisdom, so many stories. He himself survived a
boarding school that actively tried to prohibit him from speaking,
and he was a wonderful speaker. But just for him
(44:37):
to sort of look at us and say they are
my courage, like he was talking about us when he
said that, and it was just such a wonderful thing
just to feel that we were bringing something to him right,
because we looked at our elders for help, We looked
at our elders for guidance, and then we hear like
we're helping them. And so coming back to this concept
of a holistic idea of indigenous peoples of strength and
(45:00):
beauty and courage and wellness. If we did our job
right collectively, what do you think things look like twenty
years from now, thirty years from now, when we're the
elders hopefully that they're bringing into the room to talk
to them.
Speaker 3 (45:18):
That is a very very big question, and it actually
brings a lot of emotion to me because the work
is very tiring and I still have hope. So it's
a huge, huge question. So as I ponder that, I'll
jump first to what I had mentioned earlier about I
(45:43):
want children to not suffer the way many of us have,
because the world's already really hard to live in, and
we have technology and social media that makes has really
even complicated it further because information is coming in. Knowledge
is there, and that knowledge, if it's negative, it can
(46:07):
really impact one's mental health. And when you're listening to
negativity all the time, it can really exacerbate already underlying
depression or anxiety, or sense of belonging. And so what
I imagine it could be like is being able to
feel like you belong, being able to feel psychologically safe
(46:33):
in spaces that you share with your family and friends
and community, Being in a space where you feel like
you have a strong sense of self and confidence, so
that you know where to turn and to ask for
help when you're suffering, and to not avoid how many
(46:54):
of us have gone into environments where we avoid maybe
taking a certain route to avoid another human being and
to avoid energy. I imagine a world and that is
something that exists profoundly among our own people due to
this extensive history of pain, pain that continues to perpetuate
(47:16):
today among ourselves. And we know how we got here.
Many of us know that that history of trauma and
what has happened, it has become a cycle. So I
imagine a world where if I were to narrow it down,
because when you speak and you try to imagine something,
(47:37):
you also should be doing the work. And so one
of the things that we do as a team here
is we hold each other accountable, and we look into
each other's eyes, and we are not afraid of having
hard conversation and encouraging each other to get help when
we see one another suffering and suffering, meaning if you
are displaying negative attitude towards each other, lateral violence, whatever
(48:02):
you want to call it, we hold each other accountable
to take a look at yourself and to start healing yourself.
I want to see a future where we can hold
each other, be honest with each other, be authentic, and
guide each other. Because the fact is is will never
be perfect. In fact, one of my elite mentors said
it would be a boring world if we were perfect.
(48:24):
So we'll never be perfect. We'll never defeat anxiety and
depression and substances, but I do believe we can live
more in balance and not disproportionate. And in doing so,
it's finding a sense of self, having a sense of
belonging and feeling safe, being able to be that baby
language speaker and not be scolded when you don't do
(48:45):
it right, having someone gently say let me teach you,
let me show you, and having the person not respond
with anger due to a history of trauma that lives
within them, because that's what's happening, it's perpetuated. And so
it would be an amazing world if our people can
really hold up to our values in an authentic and
(49:07):
honest way.
Speaker 1 (49:08):
Okay, wonderful. You know, I was thinking as in Hawaii
and we're just having a conversation, and I've had this
image that sort of popped up in my mind. So
in Alaska, almost every single language is extremely endangered. It's
a very dangerous situation in that if there's not very
(49:29):
serious structural changes that happen quickly, we're going to watch
these languages begin to disappear. And they don't just disappear,
they're getting killed off by colonization. And so there's agency
behind colonization that does attempt to completely annihilate indigenous languages.
So if we look at survival, we have to transform
indigenous communities and we have to transform the colonizers as well,
(49:52):
Like these descendants of colonizers who were active agents of
destruction have to now become active agents of healing themselves
some transformation. So when people come to learn the language,
I usually like to tell them, oh, this is wonderful.
I'm so glad you're here. You were needed, you were valued,
you were exactly what we want, exactly what we need.
But if you do not speak this language and you
(50:13):
want to, that means you cannot live the same life
you lived before. That's not a bad thing. That means
you're the one who has to create that room in
your life. And what I like to think of it
as is, there's a whole bunch of your ancestors in
a room right near you, and they have all their
favorite foods out. The table is set, and they're just
looking at you and saying, a good chunk inkachra, and
(50:38):
they're saying, come here, grandchild, come sit by us. We're
going to eat together. And you have to answer that call.
But answering that call means you have to create that
time and that space in your life. So if you
were ever thinking about maybe I'll quit smoking, today's a
great day to do that. Maybe I'll quit drinking. Today's
a great day to do that. Maybe you all quit
(51:01):
engaging in drugs, and so today is a great day
to do that. But not to say you need to
do all of those things all at once, like you
have to set yourself up for a gradual success, a
shift in your perspective of what you want and envisioning
of future. There was there was this elder and he
tragically passed away not too long ago. His name was
(51:23):
Cocktage Norman James, and he used to tell me our
people could see way out into the future in our language.
And he says, I'll tell you about it sometime. And
I tried. I kept trying to get him on to
record him saying this in the language. It's like, let
me will you say it? Will you let me record you?
Speaker 3 (51:38):
He said yes.
Speaker 1 (51:39):
Then I come down him. He's like, I got a
headache today. I was like, okay, next day, I guess
sore throat, don't feel good. Okay, next day my stomach
doesn't feel good. And then I said, Okay, today's our
last day getting together. Can you do it? I would
love if you could. And he says, okay, just you
and me will walk down by the lake, just you
and me, and he just does very short conversations, only
about eight minutes long. And I thought, huh, maybe there's
(52:02):
a lot in there. But then when I went back
and listened to it, he gave us so much information.
And the biggest thing he said there was probably our
ancestors could see way out in front of themselves because
they were always thinking about this place they're reserving for
their grandchildren, and so thinking about this concept of future
generations and thinking about this concept of ancestors. So if
(52:23):
we're doing it right, I think twenty years from now,
all the current languages in Alaska are alive and are
gaining strength in terms of the number of speakers in
the places the languages are spoken. The state of Alaska
has done a lot to acknowledge its own historical role
in putting indigenous peoples through a tremendous amount of harm
in their languages in a severely endangered state. And then
(52:46):
we have schools that are teaching in our language we
have kids that are speaking in our languages, and we
are living absent collectively of a huge trauma. Herold Napoleon
talks about this in his text, like the great death
that the colonizer and the colonize have to collectively overcome,
and then that releases a burden from the entire population
(53:06):
to say, we don't have to carry this, this horrible
thing that happened, this series of horrible things that happen.
But my hope is that we're we're radiating a sense
of well being, of health, of happiness, of joy. And
you know, life is not always just good stuff. You're
gonna have to go through grief, You're gonna have to
go through sorrow, You're gonna have to go through loss,
but that when that loss happens, we have the things
(53:29):
in our culture, in our language that equips us to
reach out and grab each other's hand and hold each
other up through the hard times, that we can get
there and get back to tell in good jokes. As
we start to wrap this up, you have any closing
thoughts for our listeners.
Speaker 3 (53:46):
I would just go back to it starts with us,
It starts with you. No one can do it for you.
Show up for yourself, Show up for yourself, and you know,
as you described, take a piece at a time, don't
get overwhelmed. And you know, change is something that only
we have control over. No one else can do it
(54:08):
for us. And you don't have to do it alone.
There are people, there are people there that would love
to hold your hand through the process. And there's nothing
better than to cry and laugh with somebody else to
help help you through it.
Speaker 1 (54:20):
Yeah, that same elder one time, he told me when
I was a young man, is from Carcross, which is
in the Yukon territory. So as well as a young
man needs to walk around and these old people are
just walking around trying to find someone to laugh with,
he says, I'm an elder, I just walk around trying
to find people to laugh with. And it was so
fun and we used to just laugh and tell jokes
(54:41):
and just just have so much fun. And as you
go through your own journey, like there's no endpoint too,
because sometimes if we might get a little bit confused
perhaps or hopeful that the life will be like a
movie with a very clean conflict and resolution in this
new world order, and there might be occasions in your
(55:03):
life where you have that, But really you're looking at
like a lifelong process, and as your process comes, you
look at yourself and you look at your journey, you
look at your actions, and your actions do not define you,
but the collective decisions that you make do help sort
of portray your values, your sense of what you think
(55:23):
things should be. And so as we wrap up this episode,
I'll share one more thing. When Alaska Native languages were
becoming the co official languages of Alaska, we're invited to
visit with the governor and have this signing ceremony and
someone stood up and he spoke, maybe it's Gwitchen, maybe
it's Kuoia Khan. It wasn't into your Dene language. And
(55:44):
he said to the governor, like in front of everybody, says,
you know, in our languages, it's very hard to just
say one thing and do another. You can't do it.
It's very hard to lie in our languages. And you're
a politician, So you should really learn an Alaska native language,
so you guys could stop lying so much. I left
(56:05):
so hard because like I could feel a setup, and
I just remember thinking, is he really gonna do that?
And he did, and it was hilarious. I don't know
if the person he said it to laughed a whole lot,
but we sure did. So whatever you're doing, wherever you're at,
I hope that you are successful, that you're feeling good
about yourself. If you're looking for help, get the help
(56:25):
you need. If someone else reaches out to you, try
to be a person for them that they can count on,
because I think if we help each other, this is
also a value in tring. Get this one elder it
Sames Kakoonish George Davis. He said, just love and kindness.
Just put that in your heart. Maybe if your life
is out of control, the people that you were kind with,
maybe they will help you. So as we start to
(56:48):
wrap up this episode, I'm so thankful to doctor Tina
Woods for sharing your perspective, your knowledge, your time with us.
She works at Central Council of Clinket and Heida in
the community Behavioral Services program. And I just see wonderful
things that are developing here, that have already developed and
that will continue to do.
Speaker 2 (57:07):
So.
Speaker 1 (57:08):
Yeah, way gonna cheesh
This episode contains sensitive conversations about historical and personal trauma, recovery,
and Indigenous led behavioral health programs. If you are triggered,
please reach out to supportive people in programs, and if
you are in crisis, please call the care line at
nine eight eight or one eight seven seven two six
(00:21):
six four three five seven For emergencies dial nine one one.
Stay safe, Know you were loved, Help each other out
and be strong in these movements of decolonization and language reclamation.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
Tay he.
Speaker 1 (00:38):
Docta he. They try to colonizs, try to genocidis. Yet
we're still here with the tongue on pro but to
(01:03):
cut you hanyata. This is the tongue unbroken. Season two,
episode three, and I am excited. Today we're having a
conversation with doctor Tina Woods Nakkasini, and we are going
to be talking about mental health wellness, Native communities overcoming
(01:26):
historical traumas. So there there will be some sensitive things
perhaps in this episode, but the intention here is to
build strength, build community, build capacity, and to continually overcome
historical and current and individual and collective traumas and work
towards a decolonized community that is embracing wellness and health
(01:51):
and hopefully sobriety, and just being open and honest, and
especially as you come into your work and decolonization, language revitalization,
checking in with each other, checking in with yourself, maintaining
a good sense of balance and well being is tremendously
important to avoid burnout, to avoid lateral violence, to avoid
(02:14):
creating hierarchies that make it difficult for people to come
into language spaces. So I'm excited for this conversation. These
are things that we need to be talking about. And
I'm here with a brilliant and talented individual. And will
you introduce yourself?
Speaker 3 (02:31):
Sure on on Hello, Hello, I'm Tina Woods. I am
Unanga originally from Saint Paul Island, otherwise known as Alute.
I am the daughter of the late Maria Sheishnikoff. My
mother was Unanga and my father, the late Wan Lungeruro
is tomorrow from the island of Guam, so I come
from two islands. I was also recently adopted into the
(02:54):
Coogwantan clan and my name given is Noctusini and I'm
a licensed clinical community psychologist with the rural Indigenous emphasis.
And I'm happy to be here.
Speaker 1 (03:06):
Go, Jeesh. Half a day. I was in a language
program in Hilo and one of the members of our
cohort was Chamorrow, and so we used to talk about
language programs that are over there in Guam, and everything
was cold to him. And so it's really great to
visit with you and to have some time to spend
(03:26):
with you as we talk about wellness and as we
talk about your work. Also, I just want to acknowledge
there's multiple places in Southeast Alaska where Ononga people were
brought here during World War two, and so we always
want to acknowledge when we're interfacing and talking with each
other are shared histories, and some of our histories is incredible.
(03:49):
Displacement and removal from your lands for protection is what
some people say, but just in terms of the way
people were housed and the way people were treated was
really inhumane, and it happened in our lands. But there
was an elder I did a lot of work with
her name Jesse Johnny, and she talked about the people
of Huna and how they used to go to Funder
(04:11):
Bay and make sure that they brought food and they
chatted with people and they said, this is how you
hunt here. This is how you fish here, and they
really wanted to make sure that people were comfortable. And
if I think that people were hosting, no one would
have been treated like that. So we just want to
acknowledge the harm done two Anong people on our lands
and the work that's been done to acknowledge that in
(04:33):
the places that it happened. So, doctor Tina, can you
tell us a little bit about the work that you
do here in our community.
Speaker 3 (04:40):
I act both as an administrator and a clinical psychologist.
I mostly identify as a community psychologist. I really believe
in bringing people together to heal through each other. Through
my training in a rural, remote community setting, I feel
strongly that programs don't heal people well, it's people that
(05:00):
heal people. We heal through relationship. We tend to see
each other, see ourselves through each other. And so some
of the work that I started doing here at Clinket
and Haida is creating the foundation for a healing center,
so community and behavioral services healing center. And while we
do many of the same outpatient services that you would
(05:22):
find at other clinics throughout the state, in addition to that,
we really do try to do work that is based
on the foundation of our tribal values, and we try
to create space really meeting people where they're at and
breaking down the barriers. In our field, it can be
highly regulated and there's a lot of administrative paperwork that
(05:43):
comes with coming in to see someone for help, and
so that's one of the areas that we really focus on,
is just really being with someone and removing that piece
of paper, really getting to know them and build relationship,
build trust before we start gathering information, making sure that
they feel comfortable in our setting, offering them a cup
of coffee, and just getting to know them, getting to
(06:05):
know who they are. Many of us are trained as
Western providers, and many of us grew up native, and
so we combined who we are as native people with
some of our training. The foundation of our work is
our tribal values, however, and just treating people with respect
and really acknowledging that it's scary task for help. So
(06:27):
when people come in seeking support from us, we pay
attention to their affect we pay attention to their body language,
we pay attention to their words to ensure that we're
meeting them and ensuring that they feel like they can
trust us. Because when we are in such a setting,
(06:47):
it can be very intimidating. Sometimes people want to come
and ask for help, and we remind them, et eat,
it's you know, it's within us, it's within you to
heal yourself. So we really see a creating space for
people to heal themselves. But we use some of the
tools from our training to help them and to help
them explore some of the cognitive distortions or some of
(07:11):
the trauma that continues to live in their nervous system,
to help them understand why they might be triggered by
certain sound or smell, to understand the history of trauma
that our people have been through. We serve children to adults, elders.
We love when elders come in for therapy. There was
(07:32):
a time in my practice where it was kind of
a foreign thing for an elder to say I need help,
And today it's probably my most favorite population to work
with because I'm so inspired by people who recognize that
forever we are healing ourselves and learning. And there's nothing
(07:52):
more enjoyable to sit with an elder who's looking to
us to heal themselves and for us to create the
space for them to do that. And so we do
a lot of community work. We tend to host opportunities
for men to heal together, for women to heal together.
And we have an opportunity coming up to host gathering
(08:16):
for children to heal from significant loss, a grief and
loss camp for children and addressing their grief and loss
so that they don't take some of what they experience
at this young age into their adulthood. Working with children
on that note is really important to us. I think
we underestimate their ability to feel, We under estimate their
(08:40):
ability to have emotions and to have thoughts about what's
happening around them. So we also create space for them
to at their cognitive level to explore some of the
challenges that the world presents to them.
Speaker 1 (08:52):
That's amazing, that's amazing. I was thinking of this thing.
Get word, it's cut to duke, and cut to duke
means it's solid like this, there's a table in front
of us, and that table is solid. Or if you
had a rock that you think it's not going to
break apart if you put it in the fire, you know,
like some rocks are, they'll explode if they get too
(09:13):
hot and stuff, and so cut to duke could refer
to that, but it could also mean like the fortress
or the village is impenetrable, like it's got solid defenses.
And it also means for a wound to heal up completely.
And so I think about this kind of stuff because
as we look at living in wellness and living in
(09:33):
an indigenous sense of wellness, I really admire that you're
looking at bringing bringing together methodologies that are maybe external
to Indigenous peoples and then methodologies that are internal to
indigenous peoples. Because one of the things that we found
I was giving testimony at the state legislature and a
legislator said, well, how do you balance the ancient of
(09:55):
the Alaska Native language and the modern of English? And
I said, well, there's a bit of a stereotype there
is that we're ancient and English is modern. And that's
a dangerous stereotype to think because behind that is these
concepts of primitive and advanced. But at the same time,
our cultures and our languages were prohibited for probably eighty
(10:16):
years in Alaska, and so we were not allowed to
bring our knowledge into science and into medicine and into
all these different sort of fields. And so what we're
looking at now when we revitalize our language and we
really try to look at what it tells us. We
tried to bring some of those concepts into things like
medicine and healing therapy, and so as we do that,
(10:39):
it's really exciting to think about what the future could
look like. I was involved with our healthcare organization years ago,
and we used to have these conversations about trying to
transform what a hospital is. So a hospital isn't a
place where you go when you're hurt, but it's a
place that radiates health. Right, It's this place that sort
of acknowledges things, and it has conversations because we're continually
(11:02):
trying to convince our own peoples to say, talk about
your pain and talk about your things that hurt. Because
as we look at this the approach from being a
Native man identifying as a Native man, I've been told
sometimes like you're not supposed to be sad. You're supposed
to just be tough, and you're supposed to just you know,
you never cry and you never do this. And I
(11:22):
think sometimes there's also a stereotype of what indigenous peoples are.
And so I thought of this because I was teaching
Clingett one time, and someone said, I didn't realize everybody
could learn clinget. She was an older white lady, and
I do think she was getting some dementia and perhaps
her filter was eroding a little bit, because she said,
(11:42):
my dad was a teacher for a long time at
a boarding school. Right. I was like, okay, And she said,
and I didn't realize that everybody could learn Flinget. And
I said, well, everybody should who lives here, because that's
how the language stays alive. It'd be great if you
go to France, if you're going to live there, you
should learn French, and if you're going to live here,
you should learn Slinget. And then she's and it was funny,
and I didn't realize that. I think that people laughed,
(12:04):
and I didn't really know how to respond to this.
So I said, ah, well, I guess when you were young,
like white people were taking everything from us, taking the land,
taking the children out of the homes, taking everything, and
so it wasn't a very fun time. But we were
still over here telling jokes, you know, so but like
just trying to sort of think of laughter and respect.
(12:25):
And it's a challenge, you know, as we talk about
serving different ages within our population as well to serve elders,
because we've been in meetings sometimes and we've been in
language gatherings where we've seen someone who is an elder
treat someone very badly, and that creates a very confusing
situation for us because that's an elder. We respect them,
(12:47):
we'd understand the knowledge they have, they can speak the language,
but we just witnessed an act of violence and all
of us know that, like, that's something that shouldn't have happened,
but we didn't really have the tools to stop that.
And so some of the things that we've been trying
to do with our language work is to be more
active in the concept of bringing in healing, bringing in
harm reduction, to the point where we were working on
(13:11):
a form where people would sign it to say I
will not cause harm and if I do, I'll be
sent home, like and we never got to a point
where we had to sort of enforce that, But the
hope was if people could see that and see that
harm has been caused, that maybe there could be some
harm reduction.
Speaker 3 (13:29):
You're bringing up so many thoughts to mind around language
and around harm and around mental health and around our
history and so I want to talk about a couple
experiences that can can demonstrate that. So I had mentioned
I'm ellute, and I'm one of eleven siblings, and my
(13:52):
late mother spoke fluent alut and she never taught any
of us. I know a few words. I try to
explore learning the language, and I was corrected for not
pronouncing something right and my feelings got hurt. But I
think it goes a little deeper. And because I'm a
(14:13):
psychologist and I've studied this, I have a better understanding
of me in that context, and I want to share that,
just to take it to another level of what that
feels like. So when I was growing up, I did
experience emotional, physical, mental abuse, and so I would say
(14:35):
that I was what you call classically conditioned to where
if I got scolded, so if somebody's voice and tone raised,
then I knew what was coming next. So my body
was conditioned to not make a mistake, and I was
conditioned to always be good and do the right thing.
(14:57):
And so that follows you later in life, and so
later in life, anything I did in my upbringing, once
I left that environment, I was living with that trauma
in my body and that memory, and so for me,
the classical conditioning came from just knowing as soon as
someone raised their voice or used a certain tone with me,
(15:20):
I would go back to that place, believe it or not,
because trauma lives in the body. And so that really
shut me down from wanting to learn, and being criticized
for being a leader and not being able to speak
my language. It creates a lot of emotional pain for me.
It hasn't stopped me from hoping. I really have rephrased
(15:42):
reframed that I don't know how to speak yet being
adopted into the clinkic culture, I am excited to learn
the language. And this is very complex because if you
think about my mother, who actually was a young woman
during the internment, my mother was removed from the provlofs
(16:04):
to fund Bay and so her life led into many
things that involve mental health behavioral health issues. And so
that's when we start talking about intergenerational trauma and transmission
of that trauma. And so when I think about language
and I think about how we are impacted today the
things that prevent us from learning. I love hearing what
(16:26):
you have to say about setting guidelines and a group
agreements about creating a psychologically safe space to learn our language.
Our language is so powerful, and one thing I do
know is you cannot translate the English language directly into
our native language. And our native language has so much
depth in what we say and how we conduct ourselves
(16:48):
as people. When I was teaching at the University in Anchorage,
I remember a class where I invited an elder and
we were talking about language, and this elder said the
English language is stupid. She is an elderly elder, and
it really offended my students, and I thought, oh my gosh,
I'm going to have to repair this. So I found
(17:09):
it very humorous because this is a very loved and
respected elder. And the next time I invited another elder
to my class and I had told him here's what happened,
and he laughed and laughed, and then he created a
conversation in the class. And I had a student who
comes from another country, and she said, you know, you're
making me really think deeply. When I talk to my
(17:30):
children in English, they don't listen. But when I talk
to my children in my language, they recognize, and they
recognize and they offer respect. She said, there's a different
meaning when we speak in our language, and those are
just some of the stories that come to mind.
Speaker 1 (17:45):
I want to thank you for sharing some of your
truth and some of your experiences, because I think there's
a lot of people out there who've experienced that they
worked up the courage to say, I'm going to go
learn this language. I'm going to go access something that
was denied to entire generations of my people. And then
you go into a room and then sometimes, whether it
(18:06):
was intentional or not, you're treated like you've done something incorrectly,
just right at the beginning. And so one of the
things that we talk a lot about in language learning,
we being folks at the university and folks who are
working in sling it right now, and language teachers that
I really relate to is making sure that your language
space is a safe space and that you have a
(18:27):
lot of room to grow. And this one elder, she said,
her name is Pakashat Florence Shakeley, she said, You're going
to be born again in this language. You're going to
be a baby again. And I was really excited. But then,
like after I've been learning the language and speaking it
and teaching it, I make sure to let students know
it's like you will be born again. But that means
it's exciting because you get a new start, which is fun.
(18:48):
But also you're going to have a little baby Indigenous
brain and you're going to have this full grown English brain,
and they're going to be battling for time and space.
And English is a colonizing language and so that you're
always going to be going back and forth and how
you think about these things. And one of the things
that's really important in language learning environments is to say,
I'm going to have these adults and they're going to
(19:09):
sound very different because they're coming now. They're not just
baby speakers. They're coming from English to an indigenous language,
which is the purest act of decolonization, I think. But
that means you're going to have to give them time
and space to sound. They're going to sound inaccurate, and
they're going to sound inauthentic. But that's okay because if
(19:29):
you presented the wrong way, they might feel like they've
failed before they even started. And so for us, like
we're dealing with all of these traumas, all these these
different things, and as we come back to it, and
we're going to take a little break here, but I
just want to make sure that if you listen to this,
you're taking good care of yourself, you're thinking good, positive thoughts,
(19:50):
like we're going to do the hard work that it
takes to heal and to recover, and to create safe
spaces and to create places where decolonization and language revitalization
are not just possible, but they're pretty much guaranteed. But
in order to do that, we have to make sure
that we're practicing self care. So if you're feeling near crisis,
if you're feeling triggered, make sure that you're taking care
(20:11):
of yourself and making sure that you know you're not alone.
There are rising numbers of people who are making moves
towards wellness and health. We'll take a short break and
we'll be right back to cheese.
Speaker 2 (20:35):
One are two or three times you try any friends,
you run all around without joy, struggle yesterday, you struggle
still new day now, but you'll find a broader away.
(20:59):
My brother said, just don't you know.
Speaker 4 (21:02):
What about the way too?
Speaker 2 (21:05):
Wait it back for those who came believe in yourself Now,
Bullie in somehow dona DEI call.
Speaker 1 (21:18):
Theasy and we're back. So thinking of this next part
of our conversation. There's a couple of little stories I
was thinking of. One is this concept of manifest destiny.
(21:41):
And so there was a T shirt company. I'm not
going to name them because I'm angry at them and
I think they never fixed their mistake. But they had
an advertisement and in the advertisement there was a white
male model who was jumping joyously with a T shirt
that said manifest Destiny on it. A lot of Indigenous
people's out against it and said, this is not a
(22:02):
good thing to put on a shirt. This is not
a great concept, because what manifest destiny is for indigenous
peoples in Native America is this concept that God was
guiding people over here to correct everything that was here.
And so it gave them a lot of a superiority
complex that they had the authority to come and just
annihilate people for the greater good. And so what was
(22:24):
really interesting is the person, someone from the T shirt
company then had some social media response which was a
survival of the fittest, Survival of the fittest, and that
was their response. And so it's like, oh, this is
like a white supremacy T shirt company. I don't really
get it. But another sort of thing and linking these
thoughts together. I was going to teach a class and
I saw a young Native man come out that I know,
(22:47):
and I said, Hey, how's it going And he said,
I've never felt bad about being Indigenous until right now.
I said, Okay, tell me what's going on. And he said,
I just came out of this class. And it was
a class on sociology and they said, if you're Alaska Native,
you're born disadvantaged. And so sometimes, like if you look
at any of the statistics that are out there, it's
really bad for us. We lead the nation and suicide
(23:10):
rates and incarceration rates, and violence, police attacks against our peoples,
on and on, like sexual violence against women, missing and
murdered indigenous women. So if you look at the statistics,
it's very dangerous because sometimes if you combine the statistics
with manifest destiny, you might think it's already over, but
it really isn't. And so we deal with this in
(23:30):
language revitalization. When people start looking at the numbers how
many speakers are left, Well, there's less than ten. Okay, well,
I wish we could have done something. So sometimes people
resign themselves to thinking like this is the destiny that
was there, and so sometimes we have to push back
against some of these concepts. No, this is a story
that is happening right now, this is our lives. We're
the ones who are in control. So as indigenous peoples
(23:53):
take more control of healthcare, of mental health, of wellness,
a lot of those things are going to be involving
so determination, which means we will be aware of these statistics.
We'll be operating from a place of distinct intention to
create change or a different reality. And so that's different
than sort of like coming at it saying, Okay, all
(24:14):
these people are broken and we're just going to have
to be careful because they are broken. I think we're
looking for a different sort of approach, and I'm curious
what your approach is for those things.
Speaker 3 (24:24):
Again, you're bringing to my attention a lot of my
own experiences with focusing. Folks like to focus on and
we tend to be putting out fires constantly. And so
when I think about the work I do here, I
think about how we have people coming in needing services
(24:48):
because they're in crisis. What our team does is we
really try to remember that it's more than just the crisis.
So we really that's where we aim to do community
events to let people see each other, to see the strengths,
to see the power that we have as Indigenous people.
(25:10):
I think about some of the work I did again
at the university where there was a class that was
going to be dismissed from an opportunity for people to register.
There was a series of classes. They were all Alaska
NAA focused. The registrations were low, and I remember being
handed these classes as a student in psychology and told here,
(25:35):
you know, if you would like to teach these, rather
than us completely removing them as an option, you're welcome
to teach them. And I remember thinking I never taught
at a university, and I just remember thinking, can I
teach it how I want to teach it? And they said, sure,
it's your class, you could teach it however you want
to teach it. So I knew I wanted to teach
it in a circle, not in rows. And I knew
(25:58):
that I actually didn't have the information to teach around
many of these topics. I knew that I had to
bring in elders to help teach these courses. So I
considered myself more of a facilitator, and there were so
many stories from those experiences, and one in particular was
when a student approached me and said, you know, Professor Woods,
(26:20):
I just don't even understand. You know, domestic violence must
be something cultural. It's culturally accepted. And I said, no,
it's not. And if you can imagine, there were a
lot of students in there who were shocked by this statement.
But what I did was I always created a psychologically
safe space for people to learn. And so I asked
(26:40):
the student to take a book home and to read it.
And the quickest book at my hands where it was
The Way of the Human Being by Harold Napoleon, And
I said, just read this book. It's a really quick read,
and then come back and ask me that and she did,
and she came back in tears. There's so much about
our history that we don't know. There's so much about
our history that we don't even know as Native people.
(27:00):
And if you don't know, but you feel something, you
feel something, but you don't always have the words to
put to it. So these classes I was teaching, they
ended up with waitlists. It ended up growing big and fast,
you know, and there were waitlists. And I taught it
for about a year, and the students were mostly Alaska
(27:20):
Native students, and many times these students would say, I
just don't know why I feel this way. I don't
know why I feel this way. I don't know why
my parents never talked about something I don't understand. And
so I created an environment, a safe environment for people
to talk about these real the hidden we're still living
(27:42):
with it today and we don't have the words for it.
We don't have the words to express what we're feeling
and carrying in our veins from our ancestors, and so
the way we address these topics is safe space to
have the conversation. This woman had no clue. No, this
is not cultural. This is there's a whole history here,
(28:06):
and it's important for us to know the history in
order to talk about present day. So those are just
some of the things that come to mind.
Speaker 1 (28:13):
Geeesh, and you had brought up earlier in our conversation
this concept of it too, ye ye tea, which I
think is really important because when we talk about healing
and mental health and well being and gaining strength and
being courageous, I think it is important for people to
know that this isn't something they're going after externally. It's
(28:34):
not like you have to go find this concept of
well like, this concept of strength and this concept of
courage is inside of people already and so I think
those are really important from an Indigenous perspective of wellness
to look at things to say, Okay, there's a bunch
of stuff that happened, and there's a bunch of stuff
that maybe you have done, but that doesn't mean that
you are this type of person, like a bad person
(28:56):
or a harmful person. It means like there is work
to do, and some of that work can be repair work.
So there are really difficult conversations that need to happen.
So we've done there's groups of us that have done
some work with Indigenous men recently and just really trying
to call attention to say there's been a lot of
harm that has been done and that it continues to
(29:18):
be done to Indigenous women by Indigenous men, and that
means there's we're creating places that are not safe. And
if we go back to the warrior days, like our
role was to really protect each other and make sure
that we had safe spaces, and to engage in those
conversations is really challenging. It's very very challenging. And again,
we have these external stereotypes about how our people are.
(29:40):
We have all this other stuff, these historical traumas, and
we have pain. Every single Indigenous person, every single Indigenous family,
just has tremendous, tremendous amounts of pain. And so as
we look at reconnecting with the land, reconnecting with the language,
I think these concepts of wholeness and starting with what's
there is really important. And so I was hoping you
(30:01):
could touch in that a little bit more.
Speaker 3 (30:03):
Yeah, I will start by saying, half the battle is
being able to feel safe to explore self. That's half
the battle. That's most of the battle. Because while I
can tell you all day long that I trust the
people that I work with beautiful healers, not everyone chooses
(30:23):
to have a therapist. In fact, it's important to have
someone in your life. And it doesn't have to be
a Western therapist. You know, for some of us, it
could be a friend, it could be a family member,
it could be a mentor the bottom line is finding
someone you can trust. The point that I really need
to make is you know we can. It goes back
(30:46):
to we can create space for people to heal themselves
and there are ways to help someone feel safe enough
to start exploring that. And you know, for some people
they go to maybe if they're with a substance use addiction,
they might go to AA. They might turn to AA
and that might work for them. And for some people
(31:07):
AA doesn't work, and maybe a clinician, a mental health
therapist who can address both trauma and substance use works
for them. You have to find somebody that you can
trust and hopefully what will happen in that relationship is
that you are willing. You have to have willingness. You
have to be willing to heal yourself. You have to
(31:29):
recognize shame and guilt. Many times, shame and guilt keep
us sick as people, and shame and guilt are very
powerful forces against somebody saying I need help and I
want to share maybe something that I did that I
have regrets and I want to address it. So creating
what we do is we create space for people who
(31:52):
want to change and we journey with them. We have
to heal with each other, and healing is not meant
to be done alone. You know, as our people, you know,
way back we held each other up and we did
not tear each other down. And many of those that
caused harm or cause harm are also individuals with history
(32:15):
of harm caused to them, and so it gets very
complicated because that does not make a wrong right. And
that's another conversation that we tend to have when people
are ready to go there and when somebody I have
witnessed it in very miraculous ways, when somebody is ready
(32:36):
to own the harm that they've caused, it is the
most incredible thing to observe them transform. Creating safe psychological
space is the key to that, and that can be
challenging with the history that we've gone through when it
comes to providers that might be a stranger. And so
here that's why I mention it's really important that the
(33:00):
foundation of our work in CBS Healing Center is to
really remember our tribal values, to really make it safe
for somebody to be them their authentic self, honest, and
to be ready to address the shame and guilt.
Speaker 1 (33:16):
Yeah oh wow. And as we sort of engage in
these conversations, like I continue to think about a number
of different things from from my personal experience and also
just from talking with elders, Like when when I were
to record them. A big question I would ask them
is and I would ask him in the in pling,
I would say toku and what hung kdnique eat cook?
(33:41):
Question two, what do you want your grandchildren to know?
If you tell me, I will try to teach it
to them. And when they kept talking and they talked
about things about how we are as a people and
what our values are and what we do, I continue
to come back to things, and I'm always trying to
sort of continually analyze our own people to think about
(34:02):
what kinds of things do we need because we are
collectively battered peoples. I remember this one educator. He said,
it's battered people's syndrome. Colonialism just beats people and beats
people and beats people. There's a quote by a Maori
scholar which is something along the lines of one of
the most dangerous things that colonization did was got us
to stop believing in ourselves. And so we're looking for
(34:24):
these external solutions sometimes or sometimes we're engaged in behaviors
that might be enabling more harm. Like someone once said
to me, hurt people, hurt people. And I said, well,
I think I get what you're saying, but you could
also say hungry people eat babies right like that. It's
not a necessary thing. It's not just because someone harms
(34:45):
you doesn't mean you now have to harm someone. Like
the cycle has to break somewhere, it has to stop.
But in order for it to stop, we're going to
have to have these hard conversations about you touched a child,
you did something to someone when they were in a
state when they couldn't really say yes to what you're
trying to do. You did these things, you said these things,
and so to sort of name these harms and to
(35:06):
think about what they do and not come to a
place of just the sort of toilet bowl effect of
guilt and shame and how that can just sort of
create this destructive environment for a lot of people. It's
a huge, huge task to sort of look at transforming
these things. And so we've mentioned a couple times where
you work, so maybe we can talk a little bit
(35:27):
about like specifically, what is the program? How did it grow?
I think you're the one who's watering the plants and
building the forest, which is just really amazing, And I
know that's a lot of pressure on you, but what
I see is that you're building something powerful and something lasting,
and I want folks to know what it is.
Speaker 3 (35:46):
Yeah, thank you. When I think about the work that
we're doing here, let me just back up and say
when I was trained, I was trained as a clinical
community psychologist with a rural Indigenous emphasis. And when I
first applied to the program, I was actually in Sitka,
and I applied to the program because of those last
(36:07):
words rural Indigenous emphasis, because honestly, I didn't know what
a PhD was. I mean, I knew it was a
terminal degree. I knew that you could be called doctor
when you're done, but that was not what I was
After I heard the words rural Indigenous emphasis, and I
thought about my hometown. So that's just something that I
wanted to mention. I knew where my passion lied from
(36:27):
years of doing community based work in my region and
the illusions and provoofs. I also felt very passionate about
the field of behave for health due to the history
of my mother and the Elliot Internment. I didn't know
anything about the Elliot Internment. I turned eighteen and I
got a check from the federal government that was eighteen
(36:50):
thousand dollars and I had no clue what it was,
and my family didn't tell me what it was. I
just knew that kids on the island would say, are
you turning eighteen? You're getting your corn beef money. And
I remember thinking, I don't know what that is, and yeah,
I turned eighteen soon and then I got the money,
and I still didn't know. No one explained to me
or I just had no clue. So I started to
(37:12):
train to become a psychologist. And there was a flyer
on the wall and it said the Elliot Story, the
Untold Story, and I remember thinking, I'm going to go
check that out. And around the same time, one of
my professors said, who knows what historical trauma is? Does
anyone want to share? And you could hear a pin
drop in the room. And this was around two thousand
and seven, and I just remember thinking, I want to
(37:33):
say something because I just watched the Elliut story and
I know my own family, and so I shared the
story of my family. But when I walked into that
Bear Too Theater and pub to watch the Elliut story,
the until story, which is where they played it there,
my grandpa was testifying to the federal government in Unana,
(37:53):
and I just was so confused because no one told
me what this was, where it came from the history was.
And afterwards I asked an elder. Many of those elders
have now passed on, and I said, why didn't my
mom ever talk about this? And she said, because it's
not in the textbook. And we were told we're liars,
and so what we did is we forgave and we
(38:15):
moved forward. And I said, what does that do psychologically
to our people? And she said, well, when you hold
it in, it does manifest into disease, such as addictions,
such as cancer, such as many things. And so all
of that really pushed me hard because there were many
times in my academic journey that I wanted to quit,
(38:38):
and I just kept remembering elders saying, you started it,
finish it, and times when I said I feel like
I'm alone. I remember when elder said, imagine a forest
of hundreds of trees and you're one of those trees,
and he said, you're not alone, but you feel alone,
and you need to finish this for our people. So
I share those things because I am driven no matter
(39:03):
how hard it is, and I do not think it's hopeless.
I still believe that there is so much hope, and
there's so much opportunity and I can see it in
my own children of breaking the cycle. I have two
children ten years apart, and my children can say I
had a really good life, Mama, and that means the
(39:24):
world to me. They don't have to suffer some of
the things that I've suffered. So breaking the cycle is
really important. So the work that we do here is
really important for helping people to see themselves, to have
a sense of belonging, and to recognize that their full
future and potential is in their hands. And it really
(39:44):
starts with us. It starts when people start to lose hope.
I like to remind them it starts with you. It's
never too late. Look at the elders that come to therapy.
They are ever so cute working on themselves. Elders, elderly elders,
working on themselves in therapy is the most beautiful part
(40:05):
of my job. And it's even more fun when they're
willing to try a tool that is introduced by Western society,
western psychology to help themselves. But also we tie it
back into what did our people do? What did our
people do for this thing called mindfulness? What did our
(40:25):
people do? You know, it's really the foundational approach of
respect for each other, respect for elders, respect for self.
It goes back to our tribal values. Everything we learn
in Western psychology, our people have already been doing for many,
many years, thousands of years, and so we tie that back.
So the work we do here is we do mention
(40:45):
our tools and skills that we learn from education, but
we tie back in how it already exists within us
through our tribal values. Probably one of the best stories
I've ever heard as an individual suffering from addiction, and
the short story is it was during being out on
the boat and away from the community for weeks at
a time that they found the most healing just being
(41:08):
on the water, having their mind clear from technology and
from noise and from pain. That was their true medicine.
And so we really tried to bring that. We bring
those those thoughts and what already exists in us as
Native people in this space, these four walls of our
healing center.
Speaker 1 (41:31):
May your spirit be like water that has settled clear.
That's a metaphor that I was thinking of that was
taught to us. It's like if you just went and
scooped out some water from especially a river that's coming
from a glacier. If you just scooped that water up,
you'd see all these particles and sediments floating around in there.
But if it wasn't a clear container and you just
(41:52):
left it long enough, it would just settle nice and clear.
And so that's a concept and thing get for just
being with yourself and being steady and just allowing yourself
to just relax into a state of calmness. And so
that's what I'm hoping for you as you're listening to this,
and we'll be right back. We're gonna take our second break,
(42:14):
and then we'll close out this conversation on healing and wellness.
So you are your best self and you are the
thing that Indigenous people's need. So stay strong, be good.
Speaker 4 (42:25):
Gheeeshyuhyah God say God he kinnor is away.
Speaker 1 (43:31):
He and we're back uns t. That translates to where
the dream of our ancestors. One time we recorded this
speaker's name was kaw Cyril George. I was so amazing,
(43:55):
so wonderful, and we asked him to record some stories
with us and cling it and he said, gonna chiesh
artu yey Ti ya ya gi ya achinhiyad at. He said,
I feel thankful today my grandchildren touched my arm and
(44:17):
led me here. They are my courage. And just like
to hear this ninety year old, wonderful person who has
so much wisdom, so many stories. He himself survived a
boarding school that actively tried to prohibit him from speaking,
and he was a wonderful speaker. But just for him
(44:37):
to sort of look at us and say they are
my courage, like he was talking about us when he
said that, and it was just such a wonderful thing
just to feel that we were bringing something to him right,
because we looked at our elders for help, We looked
at our elders for guidance, and then we hear like
we're helping them. And so coming back to this concept
of a holistic idea of indigenous peoples of strength and
(45:00):
beauty and courage and wellness. If we did our job
right collectively, what do you think things look like twenty
years from now, thirty years from now, when we're the
elders hopefully that they're bringing into the room to talk
to them.
Speaker 3 (45:18):
That is a very very big question, and it actually
brings a lot of emotion to me because the work
is very tiring and I still have hope. So it's
a huge, huge question. So as I ponder that, I'll
jump first to what I had mentioned earlier about I
(45:43):
want children to not suffer the way many of us have,
because the world's already really hard to live in, and
we have technology and social media that makes has really
even complicated it further because information is coming in. Knowledge
is there, and that knowledge, if it's negative, it can
(46:07):
really impact one's mental health. And when you're listening to
negativity all the time, it can really exacerbate already underlying
depression or anxiety, or sense of belonging. And so what
I imagine it could be like is being able to
feel like you belong, being able to feel psychologically safe
(46:33):
in spaces that you share with your family and friends
and community, Being in a space where you feel like
you have a strong sense of self and confidence, so
that you know where to turn and to ask for
help when you're suffering, and to not avoid how many
(46:54):
of us have gone into environments where we avoid maybe
taking a certain route to avoid another human being and
to avoid energy. I imagine a world and that is
something that exists profoundly among our own people due to
this extensive history of pain, pain that continues to perpetuate
(47:16):
today among ourselves. And we know how we got here.
Many of us know that that history of trauma and
what has happened, it has become a cycle. So I
imagine a world where if I were to narrow it down,
because when you speak and you try to imagine something,
(47:37):
you also should be doing the work. And so one
of the things that we do as a team here
is we hold each other accountable, and we look into
each other's eyes, and we are not afraid of having
hard conversation and encouraging each other to get help when
we see one another suffering and suffering, meaning if you
are displaying negative attitude towards each other, lateral violence, whatever
(48:02):
you want to call it, we hold each other accountable
to take a look at yourself and to start healing yourself.
I want to see a future where we can hold
each other, be honest with each other, be authentic, and
guide each other. Because the fact is is will never
be perfect. In fact, one of my elite mentors said
it would be a boring world if we were perfect.
(48:24):
So we'll never be perfect. We'll never defeat anxiety and
depression and substances, but I do believe we can live
more in balance and not disproportionate. And in doing so,
it's finding a sense of self, having a sense of
belonging and feeling safe, being able to be that baby
language speaker and not be scolded when you don't do
(48:45):
it right, having someone gently say let me teach you,
let me show you, and having the person not respond
with anger due to a history of trauma that lives
within them, because that's what's happening, it's perpetuated. And so
it would be an amazing world if our people can
really hold up to our values in an authentic and
(49:07):
honest way.
Speaker 1 (49:08):
Okay, wonderful. You know, I was thinking as in Hawaii
and we're just having a conversation, and I've had this
image that sort of popped up in my mind. So
in Alaska, almost every single language is extremely endangered. It's
a very dangerous situation in that if there's not very
(49:29):
serious structural changes that happen quickly, we're going to watch
these languages begin to disappear. And they don't just disappear,
they're getting killed off by colonization. And so there's agency
behind colonization that does attempt to completely annihilate indigenous languages.
So if we look at survival, we have to transform
indigenous communities and we have to transform the colonizers as well,
(49:52):
Like these descendants of colonizers who were active agents of
destruction have to now become active agents of healing themselves
some transformation. So when people come to learn the language,
I usually like to tell them, oh, this is wonderful.
I'm so glad you're here. You were needed, you were valued,
you were exactly what we want, exactly what we need.
But if you do not speak this language and you
(50:13):
want to, that means you cannot live the same life
you lived before. That's not a bad thing. That means
you're the one who has to create that room in
your life. And what I like to think of it
as is, there's a whole bunch of your ancestors in
a room right near you, and they have all their
favorite foods out. The table is set, and they're just
looking at you and saying, a good chunk inkachra, and
(50:38):
they're saying, come here, grandchild, come sit by us. We're
going to eat together. And you have to answer that call.
But answering that call means you have to create that
time and that space in your life. So if you
were ever thinking about maybe I'll quit smoking, today's a
great day to do that. Maybe I'll quit drinking. Today's
a great day to do that. Maybe you all quit
(51:01):
engaging in drugs, and so today is a great day
to do that. But not to say you need to
do all of those things all at once, like you
have to set yourself up for a gradual success, a
shift in your perspective of what you want and envisioning
of future. There was there was this elder and he
tragically passed away not too long ago. His name was
(51:23):
Cocktage Norman James, and he used to tell me our
people could see way out into the future in our language.
And he says, I'll tell you about it sometime. And
I tried. I kept trying to get him on to
record him saying this in the language. It's like, let
me will you say it? Will you let me record you?
Speaker 3 (51:38):
He said yes.
Speaker 1 (51:39):
Then I come down him. He's like, I got a
headache today. I was like, okay, next day, I guess
sore throat, don't feel good. Okay, next day my stomach
doesn't feel good. And then I said, Okay, today's our
last day getting together. Can you do it? I would
love if you could. And he says, okay, just you
and me will walk down by the lake, just you
and me, and he just does very short conversations, only
about eight minutes long. And I thought, huh, maybe there's
(52:02):
a lot in there. But then when I went back
and listened to it, he gave us so much information.
And the biggest thing he said there was probably our
ancestors could see way out in front of themselves because
they were always thinking about this place they're reserving for
their grandchildren, and so thinking about this concept of future
generations and thinking about this concept of ancestors. So if
(52:23):
we're doing it right, I think twenty years from now,
all the current languages in Alaska are alive and are
gaining strength in terms of the number of speakers in
the places the languages are spoken. The state of Alaska
has done a lot to acknowledge its own historical role
in putting indigenous peoples through a tremendous amount of harm
in their languages in a severely endangered state. And then
(52:46):
we have schools that are teaching in our language we
have kids that are speaking in our languages, and we
are living absent collectively of a huge trauma. Herold Napoleon
talks about this in his text, like the great death
that the colonizer and the colonize have to collectively overcome,
and then that releases a burden from the entire population
(53:06):
to say, we don't have to carry this, this horrible
thing that happened, this series of horrible things that happen.
But my hope is that we're we're radiating a sense
of well being, of health, of happiness, of joy. And
you know, life is not always just good stuff. You're
gonna have to go through grief, You're gonna have to
go through sorrow, You're gonna have to go through loss,
but that when that loss happens, we have the things
(53:29):
in our culture, in our language that equips us to
reach out and grab each other's hand and hold each
other up through the hard times, that we can get
there and get back to tell in good jokes. As
we start to wrap this up, you have any closing
thoughts for our listeners.
Speaker 3 (53:46):
I would just go back to it starts with us,
It starts with you. No one can do it for you.
Show up for yourself, Show up for yourself, and you know,
as you described, take a piece at a time, don't
get overwhelmed. And you know, change is something that only
we have control over. No one else can do it
(54:08):
for us. And you don't have to do it alone.
There are people, there are people there that would love
to hold your hand through the process. And there's nothing
better than to cry and laugh with somebody else to
help help you through it.
Speaker 1 (54:20):
Yeah, that same elder one time, he told me when
I was a young man, is from Carcross, which is
in the Yukon territory. So as well as a young
man needs to walk around and these old people are
just walking around trying to find someone to laugh with,
he says, I'm an elder, I just walk around trying
to find people to laugh with. And it was so
fun and we used to just laugh and tell jokes
(54:41):
and just just have so much fun. And as you
go through your own journey, like there's no endpoint too,
because sometimes if we might get a little bit confused
perhaps or hopeful that the life will be like a
movie with a very clean conflict and resolution in this
new world order, and there might be occasions in your
(55:03):
life where you have that, But really you're looking at
like a lifelong process, and as your process comes, you
look at yourself and you look at your journey, you
look at your actions, and your actions do not define you,
but the collective decisions that you make do help sort
of portray your values, your sense of what you think
(55:23):
things should be. And so as we wrap up this episode,
I'll share one more thing. When Alaska Native languages were
becoming the co official languages of Alaska, we're invited to
visit with the governor and have this signing ceremony and
someone stood up and he spoke, maybe it's Gwitchen, maybe
it's Kuoia Khan. It wasn't into your Dene language. And
(55:44):
he said to the governor, like in front of everybody, says,
you know, in our languages, it's very hard to just
say one thing and do another. You can't do it.
It's very hard to lie in our languages. And you're
a politician, So you should really learn an Alaska native language,
so you guys could stop lying so much. I left
(56:05):
so hard because like I could feel a setup, and
I just remember thinking, is he really gonna do that?
And he did, and it was hilarious. I don't know
if the person he said it to laughed a whole lot,
but we sure did. So whatever you're doing, wherever you're at,
I hope that you are successful, that you're feeling good
about yourself. If you're looking for help, get the help
(56:25):
you need. If someone else reaches out to you, try
to be a person for them that they can count on,
because I think if we help each other, this is
also a value in tring. Get this one elder it
Sames Kakoonish George Davis. He said, just love and kindness.
Just put that in your heart. Maybe if your life
is out of control, the people that you were kind with,
maybe they will help you. So as we start to
(56:48):
wrap up this episode, I'm so thankful to doctor Tina
Woods for sharing your perspective, your knowledge, your time with us.
She works at Central Council of Clinket and Heida in
the community Behavioral Services program. And I just see wonderful
things that are developing here, that have already developed and
that will continue to do.
Speaker 2 (57:07):
So.
Speaker 1 (57:08):
Yeah, way gonna cheesh
Host
X̱ʼunei Lance Twitchell
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