A Mixed Methods Study to Explore Attachment for Native Americans who

Attended Indian Boarding Schools

MELISSA D. OLSON (ZEPHIER), MS, PHD STUDENT

AMERICAN INDIGENOUS RESEARCH ASSOCIATION 2017 CONFERENCE IN POLSON, MT

OCTOBER 20-21, 2017

My world

Historical trauma of Indian Boarding Schools

Forced Assimilation • Tribal Identity: Language, Names, Religion, Hair, Clothes, etc.

Family Relationships

Residential School Syndrome (RSS) (Churchill, 2004) • Characteristics: Emotional despair, suicidality, depression, inability to trust, lowered self-esteem, conflicted self-concept, heightened irritability

• Inability to participate in their own tribal community

• Intergenerational Trauma (Duran & Duran, 1995) • Chase (2011) found that children who attended boarding schools usually experienced harsh parenting after leaving the schools and experienced poor trust, communication, relationship building and parenting.

Historical trauma of Indian Boarding Schools

Marie-Anik Gagné’s Conceptualization of Indian Boarding School Trauma

(Gagné, 1998, p. 358)

CulturalBereavement

Nega/veCopingMechanisms

SocioeconomicandPoli/calDependency

BoardingSchoolAssimila/on

Attachment Theory  Secure attachment helps navigate difficult experiences (Ainsworth, 1967; Bowlby, 1969, 1973) • Impact on quality of future relationships • Attachment & cultural identity (Bornstein, et al, 2008)

 Siegel (2001) determines five elements to secure attachment: • Collaboration • Reflective dialogue • Repair • Coherent narrative • Emotional communications

What do Insecure Attachments look like?

• Poor neural development (Schore, 2001) • Self-regulation is negatively impacted (Atwool, 2006) • Unstable emotional health • Institutionalized children developed detachment (Bowlby, 1963)

Attachment Behaviors • Attachment behaviors grow from cultural norms (Posada, Gao, Wu, et al., 1995)

• Survival of developmental trauma necessitates complex adaptations (Haskell & Randall, 2009) • Often results in inadequate self-capacities

• Boarding schools result in child not having the ability to regulate their emotions nor self-soothing abilities

Complex Trauma and Relationships

• Negative impact on safety and comfort in relationships.

• Disrupts the historical worldview of Indigenous families

• Higher risk of suicidal ideation

• Dramatically impacts the relationship between a traumatized parent and child thus impacting subsequent generations.

 (Haskell & Randall, 2009)

Significance  6 times more likely to experience suicidal ideation and depression (Kahn, et al, 2016)

 Assimilation aimed to destroy all Native American Cultures and Languages

 Poor relationship dynamics

 Traumatized children become traumatized parents

 Intergenerational Trauma

 Mental health services for Native Americans: Neither feast nor famine Beisner and Attneave (1978)

Research Purpose  Explore attachment behaviors for Native Americans who have attended Indian boarding schools. • RQ1: How did Indian boarding schools’ assimilation practices sever attachment bonds between Native American children and parents?

• RQ2: How did these broken parent-child relationships affect adult development and relationships?

• RQ3: How did Native Americans who attended Indian boarding schools experience their cultural identity and their family identity/attachment?

• RQ4: How did their experiences affect their connection to their parents after leaving the boarding school?

A Explanatory Sequential Mixed Methods Design: Attachment for Native American Adults who Attended

Indian Boarding Schools

Phase 1 Quantitative

Assessments

ANALYSIS Correlation Regression Path analysis

Phase II QUALITATIVE

Semi-structured interviews

DATA COLLECTION Recorded individual interviews Ethnographic participant observation

Phase III INTEGRATION

Combining quantitative and qualitative data

DISSEMINATION

Guided by Framework from Howell Smith, M.C. (2011).

Methods  Tribal relationships and collaborative research processes

 Sampling • Purposive Sampling (n=100) • Must be tribal individuals who have attended Indian boarding schools prior to 1975

• Tribal Approval

 Narrative Interviews to allow individuals’ stories to emerge (Merriam & Tisdell, 2013) • Semi-structured interviews to explore boarding school experiences and questions to identify attachment behaviors

 Researcher reflective journal – Ethnographic

Ethical concerns

 Tribal approval and involvement

 Researcher experience - bias

 Sensitive experiences

Implications  Culturally-relevant mental health services:

 Repair Intergenerational trauma Duran and Duran (1995) contend that Native Americans as a collective have suffered a wound to their soul as a result of colonization and assimilation.

 Services to help historically traumatized parents restore attachments

 “To the extent that healthy, balanced and respectful relationships are central to the health and well-being of individuals and communities, the harm to relationships associated with collective complex trauma is a fundamental and enduring form of damage. This harm of collective complex trauma for Aboriginal peoples is one that urgently requires additional remedies at both the micro and macro levels,” (Haskell & Randall, 2009, p. 83)

Imagine… You are at your high school graduation and the keynote speaker, a prominent religious scholar says:

“Let all that is Indian within you die!...You cannot become truly American citizens, industrious intelligent, cultured, civilized until the INDIAN within you is DEAD.”

“Pratt [founder of Carlisle School] was so impressed with the reverend’s remarks that he immediately jumped to his feet to add the postscript: ‘I never fired a bigger shot and never hit the bull’s eye more center,” (Adams, 1995, p. 274).

Thank you! Any Questions?

References  Adams, D. W. (1995). Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience. Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press.

 Ainsworth, M. (1967). Infancy in Uganda. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

 Atwool, N. (2006). Attachment and resilience: Implications for children in care. Child Care in Practice, 12(4), 315-330.

 Beisner, M. & Attneave, C. (1978). Mental health services for Native Americans: Neither feast nor famine. White Cloud Journal of American Indian/Alaska Native Mental Health, 1(2), 3-10.

 Bornstein, M.H., Putnick, D.L., Heslington, M., Gini, M., Suwalsky, J.T.D., Venuti, P., de Falco, S., Giusti, Z., & de Galperin, C.Z. (2008). Mother-child emotional availability in ecological perspective: Three countries, two regions, two genders. Developmental Psychology, 44, 666-680.

 Bowlby, J. (1969/1982). Attachment and Loss. Vol. 2: Attachment (2nd ed.). New York: Basic Books.

 Bowlby, J. (1973). Attachment and loss. Vol. 2: Separation: Anxiety and Anger. New York: Basic Books.

 Campbell, A. N. C., Turrigiano, E., Moore, M., Miele, G. M., Rieckmann, T., Hu, M-C, Kropp, F., Ringur-Carty, R., & Nunes, E. V. (2015). Acceptability of a web-based community reinforcement approach for substance use disorders with treatment-seeking American Indians/Alaska Natives. Community Mental Health Journal, 51(4), 393-403.

 Chase, J.A. 2011. Native American elders’ perceptions of the boarding school experience on Native American parenting: An exploratory study. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Smith College, Northampton, MA.

 Churchill, W. (2004). Kill the Indian, Save the Man: The Genocidal Impact of American Indian Residential Schools. San Francisco, CA: City Lights

 Duran, E. and Duran, B. (1995). Native American Postcolonial Psychology. Albany: State University of New York Press.

 Gagné, M-A. (1998). The role of dependency and colonialism in generalizing trauma in First Nations citizens: The James Bay Cree. In Y. Danieli (Ed.), Intergenerational Handbook of Multigeneratioal Legacies of Trauma (pp. 355-372). New York and London: Plenum Press.

 Haskell, L. & Randall, M. (2009). Disrupted attachments: A social context complex trauma framework and the lives of aboriginal peoples in Canada. Journal of Aboriginal Health, 5(3), 48-99.

 Kahn, Carmella B.; Reinschmidt, Kerstin; Teufel-Shone, Nicolette; Oré, Christina E.; Henson, Michele; Attakai, Agnes. (2016). American indian elders' resilience: sources of strength for building a healthy future for youth. American Indian & Alaska Native Mel Health Research: The Journal of the National Center, 23(3), 117-133.

 Katsurada, E. (2007). Attachment Representation of Institutionalized Children in Japan. School Psychology International, 28 (3), 331-345.

 Guided by Framework from Howell Smith, M.C. (2011). Factors that facilitate or inibit interest of domestic students in the engineering PhD: A mixed methods study. Open Access Theses and Dissertations from th eCollege of Education and Human Sciences. Paper 121, p. 41. http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cehsdiss/121.

 Merriam, S. & Tisdell, E.J. (2016). Qualitative research: A guide to design and implementation (4th ed.). San Francisco, CA: John Wiley and Sons.

 Posada, G., Gao, Y., Wu, F., Posada, R., Tascon, M., Schöelmerich, A., Sagi, A., Kondo-Ikemura, K., Haaland, W., & Synnevaag, B. (1995). New Growing Points of Attachment, 60(2-3), 27-48.

 Schore, A. (2001). Effects of a secure attachment relationship on right brain development, affect regulation and infant mental health. Infant Mental Health Journal, 22(1/2), 201-269.

 Siegel, D. J. (2001). The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Wh We Are. New York: Guilford Press.

 Strauss, A., & Corbin, J. (1998). Basics of qualitative research: Techniques and procedures for developing grounded theory (2nd Ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA:

Additional References