Dialogue 2008

Abstract

In the wake of European settler-colonialism, the indigenous peoples of North America still contend with the social and psychological sequelae of cultural devastation, forced assimilation, social marginality, enduring discrimination, and material poverty within their respective nation-states. In response to this contemporary legacy of conquest and colonization, a cottage industry devoted to the surveillance and management of the “mental health” problems of Native Americans proliferates in the United States and Canada without abatement. The attention of clinically concerned researchers, practitioners, and policy makers to an indigenous “patient” or “client” base, however, invites critical analysis of the cultural politics of mental health in these contexts. More specifically, the possibility that conventional clinical approaches harbor the ideological danger of implicit Western cultural proselytization has been underappreciated. In this special section of Ethos , three investigators engage the provocative cultural politics of mental health discourse and practice in three diverse Native American communities. Each provides a critical analysis of mental health discourse and practice in their respective research settings, collectively comprising an analytical and political subversion of the potentially totalizing effects of authorized, universalist mental health policy and practice. [mental health, American Indians, psychiatric anthropology, cross-cultural counseling, postcolonialism]