Rethinking cultural competence: Insights from indigenous community
نویسندگان
چکیده
Multicultural professional psychologists routinely assert that psychotherapeutic interventions require culturally competent delivery for ethnoracial minority clients to protect the distinctive cultural orientations of these clients. Dominant disciplinary conceptualizations of cultural competence are ‘‘kind of person’’ models that emphasize specialized awareness, knowledge, and skills on the part of the practitioner. Even within psychology, this approach to cultural competence is controversial owing to professional misgivings concerning its culturally essentialist assumptions. Unfortunately, alternative ‘‘process-oriented’’ models of cultural competence emphasize such generic aspects of therapeutic interaction that they remain in danger of losing sight of culture altogether. Thus, for cultural competence to persist as a meaningful construct, an alternative approach that avoids both essentialism and generalism must be recovered. One means to capture this alternative is to shift focus away from culturally competent therapists toward culturally commensurate therapies. Indigenous communities in North America represent interesting sites for exploring this shift, owing to widespread political commitments to Aboriginal cultural reclamation in the context of postcoloniality. Two examples from indigenous communities illustrate a continuum of cultural commensurability that ranges from global psychotherapeutic approaches at one end to local healing traditions at the other. Location of culturally integrative efforts by indigenous communities along this continuum illustrates the possibility for local, agentic, and intentional deconstructions and reconstructions of mental health interventions in a culturally hybrid fashion.
منابع مشابه
Rethinking cultural competence: insights from indigenous community treatment settings.
Multicultural professional psychologists routinely assert that psychotherapeutic interventions require culturally competent delivery for ethnoracial minority clients to protect the distinctive cultural orientations of these clients. Dominant disciplinary conceptualizations of cultural competence are "kind of person" models that emphasize specialized awareness, knowledge, and skills on the part ...
متن کاملIndigenous communities and evidence building.
Indigenous populations in the U.S. and Pacific Islands are underrepresented in mental health and substance abuse research, are underserved, and have limited access to mainstream providers. Often, they receive care that is low quality and culturally inappropriate, resulting in compromised service outcomes. The First Nations Behavioral Health Association (U.S.) and the Pacific Substance Abuse and...
متن کاملA Gathering of Native American Healers: Exploring the Interface of Indigenous Tradition and Professional Practice.
This article reports insights from a 4-day Gathering of Native American Healers at the University of Michigan in October of 2010. This event convened 18 traditional healers, clinically trained service providers, and cross-cultural mental health researchers for a structured group dialogue to advance professional knowledge about the integration of Indigenous healing practices and conventional men...
متن کاملTraining community practitioners in a research intervention: practice examples at the intersection of cancer, Western science, and native Hawaiian healing.
This practice paper describes the preintervention training component of a feasibility study exploring the use of ho'oponopono, an indigenous Hawaiian healing practice, for enhancing psychosocial adaptation to breast cancer among Native Hawaiian women. Practitioners' adherence to research protocols and competence in intervention delivery are both regarded as essential to obtaining valid results ...
متن کاملConceptualizing Cultural Safety: Definitions and Applications of Safety in Health Care for Indigenous Mothers in Canada
The importance of delivering culturally-appropriate health care to meet the unique health needs of Indigenous peoples in Canada has resulted in the emergence of various concepts to describe how care should be provided. However, there is lack of clarity regarding how these terms differ from one another and what they look like in practice. An extended literature search was performed to conceptual...
متن کامل