Joshua Moses

Rethinking historical trauma.

Recent years have seen the rise of historical trauma as a construct to describe the impact of colonization, cultural suppression, and historical oppression of Indigenous peoples in North America (e.g., Native Americans in the United States, Aboriginal peoples in Canada). The discourses of psychiatry and psychology contribute to the conflation of disparate forms of violence by emphasizing presumptively universal aspects of trauma response. Many proponents of this construct have made explicit analogies to the Holocaust as a way to understand the transgenerational effects of genocide. However, the social, cultural, and psychological contexts of the Holocaust and of post-colonial Indigenous “survivance” differ in many striking ways. Indeed, the comparison suggests that the persistent suffering of Indigenous peoples in the Americas reflects not so much past trauma as ongoing structural violence. The comparative study of genocide and other forms of massive, organized violence can do much to illuminate both common mechanisms and distinctive features, and trace the looping effects from political processes to individual experience and back again. The ethics and pragmatics of individual and collective healing, restitution, resilience, and recovery can be understood in terms of the self-vindicating loops between politics, structural violence, public discourse, and embodied experience.

Out on the Land: Income, Subsistence Activities, and Food Sharing Networks in Nain, Labrador

In recent Inuit ethnography, a major concern has been how and to what extent contemporary Inuit participate in and depend on subsistence activities, particularly in the context of increasing wage employment and growing participation in the cash economy. This paper provides an analysis of these activities in the predominately Inuit community of Nain, Labrador. Using social network data and demographic information collected between January and June 2010, we examine the interconnections between subsistence activities—obtaining “country food” through activities such as hunting, fishing, and collecting—with access to the means of obtaining subsistence resources (such as snow mobiles, cabins, and boats), employment status, and income. Our data indicate that individuals with higher employment status and income tend to be more central to the network of subsistence food sharing, but not because they have greater access to hunting tools or equipment (they do not). We conclude that those individuals who play the most central role in the network are those who are financially able to do so, regardless of access to hunting tools/means.

Kinship, Family, and Exchange in a Labrador Inuit Community

Kinship, family, and household have received considerable attention in Inuit studies; this paper takes a comparative social networks approach to these issues. Here kinship connections are represented in network form as a composite of individual kinship dyads of descent, coparentage, or siblingship. The composite kinship network is then used as a standard of measure for the pair-wise distances of exchange/dependency dyads appearing in other social networks within the community (including the country-food distribution network, store-bought-food-sharing network, traditional-knowledge network, alcoholco-use network, household-wellness networks, job-referrals network, and the housing network). This analysis allows us to gauge the role that kinship (of various distances, including household and family) plays in structuring exchanges across these various network domains. The data used here was collected in Nain, Labrador in January– June 2010. From 330 interviews, we extracted more than 4,900 exchanges and patterns of helping relationships among the 749 current adult residents of the community, and more than 10,000 kinship connections among a total of 1,687 individuals directly linked by descent, marriage or coparentage. The results of this analysis show that past emphasis on kin-oriented exchange in Inuit communities has mistakenly emphasized the nature of the exchange item (traditional versus store-bought (cash) economy) thereby missing important data on the nature of the exchange itself (reciprocal or one-way).

Network sampling of social divisions in a rural Inuit community

This paper describes results from a network survey of Nain – a predominantly Inuit community of ~1200 people located on the northern coast of Labrador. As part of a larger social network research project, we used peer-referral sampling to recruit 330 residents for interviews about food sharing, housing, public health and community traditions. The peer-referral chains were analysed statistically to determine the presence and absence of social divisions in the community. The results of these analyses show that ethnic identification, relocation status and household income were the most significant social divisions in the community, while gender, education level and employment status show little or no effect on patterns of between-group interconnection. We argue that statistical patterns in the presence (and absence) of intergroup links offer novel ways to examine the interrelationship between recent economic development and the historical disruptions caused by Inuit community relocations in the 1950s.

Relocation Redux: Labrador Inuit Population Movements and Inequalities in the Land Claims Era

The importance of community relocation experiences for aboriginal land claims movements is well documented; the role played by successful land claims in prompting ongoing out-migration is not. Data collected in 2011 on the lives of migrants are used to test three hypotheses: H1, Inuit leaving the land claims area for a nearby nonaboriginal city show markedly different social outcomes based on the length of time since migration; H2, these social outcomes map onto patterns of intergroup boundaries in their new communities; and H3, both of these outcomes are better explained by migration patterns after the land claims than by the ethnic/racial exclusion that has been the focus of past research on inequality in the region. This analysis takes advantage of social network techniques used to study hard-to-reach populations, showing how these methods can be used to address broader questions of community structure and cohesion during rapid social change. Conclusions focus on the experiences of migrants on the margins of sending and receiving communities and what they can tell us about the role played by aboriginal land claims in the culture politics of industrial resource extraction.

Confounding Culture: Drinking, Country Food Sharing, and Traditional Knowledge Networks in a Labrador Inuit Community

This article presents evidence from one Northern Inuit community showing that networks associated with the exchange of traditional knowledge and subsistence foods among households overlap with alcohol co-use patterns. The findings presented here are based on a large social network research project that included 330 interviews with adult residents of a single community over the course of more than five months. These data belie depictions of alcohol use as solely pathological in indigenous communities. The fact that relationships at the center of traditional/cultural activities are simultaneously relationships through which ostensibly damaging behaviors are enacted necessarily presents a more complex picture than is often depicted in literature on Aboriginal mental health and well-being. Culture, we illustrate, is not a separate sphere of life where individual and collective well-being is produced by activities deemed healthy, excluding those behaviors understood as damaging. Instead, the sources of cultura...

Mindful interventions: Youth, poverty, and the developing brain

Mindfulness meditation is being advocated as a promising new educational, clinical, and social intervention for youth, fueled by new evidence from neuroscience about the benefits of “growing the brain through meditation,” convergent with recent data on developmental neuroplasticity. Although still marginal and in some cases controversial, secular programs of mindfulness have been implemented with ambitious goals of improving attentional focus of pupils, social-emotional learning in “at-risk” children and youth and, not least, to intervene in problems of poverty and incarceration. In this article, we present insights from an ongoing study involving teachers and mentors working with young people using mindfulness education from an emerging project on the social and cultural contexts of “neuroeducation.” Our analysis points to the role of neuroscience in positioning these programs as legitimate and progressive, based on state-of-the-art science. We discuss the tensions arising from their moral reframing of social problems associated with poverty and inequality.

A “Mechanism of Hope”: Mindfulness, Education, and the Developing Brain

Mindfulness meditation has recently become mainstream, secular, and backed by evidence from neuroimaging studies about the benefits of “growing the brain through meditation.” Touted as the latest tool for educational curricula, psychotherapy, and intervention for at-risk or disenfranchised youth, it has garnered widespread excitement and investment for its promises to help cultivate self-regulation, empathy, and attentional focus, while being both non-invasive and empowering for young people. The mindfulness movement has, however, also been subject to skepticism, with critics raising caution about the “shadows” of mindfulness, pointing to its (often inadvertent) effects of depoliticizing social problems associated with inequality and poverty, occasional association with adverse behavioral effects, and its instrumental use as a technique for boosting productivity in the corporate workplace. In this paper, we present insights from a project on neuroscience and education, and illustrate some of the tensions surrounding mindfulness as seen from the perspectives of educators and policy makers. We apply a critical neuroscience framework to analyze the role of the brain in underpinning and undermining the mindfulness movement and to understand the reported challenges and promises of mindfulness. We point to a general ambivalence surrounding the potential of mindfulness meditation as an intervention for youth.

Beyond two worlds: Identity narratives and the aspirational futures of Alaska Native youth

Indigenous communities across the Alaskan Arctic have experienced profound revisions of livelihood, culture, and autonomy over the past century of colonization, creating radical discontinuities between the lives of young people and those of their parents and Elders. The disrupted processes of identity development, access to livelihoods, and cross-generational mentorship associated with colonialism have created complex challenges for youth as they envision and enact viable paths forward in the context of a rapidly changing Arctic home. In this study, we consider the meanings associated with different constructions of culture and selfhood, and the ways in which these identity narratives position Inupiaq Alaskan Native youth in relation to their personal and collective futures. Through an intergenerational and participatory inquiry process, this study explores how representations of shared heritage, present-day struggles, resilience, and hope can expand possibilities for youth and thus impact individual and community health.

New understandings of communities and ourselves: community-based participatory research with Alaska Native and Lower 48 youth

Abstract In the summer of 2014, students from universities in the contiguous United States (Lower 48) and Inupiat youth from Alaska carried out a pilot project as participants/co-researchers in a process called Intergenerational Dialog, Exchange, and Action (IDEA). This action-oriented, community-based, and participatory research method was first developed in 2008, as a platform for structuring dialog between adults, Elders and youth within a community, and for extending resonant ideas emerging from these discussions through Photovoice and digital storytelling amongst youth participants. This pilot study was designed to investigate the feasibility and potential of university students from the Lower 48 and Indigenous youth from Alaska to carry out the IDEA process together as co-researchers. The results of the pilot suggest that it is both possible and meaningful for IDEA to be conducted by a team of youth co-researchers. We found that participation in IDEA expanded the perspectives of youth co-researchers from both Alaska and the Lower 48 in parallel, yet different ways. Exploring the strengths of older community members, being exposed to different ways of living and being, and having opportunities to reflect on and build narratives around these ideas, allowed all the co-researchers to develop a new understanding of their own communities and their roles and responsibilities within them. This paper shares youth co-researcher reflections of the process and the ways in which the process prompted these new perspectives about themselves, their respective communities and their roles within them.