Untying the knots of colonialism in Native healthcare

Psychologist turns to a Bush Fellowship to Indigenize medicine

Modern medicine and methodologies have benefits. But what if the help you seek is more than what Western medicine can offer? One psychologist is about to test his theories as a 2024 Bush Fellow.

Dr. Antony Stately is an enrolled citizen of the Oneida tribe of Wisconsin and a descendant of the Red Lake and White Earth Ojibwe Nations of Minnesota. He grew up with several places to call home in South Minneapolis. His single mother raised him and his six siblings, struggling to make ends meet.

“When I was younger we lived in the American Indian Corridor. There were four Native bars, a couple of liquor stores. People were struggling with all kinds of things, different kinds of Native issues.”

Stately himself struggled with substance use and addiction beginning in his mid-teens. A terrible car accident in which he almost died helped him to get clean and sober. He says that while he was in the hospital, a voice spoke to him saying that if he used drugs or alcohol again, he would die. “The hardest thing to do was move away from my mother and family, but I knew I needed to get out of this social environment.”

He left Minnesota at age 23, newly sober and anxious to find a new way of life on the West Coast. He received his Ph.D. in clinical psychology from Alliant International University in 1997, then spent the next few decades learning to combine healthcare with cultural healing and spiritual care. Or as Stately says, “Indigenizing the way we do medicine.”

Before moving back to Minnesota he served as a research scientist and director of the Center for Translational Research at the Indigenous Wellness Research Institute at the University of Washington-Seattle. His background includes being director of client services at AIDS Project Los Angeles; founding and inaugural program director for Seven Generations Child and Family Counseling Services in Los Angeles; and teaching assignments at several clinical graduate programs in Seattle and Los Angeles. He was a consultant and advisor to several federal agencies and nonprofits delivering health services to Indigenous communities nationally and internationally.

When he decided to move closer to home, he took a position at the Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux Community. There he worked for several years as the director of Behavioral Health Services before his current position as the president and executive officer at the Native American Community Clinic in Minneapolis.

Stately says that after coming home in 2009 and seeing the transformation of his old neighborhood, it still felt off. There were no more bars, but more Native organizations and agencies served the community. But in some ways, he says, this neighborhood was worse off than when he left in the mid-1980s.

“There are higher rates of child welfare cases, skyrocketing problems around addiction and houselessness. It was heartbreaking to see my community struggling with so many things. I asked myself, ‘What has to change and what has to be different here?’ We have to do healing work in healthcare differently. We’re not moving the needle fast enough.”

Dr. Amelia Franck Meyer was among the colleagues who encouraged Stately to apply for the Bush Fellowship. Franck Meyer, a 2015 Bush fellow, is the founder and CEO of Alia Innovations, based in St. Paul, Minn. Alia Innovations works across the country with communities, organizations, and systems to keep children and families safely together. Franck Meyer says she encouraged Stately to apply for the Bush Fellowship because of his ability to lead and his unique long-term, intergenerational vision of healing.

“He deeply believes that Indigenizing NACC’s approach to healthcare is a pathway forward to healing for generations of relations,” she said. “His vision is compelling, and he has been able to bring funders to the table to help realize his vision.”

Stately explains further what it means to “Indigenize” healthcare, comparing the work of the clinic to untying knots.

“We know this work is challenging because we are all still highly colonized,” says Stately. “There’s this metaphor that’s being used in Canada’s health care system: Untying colonial knots, a net metaphor for settler-colonialism.”

Stately recalled a conference speaker he once heard who paired that metaphor with an art installation in downtown Vancouver, British Columbia, composed of 860,000 knots that looks like a giant fishing net. During the day it’s your average-looking net. But at night it is illuminated and really shows what’s inside of it.

“So it’s this metaphor about how the spaces we operate within healthcare, within education, within all these spaces have these colonial knots that we as Indigenous people get caught in. We get tangled up in them, like we’re flies in a spider’s web. We’re trying to figure out how to free ourselves from that or untie those knots so that we don’t get so caught up in them and find the spaces where we can begin to dismantle that. Creating that space is a big part of the work.”

Stately says his goal with the fellowship is to explore how other tribal communities and health centers are Indigenizing the way they do medicine. “I’ve been doing this work for a really long time and in a lot of different places. I’ve had a long career around researching, lecturing, teaching, practicing mental health and behavioral health interventions around specifically historical trauma, which is the byproduct of colonization.”

Franck Meyer adds that Western medicine is based on diagnosing and treating illness, not preventing it. “Traditional healing is not based in illness. It is based in health, connection, and culture. For those rooted in their culture and Native wisdom, the connection to something bigger is a more powerful medicine than any pill.”

Stately believes now is the time to integrate Western methodologies like cognitive behavioral therapies used to address trauma and post-traumatic stress disorder with spiritual practice. “I started to have the sense that these Western practices had some efficacy, but they weren’t going to get us where we needed to be.”

The NACC sees people from over 130 different tribes, people of all ages and generations, who have been caught in the historical trauma cycle of Indian boarding schools. Stately himself attended St. Joseph Indian Boarding School in Chamberlain, S.D., the fourth and last generation in his family to do so. In the work he does, he sees firsthand the impact these institutions had on Indigenous people.

One way he sees it is in the opioid crisis, which has hit the Native community hard in Minneapolis.

“We have more Native people dying from opioid overdoses here in Minneapolis and South Minneapolis, specifically in Hennepin County, than any other race in the US. There are people who are, 20 or 30 years younger than me, who probably didn’t go to boarding school, but what we’re seeing is that the long tail of colonization is whipping us around.”

As an executive officer, Stately says it’s important to be among Indigenous leadership doing really transformative work not only in healthcare but in all kinds of different spaces — around land reclamation, for example. He points out that healthcare isn’t removed from those things. “Health and well-being are embedded in all of those things. So it’s important that I be in all these spaces. I want the fellowship to open up my thought process and my capacity to think about what other Indigenous leaders across Turtle Island are doing and in other parts of the world around this kind of work.”

Stately wasn’t raised with his language, culture, or ceremonial practices but recognized their importance much later in life. “One of the things I think that was really important for me to do in this fellowship was to actually be able to create the space and the bandwidth to go to ceremonies, not just be an observer. I crafted this opportunity to spend time with healers, elders, and people doing that work.”

The 2024 Bush Fellow awards $150,000 over two years. Stately is planning a world tour of sorts, guided by his research — starting with Ireland, where he plans to spend time with the Indigenous people known as the Celts [pronounced kelts]. “The Celtic people were right next to Britain and Britain did all kinds of really horrible things to them. They are still highly colonized. But they’re in the process of recovering from historical trauma, recovering their language and their cultural lifeways. I’ve been invited to give a talk.”

He’ll attend several workshops at the Indigenous Leadership Program at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity in Alberta, Canada, over the Medicine Line—an Indigenous term for the U.S.-Canada border — followed by site visits to Indigenous communities in New Zealand and Australia.

Stately will continue his role as the president and executive officer of NACC as they continue to build a brand new clinic. “One of the things we’re doing with the new clinic is embedding culture at the center of what we do, rebuilding our Western medical and healthcare practice around that. We have this term we use to describe ourselves at NACC. We’re ‘unapologetically Indigenous’, which means we are centering indigeneity and Indigenous practices and healing at the center of what we do.

“It sounds like work, but it’s actually going to be like an adventure to me,” Stately adds. “It’s going to be the stuff that sustains me.”

He says the first year of the fellowship will be the hardest. His kids are graduating from high school next year.

“That’s going to be a challenge, trying to get them across the finish line while I’m doing this as well,” he said. “But I feel like I have enough support within my family and community. I also feel with the Bush Fellowship, I have the financial resources now to be able to support that work as well.”

References:

Native American Community Clinic website, About Us: https://nacc-healthcare.org/about

Jongbloed, Kate & Hendry, Jorden & Smith, Danièle & Kʷunuhmen, Joe. (2023). Towards untying colonial knots in Canadian health systems: A net metaphor for settler-colonialism. Healthcare management forum. 36. 8404704231168843. 10.1177/08404704231168843. https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Skies-Painted-with-Unnumbered-Sparks-Photo-by-Ema-Peter-courtesy-Studio-Echelman_fig1_370836679

Microsoft Power BI, “Substance involved emergency and hospital visits in Hennepin County.” https://app.powerbigov.us/view

Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, Indigenous Leadership Programs https://www.banffcentre.ca/indigenous-leadership