Implementing Culture as Treatment to Reduce Stress and Promote Well-Being in Reservation-Based Native American Head Start Teachers

Native Americans have a strong cultural identity, connection to traditions, and centuries of viewing health and well-being as a balance of physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual health. However, the oppression of Native Americans through colonization which aimed to systematically wipe them out using federal programs such as forced relocation to reservations from sacred homelands, removal of children from their families placing them into boarding schools, outlawing Native languages and ceremonies, and forced acculturation disrupted the natural balance that helped keep their communities healthy and prosperous. High rates of distress, substance and alcohol misuse, social dysfunction, and suicide among Native peoples can be connected to the intergenerational traumatic impact of these policies. Reconnection with culture, cultural identity, and traditional practices can help return individuals and communities to balance. This chapter describes the collaborative work of an academic-tribal partnership who used community-based participatory research and mixed methods to implement traditional cultural practices as an intervention for reducing stress and promoting well-being in reservation-based Native American early childhood education (ECE) teachers working for the United States-based Head Start program. Relationship building and respect for tribal sovereignty and self-determination were essential to the success of this research effort. The process of adapting an existing cultural intervention and the implementation of a feasibility study to test the adapted intervention are detailed in other publications. However, our study findings indicate the promise of a group-based culturally informed workplace intervention delivered by a trained community-based interventionist for improving health and well-being of Tribal Head Start teachers. By implementing culture as treatment, a strengths-based focus was used to promote the psychological health and well-being and thus a return to balance for study participants helping to support evidence for the importance of culture as a social determinant of health.