Ke Alahou, Volume I, Number 8, 1 Iulai 1980 — VICTORIA SCHOOL DISTRICT COMES UNDER FIRE [ARTICLE]

VICTORIA SCHOOL DISTRICT COMES UNDER FIRE

(Native Voice May-June 1980}

Positive thinking will go a long way toward improved Indian education and health, an American social services researcher believes. Dr. Audra Panbrum says Indian" youngsters are repeatedly exposed to negative information about themselves, and lack positive models on which to pattern their own behavior. Panbrum was in Victoria recently to attend a conference on community-bas6d social services, sponsored by_ the faculty of human and social development at the University of Victoria." "You never hear about the 80 per cent of Indians who complete school and are employed. You hear a lot more about the small proportion who don't finish school. w T ho are unemployed and alcoholjc," she said in an interview. v "Alcoholism is an illness,, and most Indians are not alcoholics." Those who do drink tend to be "spree drinkers." she says. But she stops herself. "We're talking about negative things. Tm all for presenting the positive figures, Panbrum is something of a positive model herself. A Plains Indian, she is researcher at the White Cloud Centre in Oregon, a national centre for mental health research for native Americans. She is a registered psychiatric nurse, hold a doctorate in behavioral sciences, and plans within a few months to begin work as an independent consultant. "People say I'm different but I'm not" different from any other North American Indian. I survived because I was positive and my parents believed I" could succeed. Indians can take heart, she said, that the "western" mind is coming around to Indian ways of thinking. While western medicine is just beginning to emphasize "holistic" medicine — treatment of not only physical symptoms, but also the social, lifestyle, and spiritual causes of illness — "we had holistic medicine to begin with."_ Original Indian cultures stressed harmony with nature and the total environment of an individual, and the strength of that model has enabled native healers to not only survive but to emerge from hiding after years of technologfcal onslaught. Physicians have begun to realize that the tug-of-war between themselves and the shamans has only hurt the patient, who has frequently sought both for advice. As the team approach to health services has gained acceptance, the native healer, too, is being included. * "We will see somVfcremendqus changes," Panbrum

predicted. The western approach to health is "crisis-oriented." and does not deal with problems so much as with symptoms, Panbrum said. As a result, the delivery of social services with standard western approaches has failed because they are not aimed at solving problems but at eliminating symptoms. "The standard models are not really. s.ensijlyj. anyone's "needs." There are no two communities that are the same or two individuals that are the same. So you have to find cut what the needs are.^ "I wouldn't treat you, with brown hair and brown eyes, the same way I would treat someone else with brown.hair and brown eyes." A nurse treating a stroke case must consider whether the patienf wishes to walk again or not. If the patient is determined to walk again within six weeks, the nurse can plan a program to help that happen. But if the patient does not want to walk, no amount of treatment will make a difference. A Plains Indian eats a lot of meat, while other Indians prefer other foods. Trying,to giye people. they can't or wont eat is a common mistake in delivering social services. For example, Panbrum once visited a health class in the Arctic taught by a nurse from the "Lower 48." At Ihe front of [he room was a chart urging the native Alaskans to make sure they got a proper diet by eating food from the vark)us food groups, such as fruits and vegetables, dairy products, cereals,, and meats. None of the natives had ever seen most of the foods on the chart, and had they followed the nurse's advice and forsake their traditionalfoods they would have starved to death, Panbrum suggested. For her part, the nurse may have concluded that the natives should change their diet after trying some of their staples, such as dried seal meat. Panbrum's description of what dried seal meat tastes and smells like to a Plains Indian is too vivid to be printed here. Let is simply be said that while she has tasted it, she has not successfully eaten it. But Alaskan natives enjoy it and thrive on it. Natives are~often given intelligence tests which are woefully inappropriate to their cultures. In a test of object recognition, her own not realize that an airplane should be matched with a hanger, having seen few airplanes and even fewer hangars, Panbrum said. "Had it been a horse and a barn he would have had no trouble." Many Alaskan natives have never seen a tree, a passanger sedan or a bus, and tests which rely on such identifications will predictably indicate a problem, when the fault lies with the test itself, "If they can't make the connection, they look like they are retarded." Rather than concentrate on learning how the standard models operate* social workers and others who come into" contact with native cultures should learn flexibility and ho\vto identify needs, Panbrum believes. * /' Such skills will go further than sophisticated technology which applies culture shock at the same time it attempts to heal. "When we didn't have all the skills and professionals, we were able to get along. Brown paper or tobacco used to be remedies to stop bleeding. They are old remedies* survived." The implications for professionals who get so wrapped up m their models that they forget the needs of !>»Hr should be clear.