Decolonizing Trauma Work: Indigenous Stories and Strategies

All Michigan social workers are invited to a virtual CE event on Wednesday, August 20 from 12-1:00pm.

FREE | 1 Implicit Bias CE

Overview:

Join us as we discuss Renee Linklater’s Decolonizing Trauma Work.

In Decolonizing Trauma Work, Renee Linklater explores healing and wellness in Indigenous communities on Turtle Island. Drawing on a decolonizing approach, which puts the “soul wound” of colonialism at the centre, Linklater engages ten Indigenous health care practitioners in a dialogue regarding Indigenous notions of wellness and wholistic health, critiques of psychiatry and psychiatric diagnoses, and Indigenous approaches to helping people through trauma, depression and experiences of parallel and multiple realities. Through stories and strategies that are grounded in Indigenous worldviews and embedded with cultural knowledge, Linklater offers purposeful and practical methods to help individuals and communities that have experienced trauma. Decolonizing Trauma Work, one of the first books of its kind, is a resource for education and training programs, health care practitioners, healing centres, clinical services and policy initiatives.

Decolonizing Trauma Work is available through your favorite bookseller.

Learning Objectives:

• Describe impacts of white supremacy on social work education, practice, and scholarship
• Describe and contextualize decolonization within the context of the social work profession
• Identify strategies for disrupting white supremacist norms within social practice
  

Presented by Chris Fike, Region 5 Representative on the NASW-MI Board of Directors.

About the Author(s) --

Renee Linklater. Renee Linklater is a member of the Rainy River First Nations in Northwestern Ontario. Her doctoral studies were completed with the Department of Adult Education and Counseling Psychology at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto.

More about the Decolonizing Social Work Book Club:

Decolonization in social work is the undoing of hegemony, the latter being the process whereby white supremacist values impregnated foundational social work theories, research, and practices. In recognizing that white supremacy is a mechanism of social control, that our current social structure is grounded in liberal-patriarchal capitalism, and that social work confirms to prevailing social norms, we, as social workers, must acknowledge our complicity in perpetuating a white supremacist ideology (Crudup, Fike, & McLoone, 2021; Pewewardy & Almeida, 2014). One strategy for disrupting white supremacy in social work is to develop a counter-narrative (Crudup, et al., 2021; Pewewardy & Almeida, 2014), a history that details the experiences of perspectives of those who have been oppressed, excluded, and silenced. The Decolonizing Social Work Book Club will meet on the 3rd Wednesday of each month starting in September 2024 and concluding in December 2025.

The voices highlighted in this book club offer counter-narrative perspectives across a range of issues and topics immediately relevant to social work.