‘Fruitful partnerships’: Researcher guest-edits journal on Indigenous mental health

Historically, the relationship between academic research and Indigenous people was an extractive enterprise.

Research was conducted on Indigenous people, not with their participation and consent. Knowledge and findings were not shared with the community. Exploitive and harmful practices proliferated.

Rachel Wilbur is part of a new generation of scholars at Washington State University working to change that approach, emphasizing start-to-finish collaboration with tribal communities in research. She is now guest editing a special issue of the journal SSM - Mental Health, focused on Indigenous self-determination and mental health.

While self-determination is often viewed generally as a question of free will or determinism, in the context of Indigenous Peoples it has ramifications for tribal sovereignty, governmental policy, and individual agency in participating in research projects.

The journal is rolling out articles as they are peer-reviewed and approved. Wilbur said she was thrilled with the range and number of submissions.

"They've been really diverse," said Wilbur, an assistant research professor at WSU's Institute for Research and Education to Advance Community Health, or IREACH, and a descendant of the Tolowa and Chetco tribes.

"We've had community researchers submitting, we've had students, we've had emeritus faculty. We've had submissions from all over the world, there are people engaging with international policy, and federal and state policy, and academic barriers - we have covered a really broad range of mental health."

Wilbur and her colleagues at IREACH have been reshaping science with Indigenous communities as a collaborative, community-based enterprise. The institute is a national leader in this effort, with a focus on including tribal people and organizations as partners and looking to focus on the strengths in those communities to support their health and well-being.

"It all comes down to the idea of Indigenous control and Indigenous agency in the research endeavor," Wilbur said. "It's only been within the last 25 years or so, that there's been pushback to include Native people in those conversations. A lot of that has come from more Native kids going through college and finding themselves in spaces where they can conduct this work and push for change."

Wilbur is co-editingthe issue with William Hartmann, an associate professor at the University of Washington Bothell. The idea grew out of conversations among researchers that revealed many of them use different definitions of self-determination in the context of Indigenous health.

The journal issue aims to bring more conceptual clarity to the framework, and explore how it operates "on the ground," in relation to institutions, and with regard to established concepts of theories of mental health.

The role is an extension of Wilbur's work on strengths-based and self-determined research, conducted in partnership with Indigenous communities. She was awarded a CAREER grant from the National Science Foundation - among the most prestigious awards for early-career research - for a five-yearproject to study and measure community strengths among urban Native Americans in Seattle, in order to develop a data-driven framework for understanding community needs and a toolkit for eventual use in clinical and educational settings.

Wilbur's project will attempt to identify cultural practices and traditions that have sustained tribal people for generations and apply them to health care.

The questions surrounding tribal research are compounded and complicated in the context of urban Indigenous people, given that they come from different tribes. But three-quartersof Indigenous people in America live in cities, giving the work added urgency.

Wilbur's project will attempt to identify cultural practices and traditions that have sustained tribal people for generations and apply them to health care. That approach turns a common paradigm of past Indigenous health research on its head: Rather than viewing tribal health as a problem to be diagnosed and addressed from the outside, it seeks potential solutions within a community's cultural practices.

"We're trying to identify some of those common strengths that different communities have used and hold those up as examples for individuals or families or communities who may find themselves at a place where they're really struggling," she said.

IREACH, which is in the Elson S. Floyd College of Medicine, works across a wide range of disciplines, from public health to economics to nutrition, to advance health and wellness among Indigenous people. It has about 40 faculty members and staff members, and has a portfolio of roughly $36 million in grant funding. Eight of its 15 core and affiliate faculty members are Indigenous. It works with 150 partners in 19 states.

"Efforts like this special issue, and research institutes like IREACH and others can help create really valuable partnerships for tribes and universities to make research a positive and fruitful relationship for both of them," Wilbur said.