Current Inspirations

The journal format allows Royal to share with Internet visitors his latest thinking about the subjects that have importance for him, particularly his system of Liberation Psychology.

Latest Journal Entry:

14 August 2003

Tribal Sovereignty and Native-American Religion

In l971, I started working in education, mental health, and alcohol and drug issues with Native Americans. At that time, Native Americans children and youth were threatened by school systems and sometimes expelled from school for wearing long hair like tribal traditionalists wore. The children were prevented from leaving school to practice their tribal ceremonies, but on Christian holidays the schools would close to celebrate the Christmas and Easter festivities. This happened on Native American reservations where 90 percent of the teachers were Caucasian.

Several county, state, and federal governmental agencies prevented tribal people from practicing their Native American religion. Finally, Congress passed American Indian Religious Act in l978 (Public Law 95-341). The act states:

The purpose of the act is to promulgate a federal policy by which to protect and preserve the traditional religious practices of American Indians, including Alaska natives and Hawaiians. Among other things, the policy guarantees access to religious sites, use and possession of sacred objects, and freedom to worship through traditional ceremonial rites. In addition to articulating a general policy promoting and preserving traditional Indian religious practices, the act calls for an examination of current federal policy by the relevant government agencies to determine what appropriate changes should be made in order to implement the spirit of the law. (Deloria, 2000).

For mental health and alcohol and drug services for Native-Americans to be effective, providers need to know the history of religious and spiritual genocide that has and still is taking place in Indian Country. Out of this struggle in Indian Country I developed my North American Liberation Psychology (NALP). The struggle for Native Americans to practice their religion continued through the 1990s until the Native-American Church was finally legalized. Religious and spiritual genocide causes the victims of the colonial and of the postcolonial era PTSD, anxiety, depression, and drug and alcohol problems. Mental health problems, alcohol and drug problems, and diabetes are caused by the colonial era and are increased along with the addition of new illnesses by the postcolonial era.

Religious and spiritual genocide is a main factor in the high suicide rate with American Indian youth. NALP and its practitioners were tested and challenged not in a psychology laboratory or a department of psychology but in courtrooms where they documented postcolonial health damage to Native-Americans for not being able to practice their religion. NALP practitioners are still documenting that Native American cultural, safety, security, freedom, spiritual, self-determination, and physical and environmental needs are still being destroyed by the dominant culture. NALP and its providers have encountered the dominant society and its mental health practitioners to try to stop the cultural genocide.

NALP is a lens that I constructed to interpret psychologically and spiritually the past events and the current events that are happening in the global village.

References
Deloria, B., Foehner, K., & Scinta, S. (Eds.). (1999). Spirit & Reason: The Vine Deloria, Jr., Reader Golden, CO: Fulcrum.
Deloria, V. Jr. & Lytle, C.M. (2000). American Indians, American Justice (Rev. ed.). Austin: University of Texas.