Reconciling and Rehumanizing Indigenous-Settler Relations: An Applied Anthropological Approach by Nadia Ferrara

Excerpt

Equal parts personal and professional memoir, Reconciling and Rehumanizing Indigenous-Settler Relations: An Applied Anthropological Approach is a record of the author’s struggles with identity, role, and responsibility that wends its way through a host of contradictions. Woven throughout the text are descriptions of Nadia Ferrara’s identities, various professional roles as “therapist, academic, and now as a bureaucrat” (69), and ethical responsibilities to the indigenous individuals and communities she served. An Italian-Canadian anthropologist employed by Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development Canada who identified with the indigenous Other, Ferrara’s work involved treating the ongoing social pathology that is the result of the cultural trauma caused by European settler conquest of the First Nations, Inuit, and Métis. That the social pathologies presented in Canadian indigenous communities—unemployment, poor health, mental illness, alcoholism, suicide, violence, and sexual abuse—are attributable to the resulting cultural discontinuity is taken as a given. Eschewing the approaches commonly adopted by bureaucratic colleagues, her professional practice applied the tenets of cultural anthropology in art therapy with the Cree victims of abuse in the residential schools and conducted focus group sessions on community engagement among the Ojibwe, with the ultimate goals of decolonization, cultural restoration or revitalization, and reconciliation. …