Fulfilling the Promise: Creating a Child Development Research Agenda With Native Communities

ABSTRACT— The historic trauma of boarding schools andsimilar efforts to eradicate Native culture and identity hada profound effect on tribal family and community life.One result is that American Indian ⁄Alaska Native familieshave largely been excluded from the child developmentresearch enterprise of the past60years.Creatingatribalapplied developmental science has promise for advancingstudies of American Indian ⁄Alaska Native child develop-ment. Realizing the promise will depend on the extent towhich investigators use community-based participatoryresearch strategies, embrace diversity in world views,emphasize cocreation of research designs and programs,and promote identity development through restorationand preservation of tribal culture and language. KEYWORDS— historical trauma; community-based partici-patory research; systems theory; intersubjectivity; mentalrepresentations; cultural identityIn 1879, Captain Richard Henry Pratt established the CarlisleIndian School in Pennsylvania in order to ‘‘kill the Indian andsave the man’’ (Marr, 2011). Pratt attempted to achieve his goalby removing Native children from their families and culture andforcing them to accommodate, and subsequently assimilate, tothe majority White culture. From 1879 to 1973 an estimated100,000 Native children were e nrolled in nonreservation andreservation-based boarding schools (Colmant, 2000). They werenot allowed to speak their language, to wear their regalia, toshare their stories, or to engage i n tribal religious practices.Boarding schools also removed ch ildren from tribal kinship net-works (Allen, Mohatt, Markstrom, Byers, & Novins, 2012) andfrom the social structures that ordinarily would have fosteredstrong intergenerational connections to tribal elders and sup-ported their emersion into tribal culture. Among the many factorscontributing to historical trauma (Galliher, Tsethlikai, & Stolle,2012), boarding schools evoked a particular aspect of traumathat was ‘‘inﬂicted upon a group of people that share a speciﬁcgroup identity or afﬁliation such as ethnicity, nationality, or reli-gious afﬁliation’’ (Campbell & Evans-Campbell, 2011). AsCampbell and Evans-Campbell (2011) note, ‘‘In AI ⁄AN commu-nities it is not only the individual that is traumatized, in manycases it is the whole family, the entire community, or even thesociety.’’The articles in this Special Section of Child DevelopmentPerspectives offer directions for redressing the consequences ofhistorical trauma through research that recognizes the sovereignstatus of tribal nations, involves the cocreation of knowledge,generates sustainable practices for tribal communities, honorstribal culture, and offers new opportunities for Native children tobe connected and rooted within their cultural context (Galliheret al., 2012).The foundational perspective to be taken from this SpecialSection is that research with Native communities must be guidedby solution-focused methods that are cocreated with tribal com-munities and that produce positive sustainable outcomes. Theauthors draw attention to the need to develop (a) indigenous the-ories, methodologies, and research assessment instruments thatare both scientiﬁcally and cultu rally grounded (Allen et al.,2012; Spicer et al., 2012); (b) culturally based interventions thatare effective for Native children and driven by applied develop-mental science approaches (Spicer et al., 2012); (c) experientialtribal-speciﬁc educational programs that incorporate historical