I am a 64 year old man who in his later years has become fascinated by the very work he has be doing for almost 40 years. I have worked in humans services during that time as a counselor, therapist, outreach worker, teacher, case manager, mediator, community health worker, program director, community organizer, group leader, living skills educator, HIV prevention coordinator, and treatment program supervisor. Each job I have done simply because I enjoy working with people and enjoy challenges. When considering retirement I realized there was only one thing I wanted to do in my retirement – the same thing I have been doing my entire work life.
I am currently in the final few semesters of a Masters in Social Work (MSW) program at Humboldt State University and with credentials in hand I plan to expand my community organizing and clinical work efforts within my local community by responding to the expressed needs of community members. I will continue to go where my strengths can best be utilized – nothing really new there. What the MSW program has done is allowed me to take time out to reflect on the work I have done in the past, learn what is happening nationally and globally, and focus my thinking on what my strengths, interests, and values really are. A couple of themes have emerged that I find, as I said before, absolutely fascinating: the unique nature of social work in rural counties and mainstream cultures relationship with indigenous populations. I have spent many hours reading, writing, studying, talking, and thinking about both of these items.
My daughter is a MSW social worker working with male Latino youth. During one visit she handed me a book by Anne Fadiman entitled The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures. My daughter simply said “Read It.” I put it aside and promptly forgot about it. About two months later I found the book and started thumbing through it. I couldn’t put it down. The book has become one of the few I have found that speaks directly to the heart of my interest in social work - the unique nature of social work in rural counties and mainstream cultures relationship with indigenous populations.
I am not going to retell the story in the book. If you have similar interests I have one simple recommendation: read it. But I am going to describe a few of the points the author made in the book that I found to be especially enlightening to this western, Euro-American mind. First I would like to say that the book is not about indigenous cultures in the United States but goes to great lengths to describe the relationship between indigenous and non-indigenous cultures in Southeast and Eastern Asia. But I believe that applying those descriptions to the United States would be simply a matter of substituting names, locations, and cultural practices. The following is one example: “For the many Hmong who live in high-unemployment areas, questions of advancement are often moot. They have no jobs at all. This is the reason the Hmong are routinely called this country’s “least successful refugees.” It is worth noting that the standard American tests of success that they have flunked are almost exclusively economic. If one applied social indices instead – such as crime, child abuse, illegitimacy, and divorce – the Hmong would probably score better than most refugee groups (and also better than most Americans), but those are not the forms of success to which our culture assigns its highest priority. Instead, we have trained the spotlight on our best-loved index of failure, the welfare rolls.” (Fadiman, 1997)Indigenous populations in the United States and other countries succeed or fail based on which definition of success you want to use. Yes, Native Americans have unemployment rates of up to 80% in some areas and have had to depend on welfare or other forms of income to survive. But in areas where local indigenous people have been able to maintain or strengthen their tribal community and family, crime, child abuse, illegitimacy, and divorce is often lower than surrounding non-indigenous communities (Red Horse, 1997). It is only in areas where their traditional values and beliefs have been decimated by mainstream culture that you find high rates in the problems described above.
The parts of the book I found the most interesting were the descriptions of the moments of face to face contact between mainstream American culture and Hmong culture. Besides the obvious lack of understanding due to the difference in language it is quickly apparent that language is just one facet and may be not even the most important. The other barriers are cultural and include spiritual beliefs, health and medical practices, the importance of the community versus the individual, literacy, appropriate treatment of children, diet, what constitutes responsible living, and more. I have stood face to face with another person and realized I cannot communicate at any level and also understood that the other person is having the same experience. We both want to but other than smiling at each other it cannot happen.
In her book Fadiman (1997) makes a salient point about healing that I hadn’t really considered before. I have always held the belief that some illnesses were more emotionally or intellectually based, some illnesses were more physically based and many are some combination of the two. The cultural healer is the best person to address the emotional or intellectual problems and western medicine is very good at addressing the physical problems. The problem is that both systems think they are addressing both problems. Confusion erupts and sometime dangerous situations develop when one system comes into conflict with the other. My understanding was that one system really didn’t buy into the validity of the other. Fadiman (1997) states that in her conversations with Hmong cultural leaders the two systems don’t really conflict, they are simply treating different parts of a person’s illness and a Hmong healer’s practice doesn’t really conflict with Western medicine as long as it doesn’t prohibit the Hmong practice. The Hmong healer often supports Western medicine as part of the healing process. I’m not sure how this applies to indigenous healers in the West but it has given me inspiration for further study in the area.
So why are this and other descriptions in Fadiman’s (1997) book about cultural contact and misunderstandings so important to me? It goes a long way toward describing the problems I face as a social worker every day. My efforts to lend a helping hand are seen as another effort of mainstream culture to assimilate their culture. The lack of participation on the part of Native Americans in a project I created is not necessarily a show of non-interest; it might be a show of disapproval. Hmong did not want to move to the United States to become American, they wanted a safe place to be Hmong. As the world shrinks and we all come into contact with more and more cultures it is essential that we learn to live in multiple worlds and to never make assumptions about another culture. We have to learn how to live together and create opportunities for cultures to value each other and see the potential for strength in communities comprised of multi-cultures not fear. This goes against our ancient reptilian brain and only through mindful thought and practice can we retrain our minds to look for and find that strength. We truly are a global community and finding strength in cultural collaborations is essential to our survival as human beings.
References:
Fadiman, A. (1997). The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures. New York, NY: The Noonday Press.
Red Horse, J. (1997). Traditional American Indian Family Systems. Family Systems and Health, Vol. 15, 243-250.
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