Well this weeks, Ch. 19 has Karre Kern written all over it. I'm not really sure why cultural competence is so important to me it just is, but I can play with why...maybe it's because I don't know very much about my own family culture(s). With both parents and all grandparents gone, it's hard to nail down the info but I've started to. The part of me I'm most drawn to is the Native American side. After reading this I wonder if the lack of information on my ancestry has to do with internalized oppression. Maybe my white family members didn't embrace that side so important details about who when and where got lost along the way. Maybe there is some shame there, I mean being white and having native blood that came from native women might be from force, not choice. For a long time I admired my roots from afar, being white and blonde I questioned my own intentions because I listened to those who said it was foolish to consider that my culture because I'm "so white" in appearance. Well the older I got the more I understood myself and what would make me happy mattered more than those outsiders judging me. I think that you can be a male anatomically and identify more as a female, it's your human experience. Now I'm less worried about what other people think about what my cultural identity is. Honestly I don't look at skin color so much as I look at humans being human and sharing a human experience together.
Reading the experience with discrimination I empathized with her. I've been in positions like that myself and I know how very hard it can be to even get yourself to walk in the door let alone speak about why you are there. If you are hungry for humble pie I suggest you show up at a food pantry and pretend you are someone who needs help. Go through the whole process, maybe you can tell them at the very end you are a student in social work and you felt you needed to immerse yourself in those shoes as best you could to be a more competent social worker later on. You know the saying "until you've walked a mile in their shoes" well that's some of our service learning and field work but we are there helping not really being in that position. Whatever the area of social work that interests you the most I think the more ways to be competent the better, become that person for a little while and feel that discrimination. If it's a safety issue, then read about it. Find books on people who were or are homeless, immigrants, battered women, child abuse, whatever your passion is from the angle of clinician as well as the one wearing the shoes.
In Ch. 20 I love how technology is showing promise in helping the cause. I'm one who stumbles with it, it seems so unnatural to me so things like the story sharing that happens feeds my happy. So does the use of theater or art. I remember seeing a production on Matthew Shepard and it really made a difference being there in a room with the emotions flowing. The following film also brought many tears to my own eyes~
Native Film: Dakota 38
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1pX6FBSUyQI
I've known Silas Hagerty, a young man in his twenties from Porter, Maine for most of his life. He grew-up with my daughters. He’s a local member of my community and a filmmaker. Silas wrote, produced, and directed Dakota 38. Over many months, many stories were shared between us. Silas’ filmmaking was done on a shoestring. He carried his gear in a bag and stayed at friends’ houses when he traveled. I remember Silas telling me about meeting a Native American elder at his home. I wondered how that had happened. The elder talked about a dream he’d had, an important dream, one that he’d tried to ignore. But finally he understood that the dream had to be re-enacted. There would be a ride of Native Americans on horseback, over 300 miles across the Dakotas in the dead of winter, a healing ride to the place where 38 Native Americans had been hung during the presidency of Abraham Lincoln. This ride would have to be filmed the elder told Silas. That’s what you’ll do, he’d said. I remember feeling shocked by the story. I asked Silas, are you going to do it? He was. I didn’t have to ask if there was any money involved. I knew there wasn’t. And I remember being alarmed. My God, what an ordeal! The blizzards and freezing winds! Things could go seriously wrong! And Silas did it. He went on the ride with his camera and some young assistants not afraid of the risks and ready for a once-in-a-lifetime adventure [Jesse HighEagle, Sarah Weston, Andrew Weston, Wes Schuck and JB Weston]. A year or two afterwards, at a makeshift screening room in Porter, he showed members of my community and me a trailer of what would become Dakota 38. What we saw knocked us out. This will change your life, I told Silas. But it already had. Putting a feature-length film together is a huge undertaking. But a few years later, it was complete. Thanks to the Kalliopeia Foundation a couple hundred of us got to see the completed film at the Cornish Town Hall, in Cornish, Maine one evening. It was one of the most powerful documentaries I’ve ever seen. Jim Miller, the Native American whose dream was the initiating event, was there and spoke afterwards. So did Silas. It was an unforgettable evening. Silas gifted the film and his six years of work to Jim Miller's project where it's being used among Native Americans for healing purposes, as foreseen in Miller’s dream.
ReplyDeleteI am so excited that so many of us are choosing to write about cultural competency! I think that we don't do enough discussion around privilege and how it impacts how we practice. Thank you for sharing your own post about it!
ReplyDeleteHi karre embrace your native American heritage its unique aspect and its your identity. Everyone should be able to talk about their family heritage and im so glad to hear you are seek to discover more about you family. Culture competency is something we will always have to work on every single day as society continues to change. thank you for sharing with us..
ReplyDeleteKarre, I love your suggestion about taking the role of someone in need at a food pantry. Just reading that demonstrated that there is this great distance from what my clients and I may have experienced. It made me realize that there is often times this invisible societal divide between social workers and those they serve. Perhaps, social workers should take some pieces of humble pie and put themselves more in the shoes of those they serve. It is only then that we, as social workers, will better understand where others are coming from.
ReplyDeleteI have thought of this in my internship at DHHS. A lot of times the reason clients are in such compromised situations are because they were born, by no fault of their own, into a situation of such limited access to resources, had a bad childhood and grow up to be addicts, abusers, etc. It is surprising to me in my work at DHHS and Sweetser that there are those who see they as a huge factor and those that see it as a nonfactor. The latter view it as solely the individual’s fault because they made poor choices. I think there needs to be more perspective, and going to a food pantry is a good start.
Thanks,
Colby
I thoroughly enjoyed your post on cultural competency Karre! I especially enjoyed hearing about how you have chosen to embrace your Native American heritage, and was sad to hear that your family chose not to identify with this culture. I think that the Native American culture is such an amazing part of our world today and there is much to be learned from this culture. Being culturally competent is such a huge part of social work and it is so important that we as social workers are able to accept all cultures, and individuals for who and what they are.
ReplyDeleteHey Karre! I found this whole post so very inspiring from start to finish! (have you thought about doing motivational speaking!? :) I constantly try to put myself in others shoes when I'm trying to better understand them. I think thats the only way we can really understand where people are coming from or what they may be feeling. I think many people are scared to do so because they're scared of the unknown. As social workers though, we cant be scared. We have to be prepared and competent to work with all different types of cultures, which could mean living a day in their shoes.
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