References:
Clarke, K., & Yellow Bird, M. (2020). Decolonizing pathways towards integrative healing in social work. Taylor & Francis Group. ProQuest Ebook Central. http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wayne/detail.action?docID=7245245
Decolonizing Pathways Towards Integrative Healing in Social Work by Kris Clarke and Michael Yellow Bird stands as a transformative contribution to the field of social work, challenging the entrenched limitations of Western-centric approaches and advocating for a holistic, decolonized vision of healing. This book transcends academia for me and serves as a call to action and roadmap for communities seeking to reclaim agency, memory, and tradition in the pursuit of justice and collective well-being.
In a time when our greatest strength lies in the bonds of community, Clarke and Yellow Bird powerfully critique the field’s silence around the enduring violence of settler colonialism. They write, “Settler colonial systems of oppression and their corresponding practices have fundamentally shaped our ways of understanding ourselves, others, and our society” (Clarke & Yellow Bird, 2020, p. 68). This quote encapsulates one of the book’s central assertions: that mainstream trauma studies, and even social work education, often erase or sanitize the foundational traumas of colonial conquest. The authors highlight how American culture rebrands settler colonialism as a barren ghost of a former age, likening it to “our grandfather’s ancient military uniform: musty, a bit out of fashion, and vaguely heroic.” This metaphor not only stirs the silence of forgotten histories but also calls into question the very institutions that drape themselves in the mantle of justice. By calling out the Eurocentrism of trauma studies and the failure of social work curricula to address doctrines like the Doctrine of Discovery, Clarke and Yellow Bird push readers, particularly white social workers, to reckon with their complicity in colonial continuities. The book demands that true decolonization can not be conjured through rhetoric and must be lived, breathed, and embodied through relentless pursuit. It calls for dismantling the ideological and material systems that perpetuate historical violence.
To migrate is to traverse not just distances, but the poignant landscapes of memory shaped by separation from the source of who we are as people. Innately intertwined to the visceral feeling of land, the quickening pulse of collective identity, and the embedded trauma of severance, is the spiritual, emotional, and physical capacity to understand ourselves and one another. For what is more important than memory in the movement between time and space? In our imprisonment in isolationist societies, we hear the call to forget, to bask in our separation, to concede to our severance from land and memory, whether forced or manifested by the will to survive. As Clarke and Yellow Bird write, “Settler colonialism is built upon the conscious forgetting of Indigenous Peoples’ histories, cultures, and ways of being. This social amnesia obscures the invasions, slavery, policing, and genocides that have enforced the subjugation and oppression of Indigenous Peoples by settler colonists.” Clarke and Yellow Bird bring forth anointment to the lack of holistic remedies currently used in Western social work practice by exploring Indigenous teachings and traditions of healing and examine six core areas of healing that are grounded in a decolonizing framework. The book encapsulates pathways to multidisciplinary healing within social work education and theory, drawing from social memory, historical trauma, contemplative traditions, storytelling, interdisciplinary approaches to health, and Indigenous healing knowledge. These pillars offer critical infrastructure for our ability to foster and nurture communities that resist oppression, cultivate collective care, and anti-carceral systemic liberation.
As highlighted throughout their work, beyond the conscious mind’s capacity to process the complexity of forgetting, therein lies the trauma shared by all contexts, human, collective, individual, and natural. In addition, they uplift the reminder that for centuries, indigenous beliefs sanctified the sentient nature of all things, rocks, grass, trees, animals, insects and the obligation humans hold to the alive, non-human world. When considering the critical concept of memory as an element of migrant experience, this idea of “sentient ecology,” or the understanding that all aspects of nature are conscious and interconnected, sheds light on the importance of shared memories, stories, and traditions in maintaining cultural identity and healing postcolonial trauma. Surviving postcolonial trauma requires resilience, the radical audacity to resist, and the heroic willingness to protect memory.
A key aspect of their work is the recognition that one of the most violent remnants of post-colonial trauma can be observed in the denial of its existence and connection to the present-day oppression of marginalized populations. A central theme is the critical role of memory and the ongoing impact of postcolonial trauma. The authors write, “Historical trauma has been defined as cumulative and collective trauma that produces psychological and emotional suffering in individuals and communities.” They emphasize that unresolved historical trauma carves our collective grief from the collateral of genocide, land theft, and cultural erasure. To acknowledge post-colonial violence and trauma is to recognize the historical and present-day injustices committed against indigenous and oppressed populations and to be willing to confront these systems and structures (Clarke & Yellow Bird, 2020). Confronting these structures requires self-reflection into the implicit and explicit ways we each contribute to the systems that oppress and conflate injustice through benevolent attempts at rescue of these populations and calls on us to extend solidarity free from manifested control, liberation of lived experiences and memory, and centering of oppressed voices and expertise (Clarke & Yellow Bird, 2020). By confronting colonial violence, upheld by enduring systems of oppression, we can begin to dismantle the artifacts of Western fundamentalism that calls on us to assimilate, to forget. The effects of post-colonial trauma endure through the systemic endorsement of assimilation and cultural amnesia serving to proliferate further indoctrination and control oppressed populations.
Historical trauma has produced violent psychological and emotional suffering across generations and life forms. Unresolved historical trauma carves our collective grief from the collateral of genocide, land theft, and cultural erasure (Clarke & Yellow Bird, 2020). The legacies of indigenous genocide, land theft, and slavery, are deeply rooted in settler-colonial ideologies and litter our visual geographies with extractive symbolism and harmful manifestations of control and dismissal of our pain (Clarke & Yellow Bird, 2020). Clarke and Yellow Bird further argue that the effects of post-colonial trauma endure through the systemic endorsement of assimilation and cultural amnesia serving to proliferate further indoctrination and control oppressed populations. This ongoing trauma is not only psychological but is embedded in social structures, policies, and even the social ecosystems we inhabit. The authors highlight the importance of “memory work” as both a healing practice and a form of resistance. Memory work is a framework to signify the process of exploration and reflection on personal and collective memories, through the context of our intersecting identities, transcending space and time, braiding ropes of salvation from the carnage of post-colonial repression.
Through the process of individualizing our experiences of grief, pain, and suffering, a capitalist society seeks to further our disunity, inequity, captivity, and dig deeper the trenches of imbalanced power structures (Clarke & Yellow Bird, 2020). Through the destruction and erasure of our collective remembering, we fail to address the institutional cultures and repetitions that allow discrimination and genocides to raze our traditions and right to agency and self-determination (Clarke & Yellow Bird, 2020).
Multitudes of systemic destruction, on our memory and our ability to trust ourselves to witness and record the atrocities being committed against indigenous and BIPOC people, continue to empower the homogenized neo-liberal strategies used to dominate and re-write our narratives of injustice (Clarke & Yellow Bird, 2020). Memory work is an integral aspect of calling back our power and self-guiding our healing and liberation. The multigenerational impact of storytelling, written words, oral histories, the sharing of cultural foods and recipes, ritual prayer, and natural healing practices have been pathologized by the West as rumination and nothing more than myth and snake oil.
The book’s chapters traverse topics such as water, creative expression, movement, contemplation, relationships with animals, and the natural world-each explored as a site of healing and resistance. Historical trauma has produced violent psychological and emotional suffering across generations and life forms. Unresolved historical trauma carves our collective grief from the collateral of genocide, land theft, and cultural erasure. The legacies of indigenous genocide, land theft, and slavery, are deeply rooted in settler-colonial ideologies and litter our visual geographies with extractive symbolism and harmful manifestations of control and dismissal of our pain. The act of remembering what happened, recording it through the grief and austerity of our poems, our songs, our laying of hands on foreheads in whispered prayer is the ablation of our grief and suffering and the liberation from our silent distress and suffocation. Rather than minimizing our suffering, or forgetting it, the act of memory work illuminates our down-beaten paths of rerun to self and offers culturally and spiritually appropriate ways to transmute our mourning into empowerment and processing the historic wrongs of incomprehensible past and present. Through the destruction and erasure of our collective remembering, we fail to address the institutional cultures and minimizations that allow discrimination and genocides to raze our traditions and right to agency and self-determination.
Decolonizing Pathways is a revelatory reminder that in a time where our survival is hinging on our ability to embolden the grassroots courage to organize and resist, our sense of personal and collective identity, inclusion, and promise of a more just social order is embedded in our willingness to command our power through social memory and emotional authority over our own narratives. Together we are bound through storytelling, breaking bread, and witnessing. While nationalism threatens to dislodge us from the ever-flowing stream of collective consciousness and build borders between our humanness, kinship, mutual aid, shared culture, space, and social memory serves to heal and unite us. We can see this when white colonial spaces shut down black and brown joy. When those spaces reframe our stories, our laughter, our gathering, as dangerous, threatening, too loud, too ethnic. Let this be a call to joyfully double-dutch across the hymns of old rhymes and rhythms kept by feet and hearts that remember. Let it be a reminder that when women gather around a bowl of brown beans and separate the useful from the discard, and tell secrets pregnant with ancient knowledge, that it is not gossip, it is fundamental discord in survival and the sharing of primitive salve and healing. Let our memories bridge the networks that keep aid and hope flowing and remind us that there is nothing for us without us.
Memory work is a framework to signify the process of exploration and reflection on personal and collective memories, through the context of our intersecting identities, transcending space and time, braiding ropes of salvation from the carnage of post-colonial repression (Clarke & Yellow Bird, 2020). While forgetting has not been unitary in its implicit reshaping of indigenous memory, alive in censorship, erasure, destruction of political, historical, and cultural artifacts, the harm has reverberated across generations (Clarke & Yellow Bird, 2020). Memory work serves as resistance to dangerous and violent systems, confrontation with our oppression and collective injustice, deeply healing in our mindful efforts at decolonizing our minds and spirits. Memory work is the spiritually militant opposition to our captivity, our pain, our grief, and our slaughter. Memory work is resistance, and to resist is to love life, and survive beyond lifespan. It is resilience through shared tradition and cultures, a source of strength and preservation. Tell your stories, share your meals, embolden your laughter, your wailing, your stories about right of return, displacement, captivity. Let the repeating of stories and memories be a danger to the systems that oppress us. Let them dismantle the silence, so that our suffering be written and accounted for and our liberation be dreamed into existence.
Decolonizing Pathways affirms the growing body of knowledge which shows that healing is not an individual pursuit but a collective journey rooted in relationships, memory, and resistance. The authors urge readers to view multitudes of systemic destruction, on our memory and our ability to trust ourselves to witness and record the atrocities being committed against indigenous and BIPOC people, and continue to empower the homogenized neo-liberal strategies used to dominate and rewrite our narratives of injustice. Memory work is an integral aspect of calling back our power and self-guiding our healing and liberation
In a time when social work and allied fields are reckoning with their own colonial legacies, Clarke and Yellow Bird’s work is both timely and necessary. It is a testament to the enduring power of memory, the necessity of solidarity, and the possibility of healing through decolonization. This book is essential reading for anyone committed to decolonial practice, community healing, and the radical reimagining of social work as a liberatory force.
