Phenomenological Study on the Efficacy of Native American Healing Practices CHAIR: Dr. Aaron Kipnis

Abstract

Native American and Indigenous approaches to healing are embedded in epistemologies that elevate wholeness, relationality, ceremony, and lived meaning, whereas Western approaches value symptom reduction and mechanistic intervention. While existing scholarship has considered Indigenous healing practices descriptively, there are significant gaps in research approaches that engage how healing is actually experienced, interpreted, and integrated by participants and healers in their cultural and relational contexts. Therefore, this study adopted a phenomenological approach informed by hermeneutic and decolonial perspectives to investigate how individuals experience healing of anxiety, depression, and trauma through Indigenous ceremonial practices and how these experiences relate to psychological, emotional, and spiritual well-being. The results indicate that anxiety, depression, and trauma are not a single intrapsychic disorder but are conditions created by losing connection with relationship, land, ancestors, and the sacred. Indigenous healing practices extend the concept of mental health beyond the intrapsychic and toward a broader concept of well-being. Such reframing challenges the Western assumption that locates mental health in the mind or the brain and points out that the relationships and the environment are the key factors of psychological functioning. Through the decolonial lens of interpretation, the findings shed light on how Indigenous healing practices exist in tension with colonial powers within the sphere of contemporary mental health systems. Clinicians are encouraged to assess and treat within broader contexts that encompass cultural identity, spiritual orientation, and historical trauma.