Early in my career, I explored clinical depression and problem drinking among my own American Indian people on the Fort Belknap Indian reservation in Montana in the United States. There I interviewed a middle-aged cultural traditionalist named Traveling-Thunder who explained why many community members struggled with substance abuse and associated distress. In his view, the primary problem was that “we do not fit in with the Whiteman’s system.” As it turned out, this straightforward observation captured an entire explanatory rationale about reservation mental health that reappears everywhere I go in “Indian Country.” Specifically, Traveling-Thunder highlighted history and spirituality in his account of the emergence of community mental health problems, overtly attributing these forms of disabling distress to processes of Euro American colonization. This problem frame overtly recasts “mental disorders” as (post)colonial pathologies, which anchors a broad alternative Indigenous mental health discourse. This framework is parallel to but distinctive from dominant psychiatric discourse. In this article, I describe this alter-Native psy-ence and trace the implications for American Indian community mental health services.

中文翻译：

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美国印第安人社区心理健康服务中的（后）殖民困境：替代本土心理的探索。

在我职业生涯的早期，我在美国蒙大拿州的贝尔纳普堡印第安人保留地探索了我自己的美洲印第安人的临床抑郁症和酗酒问题。在那里，我采访了一位名叫 Traveling-Thunder 的中年文化传统主义者，他解释了为什么许多社区成员都在与药物滥用和相关的痛苦作斗争。在他看来，主要问题是“我们不适合怀特曼的体系”。事实证明，这个直截了当的观察抓住了一个关于保留心理健康的完整解释性基本原理，这种基本原理在我去“印度国家”的任何地方都重新出现。具体来说，Traveling-Thunder 在他对社区心理健康问题出现的描述中强调了历史和灵性，公开地将这些形式的残疾痛苦归因于欧美殖民化的过程。这个问题框架公然将“精神障碍”重新定义为（后）殖民病理学，它锚定了一个广泛的替代土著心理健康话语。这个框架与主流的精神病学话语平行但又有所不同。在这篇文章中，我描述了这种另类的本土心理，并追溯其对美国印第安社区心理健康服务的影响。