An Interview with Professor Gabrielle Lindstrom
Gabrielle Lindstorm, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor in Indigenous Studies with Mount Royal University and an Educational Development Consultant (Indigenous Ways of Knowing) at the University of Calgary. Dr. Lindstrom is a member of the Kainaiwa Nation which is a part of the Blackfoot Confederacy.
Theresa Nair: Thank you for joining us today for this installment of the Seattle Psychiatrist Interview Series. I'm Theresa Nair, a research intern at Seattle Anxiety Specialists. We are a Seattle-based psychiatry, psychology and psychotherapy practice specializing in anxiety disorders.
I'd like to welcome with us Indigenous researcher, Gabrielle Lindstrom, who is an Assistant Professor of Indigenous Studies at Mount Royal University. Dr. Lindstrom is a member of the Kainai Nation Blackfoot Confederacy. Her teaching background includes topics surrounding First Nation history and current issues, Indigenous studies, Indigenous cross-cultural approaches and Indigenous research methods and ethics. She recently co-authored the article, Reconsidering Maslow and the Hierarchy of Needs From a First Nation's Perspective.
Thank you for joining us today, Dr. Lindstrom.
Gabrielle Lindstrom: Thank you, Theresa. [Dr. Lindstrom introduces herself in her traditional language]. Greetings, everyone. My name is Dr. Gabrielle Lindstrom, and I just introduced myself in my Blackfoot language. My Blackfoot name is Tsaapinaki and it translates to slanted-eye woman. I'm happy to be here.
Theresa Nair: Thank you so much. Before we get started, could you tell us a little bit more about yourself and what made you interested in studying the relationship between Abraham Maslow and the Blackfoot peoples of Southern Alberta?
Gabrielle Lindstrom: Yeah, of course, Theresa. I was born and raised on the Kainai First Nation in what is now Southern Alberta in Canada, a province in Canada. I've been doing a lot of my research in community, and a lot of my research is concerned with knowledge and with reframing how mainstream society thinks about Indigenous people, as well as offering clarity around misunderstandings of who Indigenous people are.
I've done quite a bit of research with my colleague, Dr. Peter Choate, where we looked at traditional parenting practices from a Blackfoot perspective. We've done some research with Indigenous elders, Blackfoot elders, where they've given us ideas of what traditional parenting practices look like. That's some of my research on that end.
Dr. Choate approached me and said, "This is an idea that I have around looking at the work of Maslow. We hear these tensions." I've certainly heard it as well, how Maslow was in the Siksika Nation in the 1930s, I think it was 1938 to be exact, and he spent some time there. Out of his time there, he was supposedly influenced in shaping his hierarchy of needs. Of course, I've heard the hierarchy of needs, I've seen it in multiple disciplinary contexts, used in disciplinary contexts. The opportunity to do research with an elder is something that I'm always deeply honored to engage with. That's how I started this in this work with Dr. Choate and with elder, Roy Bear Chief. Really, it was certainly eye-opening and it was very interesting. I found it a very interesting process, for sure.
Theresa Nair: That's great, thank you. I do strongly encourage anyone watching this to go and read the article that they wrote because it is quite a fascinating article. As you mentioned, we do know that Maslow visited the Siksika Nation in the summer of 1938. That was several years before he published his Theory of Human Motivation. Could you tell us what prompted the visit and what type of research he conducted once he arrived?
Gabrielle Lindstrom: Sure, Theresa. Maslow was sent to the Siksika Nation at the direction of his mentor, who at the time was Ruth Benedict, an American anthropologist. He was there to do his social index testing, the social personality index testing. At the time, he thought she was really onto something with that. He went into the Siksika Nation, as I said, at the prompting of his mentor. At the time as well, she was challenging this idea that there had to be some kind of competition in Western society, this inherent competition. Benedict was challenging this idea that human beings had this inherent competition within them.
She asked him to go there, and she also wanted him to go because he had some good ideas and wanted him to explore them in that context, but his perspectives were quite narrow because he had never really been and had that cross-cultural experience. That was what prompted him to go. He was really looking at that social personality index, that's what he was really interested in expanding his ideas around, and thought that going into this very diverse cultural context he could make some generalizations that would be applicable across the human experience.
Theresa Nair: Okay, thank you. When he arrived, how was his research perceived by members of the Siksika Nation? What do we know about his efforts to follow culturally appropriate guidelines or any customs while he was there?
Gabrielle Lindstrom: His research, he wasn't received in a very good way because he was asking questions of the community members that were perceived as being disrespectful, that were perceived as being quite inappropriate. According to the Siksika elders, he came in with an existing agenda, which for the Siksika, this agenda was socially unacceptable to them. He ended up only observing behaviors and, of course, interpreting them from his Eurocentric filter, his Eurocentric frame of reference.
While he wanted to gain more, just get a better understanding of the human experience in the context of his social personality index test, he wasn't able to engage with Siksika members because, as I said, what he was asking, he was unaware of the protocols, the Nation protocols, in terms of what he could ask, what he couldn't ask, and so he was basically left to only observe rather than ask questions.
The Siksika elders, they said, "Okay, you're asking these very inappropriate questions really around sex and interpersonal relationships." We don't talk about things like that, we don't, it goes against our social norms as Blackfoot people. They said, "You could stay," they told Maslow, "You could stay, but you can't ask those kind of questions." They tolerated him, they tolerated his presence, and he was only left to observe. He couldn't ask those questions.
I don't know what kind of effort he made to follow culturally appropriate protocols or guidelines or customs while he was there, because as I said earlier, he didn't have any cross-cultural experiences with Indigenous people in the past, so this would've been entirely new for him. I don't know really how he was prepared, what kind of background research he'd done.
But what I find interesting is, from a Blackfoot perspective, you can't really be trained on how to act within another cultural context. Either you go in there with an open mind and an open heart of coming from a good place of respect and you build relationships and you experience those relationships in authentic ways. You can't be trained in how to be a relational human being. Either you are or you aren’t, and the only way you can learn is through experience. That's anyways what the research has shown, is that he had this agenda, he wasn't prepared, didn't know what the guidelines, the protocol. So, yeah.
Theresa Nair: That's a good point, I think you made a lot of good points, and just the importance of being respectful. Thank you for sharing that. One of the biggest questions that come up when discussing this period of Maslow's research is how much influence this visit had over the hierarchy of needs that he later published and became quite famous for. In your research, did you find any evidence of traditional Blackfoot teachings in Maslow's theory?
Gabrielle Lindstrom: See, the thing about it is, is there's such a disconnect in paradigms between the Western and the Blackfoot paradigm. It would've been very difficult for Maslow, coming from his Western paradigm, to authentically capture meaning from a Blackfoot perspective. It would've been very, very difficult. This notion of peak experiences that Maslow describes, that's come up in our research, but what he didn't get and what he didn't appreciate, or what he didn't understand, was the nature of relationships in Siksika culture. He didn't understand that, the connections to land, the connections to each other, the complex dimensions of spirituality. Relationships aren't about hierarchies. They're about interconnections. For Blackfoot, for Siksika, these relationships are holistic and our relationship to satisfaction, our relationship to the human experience, it doesn't exist along a hierarchy. It really is about these interconnections.
He didn't understand the traditional parenting styles of the Blackfoot and he didn't understand the notion of the child as already being self-actualized when they're born, the child as already being self-fulfilled when the child is born. When the Blackfoot child comes into the world, they already have a name, they know their place in society. They're essentially sung into their relationships that have already been established in utero.
It's very difficult to say what kind of influences, because there's such this diametric opposition, but in speaking with some of our interviewees in our research, we certainly were given some insights into how his ideas were changed. He went into Siksika really this hard science sort of guy, he was very much based in the scientific paradigm and he published around that. When he came out of that, his experiences in Siksika, he developed a more humanistic perspective, where he's looking at his observations, interpreting those observations around altruistic behaviors in the Siksika.
I think that really sort of ... Well, I should say I think, but that was what we found in the research, is that that did influence him to some degree, but we have to keep in mind that everything he observed, he was essentially integrating and filtering through his Eurocentric Western/American frame of reference. That's the thing, it's pretty difficult for me to say what kinds of ideas was he able to, how much of an influence. I think there was some influence there, but then we also have to see those cultural disconnects for what they are.
Theresa Nair: Yes, it does sound like maybe it did influence his interest in more of a humanistic approach to things, at the very least.
Gabrielle Lindstrom: Yeah, for sure. It definitely did. He found clues about the altruistic nature of human beings through his time in Siksika. Very much in our society, and I think at the time, and this is what one of our interviewees in our research had pointed out to us, is that Maslow was very individualistic. He came into his time at Siksika and he witnessed behaviors amongst the Siksika people, where people were just helping each other, just with no benefit to that individual who's helping the other individual, no benefit whatsoever. Maslow struggled with that, because when you enter into a relationship in our society in mainstream society, you enter into it because in some way or another you're going to benefit from it.
That was what Maslow was, I think, really struggling with, at least this is what our research found, struggling to figure out why are these Blackfoot people just helping each other out like this, why are they just doing this, what are they getting out of it? What are they getting, these kinds of experiences. Yeah, I think he was influenced, but the degree to which he could authentically and meaningfully and accurately interpret what he was observing was really lacking because of the cultural disconnect.
Theresa Nair: Maybe part of it was him trying to understand that kind of selfless helping of other people in part of the process.
Gabrielle Lindstrom: Yeah, absolutely.
Theresa Nair: That leads us to our next question about when he presented his theory, do you think he was trying to incorporate what he learned and maybe just misunderstood it due to cultural differences, or does it seem from your research that he was trying to present a completely different theory that he just thought he came up with on his own?
Gabrielle Lindstrom: This is also a difficult question for me to answer, but when we think about this in psychological terms, we can see that there's an attempt to bring a Western scientific lens to relationships, that's exactly what Maslow was trying to do. He was trying to bring this lens to relationships, but that's not what they embody in their relationships. The Siksika and other Blackfoot Nations were about interconnections, interconnections with the universe and we exist within this web of relationships.
This individualized perspective that Maslow brings to the hierarchy of needs is not the way in which Siksika exists and it's not the way that we think either. Bringing in that Western scientific analysis, that lens that very much shapes the hierarchy of needs as we know it today, it's misapplied in the context of Blackfoot peoples.
It's hard to know. I think he was influenced, and our research found that he couldn't have, because we've heard this before, is that Maslow got it wrong or something, that he tried to convey the knowledge, his observations and what he saw in Siksika and tried to translate that into his hierarchy of needs, but our research finds that it was not so, it couldn't have been so, because of these diametrically opposed paradigms. What Maslow was drawing on certainly was drawing on some of his experiences in Siksika, but ultimately I think he still had his own agenda.
Theresa Nair: He may have gone in with that agenda and maybe even looking to justify it while he was there. Okay.
Gabrielle Lindstrom: Yeah, he had his own agenda, exactly. Our research, and in our article, we definitely talk about that, we talk about that quite a bit. The purpose of this isn't to say that Maslow's research or that his hierarchy of needs is... We don't critique it, necessarily. It wasn't to discredit it or anything like that, but it was really about trying to deconstruct that notion that the hierarchy of needs is based in Blackfoot knowledge. That's what we were really interested in doing, because there's definitely those that say that, that have suggested that there is this link that Maslow was trying to portray Blackfoot knowledge but that he got it wrong.
We concur and we agree that our research found that he was certainly impacted by his time in Siksika, but I don't think there that he, or I should say our research, we find that it couldn't have been so.
Theresa Nair: That's a good point, thank you. I think that's an important clarification, that whether or not his theory or his hierarchy is accurate is an entirely different topic from whether or not it was influenced by Blackfoot teachings. Those are two different questions, so I think that's an important distinction. Next, I was wondering if we could discuss the hierarchy of needs and mental health. In Maslow's theory, anxiety develops when the need for safety is not addressed and depression is a result of self-esteem needs not being met. Would you say that this part of the theory is similar to Blackfoot teachings on anxiety and depression, or would traditional teachings present an entirely different perspective on these two topics?
Gabrielle Lindstrom: Theresa, it's very different. In my own research around Blackfoot resilience, this is where my research would come in, is it's very unnatural for a Blackfoot person to be depressed. It’s not even a part of pre-colonial teaching, it's not even really ... We're so relationally oriented, within this relational paradigm. We often say this as well, our elders will say this, or even I think this too, when I'm feeling down, I remind myself that I'm never alone and we're never alone. This idea of not having your needs met, I think it's not necessarily ... I'm not saying that's correct or that it's right, but if we are trying to understand a Blackfoot way of mental health and we're trying to understand it in the context of how Blackfoot people think about wellness, it's not just mental health, we might think of it as a spiritual wellness is what it is. It's spiritual wellness.
When your spirit is well, you're connected. You're connected to your ancestors, you're connected to the land, you're connected to each other, you're connected to the universe, you're connected to your more than human relatives. You are so connected within this web of relational alliances. When you are not connected, then there's an interruption in that spiritual wellness, there's a fracturing in that spiritual wellness, so of course a person is going to feel disconnected. It's not so much depression as it is disconnection for us. That's how we might think about it, the differences.
Theresa Nair: That's a really interesting point, because that is a completely different perspective.
Gabrielle Lindstrom: It is.
Theresa Nair: Yeah, the importance of being connected to something larger and that it naturally addresses depression and anxiety as well. I think that's interesting.
We've been talking a little bit about traditional perspectives on mental health. I'm wondering if this relates to modern perspectives on mental health within the community, either within the Kainai Nation or the larger Blackfoot Confederacy. Are there any specific mental health concerns within the community, and what is the view on paths of mental health treatment? Is it generally more of a traditional perspective or what is the approach to mental health now?
Gabrielle Lindstrom: It really is, as I mentioned, it's about spiritual wellness and connection and relationality and restoration. That's really what we're talking about. I know that there's been some work within our Blackfoot Nations, around indicators of wellness, of Blackfoot wellness. What are indicators of Blackfoot wellness, how connected are you to your language, how accessible are elder teachings, how active are you in ceremonies, all of that.
See, it's even hard for me to try and wrap my head around now, as Westernized as I am. It's very difficult for me to separate mental health from spiritual wellness, spiritual connection, from physical, all of that, because it's all so interconnected. You can't just address one aspect. It's a very holistic way, a very holistic pathway. Today, we're experiencing an extreme disconnection, disconnection from our language, and this has been ongoing, but we feel it so acutely these days because it's intergenerational. With each generation, the further away from being Blackfoot it feels like we are.
Now, some of our Blackfoot health researchers, and I'll name one that I'm very influenced by, Bonnie Healy, she talks about how far away are we from being Blackfoot. Now, the focus is on creating pathways towards coming home to being Blackfoot. That includes everything, that includes access to our lands, and I'm not just talking about the small remnants of reserves that we're left on, it's access to lands, it's access to language, it's connection, all of that.
Those are the discussions that are happening in terms of addressing mental health, if we think about it in a Western construct. We're really about restoring, restoring and having that sovereignty again in terms of how we define and how we embody our connections and our relationships.
Theresa Nair: That's a really interesting point. With the current confines and restrictions, would it be possible then to achieve the ideal of mental health? I know it's difficult to even look at mental health as something completely separate when you're looking at a more holistic approach, but would you say those obstacles are preventing people from even reaching the state of mental health that would be the goal?
Gabrielle Lindstrom: Oh, there's always barriers. That's the nature of our existence, is there is always going to be barriers that are cropping up that are going to push us off balance. For Blackfoot, and I'm sure for other First Nations, Indigenous Nations, I won't speak on their behalf, so I'm just going to talk about Blackfoot, it's life exists, our ontological responsibilities really are around the maintenance of balance. This is even before colonization and even now.
Is it possible, you asked me Theresa, to have optimal mental health, even in today's society, even with all of these disruptions to our traditional lifestyles? I would say, yes, it is. As long as you feel connected, as long as you are connected, as long as you can hear your language, you can hear your songs, you can sing them, you can be in ceremony, those things are still alive. Our culture is still alive and we very much are a living culture.
What Maslow brought and what he thought when he went into the Siksika community very much embedded in that salvage anthropology, that he's going to observe a people that are dying. That's not the case, we are still here and we are still achieving that optimal search and balance, because that's what it's about. You're never there, you're never just optimally have this perfect mental health. It's always about finding balance. Some days were pushed off balance, other days were very balanced. This pathologizing of those who are not in balance in that moment, that's not helpful. What we need to focus on is bringing people to balance, and that's something that no pill is going to solve. That's something that Western therapies alone don't have the answer for.
It's about a person having an opportunity to express how they are already self-actualized, because we always say in our Blackfoot ways, you are already born a perfect human being, as Creator meant you to be, but it's as we're going through those life challenges that push us off balance. What ends up happening for so many Indigenous people is we're just completely pathologized in Western mainstream society. We internalize these, and these messages push us off balance and they keep us off balance. It's very difficult to try and regain your balance when you're constantly seeing these messages in media and all of that. Yeah, that's what I have to say about that, Theresa.
Theresa Nair: You're making some great points. This has been really insightful and I appreciate you sharing this perspective on it. As an Indigenous researcher who specializes in communicating topics related to Indigenous and First Nation communities, do you have anything else you'd like to share with our audience?
Gabrielle Lindstrom: Well, Theresa, I think I've shared quite a bit, but what my research has really led me to realize is, and it's really, for me, doing my research is really about coming home to being a Blackfoot woman, and I'm not the first to say this, but we'll see this in even in Western concepts, is in our Indigenous ways, we have our parallel concepts. Again, I learned this, these aren't just something I come up with, this is something that these are what I've learned as well, these ideas are what I've learned from the elders. It's about understanding that we can't just do things interchangeably and interchange Western concepts with Indigenous concepts, that's not what paralleling is about. It's really about experiencing relationships.
Indigenous people have experienced relationships with Western folks on the terms of Western people, that's what I'll say, on the terms of Western people, but Western folks have not experienced relationships on the terms of Indigenous people, they have not done that yet. But if they were to do that, could you imagine the opportunities for being in balance, for being in relationship?
Hopefully, if one of the messages that I leave the audience with is, is that that pathway to transformation is really about stepping out of comfort zones and experiencing relationships not only on your terms, but on the terms of Indigenous people. Our terms, they're not oppressive, they're not assimilationist or anything like that. If anything, the Indigenous paradigm is inherently inclusive. That's what I want to say.
Theresa Nair: That's wonderful, thank you so much. I really appreciate you participating in our interview series, and both for sharing your knowledge of the historic event between Maslow and visiting the Siksika Nation, and also for sharing this perspective on mental health as well, and more the holistic perspective from this aspect. I really appreciate it, thank you so much for joining us today.
Gabrielle Lindstrom: You bet, Theresa.
Dr. Gabrielle Lindstrom beside a picture of her paternal grandfather, Mokakin (translates to Pemmican), Pat Weasel Head.
Please note: The views expressed by the interviewee are for educational and informational purposes only, are not meant to diagnose or treat any condition, and do not necessarily reflect the views of Seattle Anxiety Specialists, PLLC.
Editor: Jennifer (Ghahari) Smith, Ph.D.