Resilience, Subjectivity and Mental Health in a Canadian Indigenous Reserve

Resilience, subjectivity and mental health in a Canadian indigenous reserve is the result of research, published in 2015, carried out by Alfonso Marquina Márquez and Jorge Virchez. It is a work presented in six interesting chapters that are easy to read given the intellectual clarity of the theoretical position they propose: to see human experiences as the result of a social construction of identity using cultural systems created from agency.

It is based on the analysis of narratives and spaces and ritual actions of healing that individuals carry out with the intention of recovering from addictions and, at the same time, (re)constructing the lost culture, snatched away by Western Canadian society, according to the Anishinaabe/Cree narratives themselves. Thus, although narratives are written as therapeutic resources for individual salvation, they also represent concrete modes of creativity aimed at the reconstruction of identity and the cultural system from the dominated. It is necessary to mention that in order to protect the inhabitants of the indigenous communities, the names of the individuals as well as the places in the book were changed. The perspective comes from the Algonquian residents of an First Nation reserve in northern Ontario who are mostly descended from Cree- and Ojibwe-speaking peoples who inhabited the lowlands of the Kenogami, Kabinakagami, Nagagami, Pagwachuan and Shekak rivers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The story told in the narratives is articulated with memory, essential components for the construction of healing spaces to return to being anishinaabe/cree. Returning to being is constituted as a matter of individual decision to build tradition and strive to maintain the symbolic and cognitive characteristics of this being in reconstruction. Hence, it is a reflexive and modern phenomenon that is understood as part of secondary socialization, the authors say.

The analysis of the narratives is exposed in a drama composed of three stages: captivity (characterized by colonization in which culture was taken away to such a degree that parental skills were lost, forgetting who they were, highlighting this act of separation that caused them to be interned in the Residential School); that of alienation (characterized by individual decadence, addictions, violence and the loss of one's roots with the people of origin, a kind of being loose or living in moral marginality); that of redemption (whose qualities project responsibility, but above all the recovery of spirituality, the reconstruction of belonging and the use of ritual practices and objects for therapeutic recovery, identity reconstruction and the salvation of the Anishinaabe/Cree cultural system).

It is of great theoretical interest to think about the identity reconstruction of the Anishinaabe/Cree, if we consider that these are actions carried out from secondary socialization, that is, by individuals who have already internalized cultural forms (deteriorated by colonial relations in this case). Thus, constructing a coherent narrative and recovering ritual spaces and times of an imagined way of being, forces us to ask about the uses of time and space in situations of cultural reconstruction. That is, is it a matter of combining the time of the individual biography with a series of healing rituals that incorporate ceremonial spaces in accordance with the time of the life trajectory? Would we be in the presence of reconstructive actions that slow down the accelerated time of modernity as a resource for mental health and the recovery of the sense of community? These are some of the questions that emerge from the reading of this book when the explanation of decadence is assigned to the disruption with the environment, the family and the spiritual world that colonization engendered, translatable as an experience of disarticulation of individual life with collective life. This readjustment between cultural space and time suggests that individuals who have entered into therapeutics achieve a certain congruence insofar as the word (the narrative) and the practice (the ritual action) contribute to the (re)construction of tradition.

The contextual framework in which these case studies occur is the strong presence of the Healing Movement that has called for the recovery of the Red Road, that is, the spiritual path; underlining the disruption that emerged with European colonization as the cause from which reconstructive reflexivity must begin. The importance of this movement is that it explains mental illness as a consequence of the dissociation of the individual from his cultural system that includes the spiritual, the natural and the human.

A theoretical question highlighted by the book is to observe whether it is possible to (re)construct identity without the existence of a cultural system. If narratives, practices and ritual objects are considered as mediating components of mentalities as ordering discourses of reality from agency, it is possible to do so as a bricoleur with creative capacity for the reconstruction and cultural reinvention of identity. If culture and identity are constructed from agency, as the theoretical hypothesis of this book suggests, individuals are not immersed in cultural codes that order their behavior, but rather codes are a permanent construction of creative individuals who act in a situation in which their cultural system has almost disappeared. Starting from this theoretical position gives power to individual agency to the extent that it shows the possibility of collective emancipation through the creation of culture as a human force to build identity. In this sense, I think that the authors describe the emergence of "a militant imaginary" that directs efforts for the collective (re)construction of identity and individual salvation from addiction, through the assembly, in the form of a bricoleur, of its cultural system.

One more element that is suggested from this reading refers to healing from the built culture. That is, it leads us to think that the (re)construction of (collective) tradition heals individuals. The maxim found in this creative action is its "configuring quality" that is based precisely on the idea that culture heals. This idea brings out a fear of the spiritual guides (the Elders), because they are reflective beings about the power links between their culture and modern Canada, they know that traditional medical knowledge can be appropriated by modernity and thus turned into a commodity. Undoubtedly, this zeal for its own is the result of experience with modern society which, for its development, requires borrowings from other cultures.

In this sense, a question that recurrently haunts the authors refers to the type of culture that the subjects of their research are constructing both individually and collectively, that is, whether it is something authentically indigenous or is the result of creative borrowings as a result of dialogue between cultures. They affirm that it is not exactly an indigenous culture but modern subjects trying to reconstruct both the individual and the collective self. The question leads to the consideration that it is a universe of social construction of subjectivities through the appropriation and construction of cultural resources, which leads to controlling the relations of confrontation with modern Canadian society, as an input of its history and memory. Without this oppressive relationship (expressed in the narratives of captivity and alienation) the narrative of redemption and, with it, the cultural (re)construction, could not be carried out. Here the following reflection is appropriate: infants who are already socialized in the new Anishinaabe/Cree culture (however minority it may be today), as a result of this reconstructive salvation or "imaginative militancy", will internalize their new circumstance that will define their life trajectories not in a soteriological sense but more explicable by the cognitive and symbolic internalization of cultural identity (this is its "configuring genesis"). which makes it imperative to continue the research, but now in a universe of cultural transmission (symbols and cognitions) to the new generations socialized primarily in this new cultural environment.

Undoubtedly, many of the therapeutic actions described by the authors are borrowed from Western culture (such as circle talks, for example), but there are several components that distinguish it: open ritualized spaces (forest, trees, rivers, lakes, day and night stays in the tundra) and the narrative awareness that addictions are not the result of an internal cause attributable to the individual (mechanism on which circle talks rest). but rather they are the product of the dissociation that the West caused, that is, something external: dissociation between time and space, one reads between the lines. Hence, the case study suggests that the social production of culture has a configuring effect on social relations that generate new individual selves and new cultures that, although today they are an expression of the effort of agency, can become, if they manage to crystallize as collective cognitive frameworks or structures of meaning, will delineate the new generations. In this sense, the work raises new questions: is the liberation from addiction that therapy makes in individuals proportional to the emancipation from oppression that modern Canadian society exerts on these peoples? Although the authors do not delve into it, the text provides clues to support this hypothesis.

The reading of this text continuously peppers relevant questions to understand the social production of identity in a context of devastation of the cultural system. The questions asked by the authors "unleash" new ideas, but above all one is left with curiosity about the culture of the new generations that will already be socialized in this new cultural framework. The book suggests the mental, political, and cultural processes for social (re)construction. Hence, it seems to me that it is an important contribution to the studies of cognitive anthropology and the development of constructivism.