Our guest today is Dr. Maegan Rides At The Door, the director of the National Native Children’s Trauma Center at the University of Montana. Now, many of us know at least some of the historical trauma faced by Native Americans and Alaska Native families, not just the genocide of the past, but also the boarding school abuses of the very recent past.

How does this impact children today? And how does racism, which is very much in the present, add to the trauma burden these children face? And how do we appreciate and recognize and leverage the incredible strengths and resiliency displayed by Native families multigenerationally? Most importantly, how do we craft culturally responsive services, not just in word and good intention, but in actuality, indeed?

Topics in this episode:

• Child welfare needs to be culturally responsive (2:09)
• Historical trauma and structural racism (5:47)
• Cultural resiliency (11:44)
• Expanding the original ACEs (17:07)
• Recommendations (19:24)
• Public policy (25:32)
• Culture eats strategy for lunch (28:24)
• Advice for CACs (35:30)
• Share this episode! (39:05)

Links:

Maegan Rides At The Door, Ph.D., LCPC, is director of the National Native Children’s Trauma Center at the University of Montana College of Education. She is an enrolled member of the Assiniboine-Sioux Tribes of the Fort Peck Reservation and a descendant of the Absentee Shawnee Tribe of Oklahoma.

The NNCTC offers a number of resources on trauma.

Rides At The Door, Maegan, and Ashley Trautman. 2019. “Considerations for Implementing Culturally Grounded Trauma-Informed Child Welfare Services: Recommendations for Working with American Indian/Alaska Native Populations.” Journal of Public Child Welfare 13 (3): 368–78. doi:10.1080/15548732.2019.1605014. 

Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) original study

RYSE Center

RYSE’s expansion of the ACEs pyramid is available online.

For more information about National Children’s Alliance and the work of Children’s Advocacy Centers, visit our website at NationalChildrensAlliance.org. Or visit our podcast website at OneInTenPodcast.org. And join us on Facebook at One in Ten podcast.

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