Contemporary Revitalization of Indigenous Spiritualities in Prisons, Treatment Centers, and Veteran Retreats: Using Drumming and Storytelling as Forms of Witnessing the Violence Away

Abstract: Bringing together Indigenous Elders, drums, and Native American storytelling, we propose to demonstrate how bringing in ceremonies to spaces long deprived of Indigenous spiritualities has impacted those spaces. In the most natural ways possible colonized spaces often created for “rescue and correction,” e.g. prisons, treatment centers, and veteran retreats have become places where Indigenous spiritualities are being revitalized through the use of ceremonies, drumming, and talking circles. We will demonstrate the ways we do this, share what were some of the outcomes, including barriers to introducing and incorporating the use of Indigenous healing modalities into spaces continuously colonized and decolonized.Presenter bios: Delores (Lola) Mondragón is a Doctoral candidate at UCSB of Native American & Indigenous Religious Traditions with an emphasis on rematriation, rites-of-passage, ceremony, militarism, Two-Spirit ways of being, and QWOC Chicana/o/x histories. She is an enrolled member of the Chickasaw Nation and is the drum-keeper of Iposi, a Women Veteran and Two-Spirit Native medicine drum.

Deborah J. Guerrero is an enrolled Tlingit Tribal member and is also Filipino. Her Tlingit name is GunSeek. She has been an Indian Child Welfare Social Worker for twenty years and is passionate about social justice and works as an advocate for Human Trafficking Survivors in her Native community. As a respected Elder she works with women veterans to help with transformations of their PTSD and is also the honored drum keeper of a sacred drum named Kira's Heartbeat.

Carolyn, Eastern Band Cherokee and Norwegian, is a consultant committed to a life of service assisting individuals, families, communities and organizations to create holistic, collaborative, evidence and spiritually based wellness for themselves, and future generations. For 30 years, Carolyn has served Indigenous and non-indigenous communities, in the United States, Canada, Norway, Australia and New Zealand, offering consultation to agencies, schools, families and individuals around cultural diversity and wellness, and prevention/intervention strategies relating to fetal alcohol spectrum disorders (F.A.S.D.), wellness and recovery.

Isabella M. Mondragón is an enrolled member of the Chickasaw Nation. They are a multidisciplinary artist, drummer, and a student at the Institute of American Indian Art in Santa Fe, NM. They identify as Chickasaw Purepecha Xicanx.

Affiliation: UC Santa Barbara