Child psychologist Dolores Subia BigFoot plans to celebrate her retirement next month, after more than three decades, alongside family, friends and colleagues. But that party is only the beginning of the planned festivities. To honor the Northern Cheyenne traditions of her late husband and four children, the celebration will last four full days.
On the first day, BigFoot will honor Indigenous knowledge and child well-being with singers from the Choctaw Nation Youth Singing Group and a dinner reception. On the second, guest speakers will send her off with speeches commemorating her retirement from the Indian Country Child Trauma Center at the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center, where she has been the director since 2003. The third day will feature a Stomp Dance — a tribal social and cultural gathering. On day four, blessings will be accepted from the sacred Four Directions, the Indigenous concept of north, south, west and east, as well as the four seasons, stages of life and the elements.
BigFoot will be recognized for the vast expanse of her professional work. She has been a principal investigator on more than a dozen federally-funded projects in Indian Country. She also created the Honoring Children curriculum series for mental health professionals serving Indigenous children in culturally relevant ways. The method is based in cognitive behavioral therapy, and focuses on healing from trauma.
“When you uplift the most vulnerable of the population, and they get better and more stabilized and are able to be less vulnerable, then you uplift all of the populations,” BigFoot said in a lengthy interview with The Imprint.
Personal experience sparked her desire to look out for these vulnerable populations. Decades ago, BigFoot, an enrolled member of the Caddo Nation, found herself a young widow and single mother to three children.
When BigFoot sought help to help juggle the demands, she said family and friends offered to take in her kids until she finished her degree.
Although she declined, the feedback inspired her. Throughout her career, “my motivation was that we shouldn’t take children away from their parents in order to help them,” BigFoot said. “We should surround parents and families with more support so children can know who they are and how they exist within this family.”
Now 76, Bigfoot has four biological children, two stepchildren and three adopted children, the last of whom joined the family as an adult. Several have followed her into related careers. Her youngest son works as a youth specialist at the National Center on the Sexual Behavior of Youth, and one of her daughters recently graduated from the San Diego State University with a master’s degree in counseling.
Early this month, BigFoot reflected on her long career in child psychology and the impact she’s had in the field.
This conversation has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity and length.
In your child psychology work, you’ve described yourself as a storyteller who helps behavioral health clinicians and other professionals understand the history of Indigenous peoples. Part of that process has included prayers, ceremony and gathering with others in kinship, at times with your family present. How is storytelling a strength in the field of child welfare, especially when discussing Indigenous well-being?
In general, it’s about what is the story that we tell ourselves when we wake up every morning? What is the story that we tell our children; the story that we tell our colleagues? We are telling ourselves stories all the time, and they may be very short stories or long stories.
My great-grandmother was born in the 1870s, and sometimes growing up we would have three or four generations in the home. We didn’t have electricity, we didn’t have indoor plumbing, which I think was common with a lot of Native families in the years that I was growing up. The stories I tell myself about my parents, my grandparents, my great-grandparents, my great-great-grandparents — those stories are the reason why I do the work that I do.
My grandmother was an activist. She was an advocate. She was very much interested in wanting to preserve the Caddo Tribe and the Caddo language. I can remember her presence, and she told a lot of stories too. But her means of social mobility was who she married. She wasn’t your typical grandmother, but I have a lot of admiration for her, because she managed to be a voice when no one was willing to listen to her.
Please tell me more about Project Making Medicine, which you’ve directed since 1994 and involves specialized training for clinicians and other providers working with American Indian and Alaska Native children and their families who’ve been exposed to childhood physical abuse, sexual abuse or other related traumas. Is that work still ongoing, and how has it evolved?
Project Making Medicine started in 1994 as a means of training clinicians in the treatment of childhood sexual and physical abuse. We did that for about 10 years, and then got additional funding in which we established the Indian Country Child Trauma Center. Then we developed the Honoring Children curriculum series so we culturally enhance trauma-focused cognitive behavior therapy for the treatment of children exposed to trauma.
Somebody asked me, what do you want your legacy to be? I want my legacy to leave healthy, happy, thriving children who know who they are. If we have happy, healthy, thriving children, then we should have happy, healthy, thriving adults, parents and families and communities.
I’m not the only brick. I’m just one brick in the building of a resiliency wall. And sometimes bricks need to be replaced. So if that’s the case, then I’m fine with that.
“If we have happy, healthy, thriving children, then we should have happy, healthy, thriving adults, parents and families and communities.”
— Dolores Subia BigFoot.
Cultural connection and sensitivity can be critical to healing from trauma. For Indigenous children in this country, how often would you say they are paired with an Indigenous therapist, psychologist or counselor? What can you tell me about Native Americans’ presence in the mental health field and access to their services?
It depends on a lot of things: what kind of program is set up, whether there’s residential treatment programs on tribal lands, where you’re more likely to encounter a Native. It depends on the availability, and there’s just very few Native PhDs that are psychologists.
There’s many, many, many communities struggling with domestic violence, with suicide, with substance abuse, with child trafficking. There’s so many things that are undermining our community. We just need the resources and the infrastructure to help create the kind of environment that we need in order for healthy, thriving, enriching growth to occur. You don’t want to set your own broken leg, and you don’t want to do your own brain surgery.
But access to services, having the infrastructure that supports that, having those resources, having that guidance, having an understanding of how to access resources, having insurance — there’s opportunity to have a lot of those services be Indigenous-based. And thank goodness, because now we have the internet, we have a lot of webinars, books on tape. There’s a lot of access without being in physical proximity to that person.
As someone who has been the principal investigator for 13 federal projects involving Indigenous child welfare, can you speak to why the presence of Indigenous psychologists is so important?
Indigenous knowledge has always been with us. It’s not a new thing. And I think we’ve always been trying to pull it in, in some way, because it makes sense. The Medicine Wheel is thousands and thousands of years old, and it’s still being used, right? The canoe, the drum, the sweat — there’s a lot of knowledge that we currently use every day. We use indigenous knowledge all the time — I think what we’re trying to do now is bring it so that it’s recognized as something we can use in day-to-day healing. We recognize that we have had a lot of teachings that make sense. They have stood the test of time. There’s also prophecies that say that our Indigenous knowledge will be what will heal Mother Earth. I’m not the only one that’s bringing Indigenous knowledge into our conversation.
So I think that the more we give voice to it, the more people will listen and see that it’s not a mythical thing. It can be certainly a spiritual thing, because I think we’re all spiritual beings. But it’s not grabbing something that’s not within our reach — we can use prayer, smudging, and bead work. We can use rhythm — those things help center and guide and direct support, and encourage and help us be reestablished or renewed.
Indigenous knowledge is vast. And we can have the benefit of applying it now in a way that we probably couldn’t before. So being able to embrace the knowledge that our ancestors have shared with us over generations, helps us with our own identity.
Sep. 13 correction: The introduction to this article has been revised to clarify several details of Dolores Subia BigFoot’s biography and career.
