Breaking the Spell of Assimilation in Academia

Academic trauma is real. I am healing.

There is a legacy of brutality and forced assimilation that still permeates American educational systems. Even under the best of circumstances, the effects of ancestral trauma plays out through familial patterns and cycles. Systems of power and control have infiltrated. Even when cycles are broken, their impact often lingers in the subconscious, lives in the DNA and requires healing.

Shifting the educational system will require strong critical thinkers and space holders who can bridge multiple schools of thought.

My evolution as a teacher, facilitator, practitioner, and therapist has been deeply connected to the value of always considering accessibility and safety. I consider neurodivergent and traumatized brains and I consider all bodies. I aim to be inclusive in the broadest sense. This means dismantling my own inner oppressor, listening deeply, studying, re-patterning, and staying committed to always learning and growing.

Personal reflection and critical thinking requires both psychological depth work and logic. It is an integrative process. This kind of work requires activating different parts of the brain, which may or may not be well integrated. Neuroscience will show how less developed corpus collosum and other factors impair the ability to integrate the L and R brain. Often this creates nervous system dysregulation (top down), while environmental stressors reinforce this pattern (bottom up).

Important considerations in the critical thinking process:

• trauma

• possible traumatic brain injury (TBI)

• developmental challenges

• neurodiversity

• left/right brain dominance

• history

In terms of L/R brain dominance, naturally people tend toward one or the other and it takes practice to learn to move between them and to engage in a full cycle of integration and learning. Our Western culture is Left Brain dominant and often labels dominant R brain learners as having a “disability” of sorts.

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My Academic Journey.

I’ve been surprised by the level of philosophical engagement required in my PhD program. It’s a new way of learning for me. The last time I studied philosophy, I was terrible at it. When I consider my cultural context, history, and academic background, that makes sense. And yet, as a Western learner, I’m being asked to learn this language and engage in academic discourse — a left-brain-dominant process but the nature of this learning also asks for deep integration on other levels. It is a considerable challenge.

Healing the brain and creating new neural pathways is exhausting work — and I believe it’s significantly understudied. In my embodiment training through Dance Movement Therapy and Somatics, I learned this firsthand. That right-brain-dominant, experiential learning required us to track felt experiences throughout the process. We would leave exhausted, dream heavily, and I always struggled with word formation.

This only worsened after experiencing significant harm from an instructor — a PhD level Jungian analyst using Dance Movement Therapy. In class, she shared stories and case studies that were concerning, but it wasn’t until I had a personal crisis (a flash flood natural disaster incident and loss of a home) right before our class, that the harm occurred for me personally. Instead of responding in a trauma-informed way, she immediately pushed me into active imagination. I flooded — became psychologically overwhelmed — and incapacitated. Many years later, I am still recovering from the damage incurred.

Learning environments that do not consider all learners create harm.

Those who don’t have access to safety — either internally or externally — will struggle to engage in unsafe learning environments. If pushed too far, it can be detrimental. The same is also true for psychological healing approaches.

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Wounds That Still Echo: The Boarding School Legacy.

The history of Native Americans shows a clear correlation between ancestral educational trauma and current educational outcomes. Yes, these are effects of colonization but I believe we have to also get more sophisticated in identifying the nuances of this collective shadow.

Colonel Richard Henry Pratt’s Carlisle had an infamous motto, “Kill the Indian, save the man” which reflects the genocidal strategies of the boarding school era. Today, as it turns out, Native American students currently have the lowest high school graduation rates in the United States. This stark reality is a living example of the long-term effects of state-sanctioned genocide, forced assimilation, and cultural erasure.

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Healing through educational repair.

I won’t go into detail here about the challenges I currently face in Academia. It does not seem appropriate after the mention of genocide. I know my privilege and the path my ancestors walked to get me here. It has taken time though for me to recognize how my ancestral and cultural conditioning can actually serve me on this path.

“Without a decolonizing mentality, smart students from disenfranchised backgrounds often find it difficult to succeed in the educational institutions of dominator culture.” ~ Bell Hooks

By resisting assimilation, code-switching, and internalized patterns, I’m actively healing and re-patterning the past. My default response to feeling overpowered in Academia still arises, but now I see the opportunity to rewrite the story. I learn more about what I need and how I learn.

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I believe that some of the most insightful thinkers may not “function highly” within traditional academic frameworks but their perspectives deserve just as much, if not more, recognition. Especially the wisdom of Native American peoples, who are the true experts of this land. Their cosmologies, their understanding of our interconnected nature is vital. I believe incorporating traditional education and heart centered ways of learning into the Western Educational models could open the doors for so many.

By taking an Indigenous epistemological approach (which I’ll explore more in future posts), I hope to advocate for more traditional, holistic ways of learning and healing. I believe this approach can help bridge cultural divides and inequities in education, and ultimately create more restorative, holistic and nourishing learning environments.