
Authors: Steven J. Onken, Hawai‘i, USA
Year: 2008
Event: 2008 TheMHS Conference
Subject: recommended reading, indigenous approaches to wellbeing, cultural issues, hawaii
Type of resource: Conference Presentations and Papers
ISBN: 9780975765340
Abstract: Wellbeing is the framework for realizing the recovery journey. This framework moves from first level (personal) change to second level (community and society) change, with an emphasis on creating and accessing community resources and social relationships that are needed to develop and exercise the person-based capacity to recover. Recognizing and understanding the intersect of predominantly Western/Eurocentric understanding of recovery and native/ indigenous approaches to wellbeing is an emerging challenge and opportunity. Creating space for the application of Native Hawaiian and other indigenous ways of knowing, traditional wisdoms and ancestral and modern-day communal resilience in partnership with research-based Western recovery practice advances and validates worldviews of wellbeing. Such practice honours the first territory: integrity. Coercion undermines integrity and thus wellbeing. Going "Force Free" is the vision and challenge we need to embrace. Among the core strategies to getting there are a trauma-informed system of care and supports, including elimination of restraints and seclusion as well as micro-aggressions, and helping relationships that work, including true shared decision making and risk taking. The heart of our system needs to be re-awakened. When decision-makers act contrary to our informed lived experience and natural ways of wellbeing, we must act contrary to decision-makers.
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