Tribal Communities and Family Resilience Today | Center for Native Child and Family Resilience

Project Goals

As part of a Children’s Bureau initiative to raise awareness of Tribally engaged prevention and intervention efforts, the Center will partner with Indian Tribes to examine solutions for healing the ongoing family trauma persisting in the aftermath of the numerous historical injuries shared by many Tribal communities, including the break-up of Indian families and child removal.

The Center works in partnership with Tribal communities to:

Honor effective Tribal community and practice-based models of prevention;
Promote awareness and use of culturally relevant child maltreatment prevention services that are supported by practice-based evidence in Tribal child welfare systems;
Improve holistic services for American Indian/Alaska Native (AI/AN) children affected by child abuse and neglect;
Develop models of cultural, community, and trauma resilience;
Build the evidence-base of Tribal child welfare knowledge and practice through evaluation; and
Transfer knowledge from project findings to the field.

Podcasts

The Center convened Native experts to discuss their projects focusing on cultural resilience, a protective factor fundamental to mitigating risks to children and healing the intergenerational impacts of trauma. We invite you to listen to this series of informative and inspiring podcasts, hosted by Shirley Cain, Red Lake Nation Tribal member:

The Benevolent Childhood Experiences Project with Melissa Walls, Couchiching First Nation and Bois Forte Band of Chippewa, John Hopkins University

Yurok Shadow Puppetry Project for School Aged Youth with Laura White Woods, Yurok Tribe, Yurok Tribal Court

Traditional Evaluation of Healing Grants with Betsy McDougall, Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa, Migizi Consulting

Resilience-Informed Care Training Modules

Resilience-informed care is a paradigm shift in child welfare work that seeks to center the ancestral resilience of Indigenous communities instead of their trauma.

The Resilience-Informed Care Training Modules support communities with building their own vision for a resilience-informed Tribal child welfare program. The course now features coaching videos with background and guidance for each module.

Zuya Yuha O’mani Project Shares Video of Song

OLCJC Case Manager and Cultural Provider Larry Swalley sings a traditional song to honor the Culture Bearers who have shared their knowledge, traditions, songs, and ceremonial processes over the years. As their wisdom is still being provided to children and families, these Culture Bearers continue to serve the community. The song is gifted to the Children's Bureau and CNCFR team in celebration of the partnership’s accomplishments.

New Resource: The Cultural Guide for the Development of Tribal Child Welfare Products

This resource provides organizations, teams, and individuals developing Tribal child welfare products with guidance about how to develop those products in ways that reflect and embrace Tribal culture and values. This guide helps product and tool developers to retrieve and incorporate cultural knowledge while ensuring that products developed collaboratively with these communities include the acknowledgement and recognition of their contributions to the fields of child welfare, education, social services, research, and evaluation. Access here

Fact Sheet for Tribal Child Welfare Officials

Tribal involvement and partnership in the process are critical to a full understanding of the experiences of people affected by the child welfare system. The Children’s Bureau is disseminating the Fact Sheet for Tribal Child Welfare Officials to spread the word and share information to invite Tribal involvement and partnership in the Child and Family Services Reviews (CFSRs). The fact sheet describes the CFSRs and how Tribal child welfare officials can get involved.

The Fact Sheet for Tribal Child Welfare Officials can be accessed here
More information about the CFSRs is available on the CFSR Information Portal.

Indigenous Ways of Knowing

The Center for Native Child and Family Resilience’s Indigenous Ways of Knowing resource provides guidance for researchers working in Indigenous communities, providing them with a framework for engaging effectively, respectfully, and reciprocally with Indigenous communities. The resource includes discussions of considerations for researchers, videos from experts in the field, and links to additional resources.

Click here to get started!

Useful Resources

Our resource page contains information and tools related to resilience-based programs in Indian Country, program implementation, and evaluation, including:

A literature review of practices used in Tribal communities
An environmental scan that identifies promising programs and practices that support and sustain Tribal families and children

Click here to find out what we have!

Many prevention models in Indian Country build resilience by using Tribal cultural values, the transmission of family traditions, and the experiences of Tribal youth. Guided by these values, traditions, and experiences, Tribal community initiatives have shown great promise in developing resilience-based models for child abuse prevention. The experiences of Tribal communities suggest that these approaches are often effective in enhancing family resilience and reducing the risks of harm to children and adults—yet rarely have these strategies used collaborative community-based evaluation to demonstrate their effectiveness.

The Center for Native Child and Family Resilience (the Center) supports and enhances resilience-related approaches to Tribal child welfare by developing evidence-based standards of care. The Center embraces the unique opportunity to honor these valiant community efforts that improve Native family resilience and to help empower Tribal communities of care by using culturally engaged, community based evaluation models to demonstrate the effectiveness of these efforts and disseminate Native solutions to the field.