Violence and the effects of trauma on American Indian and Alaska Native populations.

This article sought to share how violence and the resulting trauma has had a major impact on American Indian and Alaska Native (AI/AN) children and their families, creating hardships that have been very difficult to address or overcome. The recent published literature on poverty and historical trauma provides a contextual framework for understanding issues of violence and the resulting trauma, suicide, domestic violence, and PTSD shared by many AI/AN communities. Cultural adaptations of evidence-based treatments (see Chamberlain, 2008, this issue) are one attempt to integrate Western psychology with indigenous ways of the knowing. Indigenous people are seeking to regain their healing ways by looking around their circle and drawing toward them ways that work and ways to address violence. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)