Description
In Disciplined Hearts, O’Nell draws on contemporary anthropological theory to locate Flathead depression in the culturally organized experiences of an oppressed people. In line with O’Nell, Flathead narratives of depression are tales in which narrators use their demoralization as a guide for brand new Indian life. Underlying their tales, she says, is the dramatic assertion that depression is the natural condition of “real Indians”—those who have “disciplined” their hearts by recasting their personal sadness into compassion for others.
This wealthy account of circle of relatives and community life describes the moral imagination with which Flathead Indian people weave together historical and personal loss, American Indian identity, and social responsibility. Based on her ethnographic and clinical work, O’Nell pinpoints American Indian depression within a complex interplay of cultural ideas of the self and the Indian circle of relatives, emotion and ethnic identity, and historical relations between Indians and whites.