Disciplined Hearts: History, Identity, and Depression in an American Indian Community

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Description

“It is a good place for your work. Depression is a large problem here. About 70-80% of our people are depressed.” When she arrived at the Flathead Reservation in Montana to start an ethnographic study of depression, medical anthropologist Theresa DeLeane O’Nell again and again encountered such statements. This astonishingly widespread concern propelled the writer into the complex lives of these brand new American Indian people and into the historical roots of their latest situation.

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.
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