Lea Denny in her healing space at HIR Wellness Institute in front of a mural painted by a Native American artist.
Our mental health systems were never meant to help Indigenous and marginalized communities because they have been built inside a system of patriarchy and colonialization, according to Lea Denny, founder of the Healing Intergenerational Roots (HIR) Wellness Institute. For the last few years, Denny has been working nonstop to build an organization specifically for the healing of Indigenous people who have suffered from trauma passed down through generations. To effectively heal people who have been subject to oppression, she knew she had to look at mental health services in a new way and build her organization in a way that doesn’t mimic the power structure of this country’s mental health system.
A daughter of Pacific Islanders and married to an Oneida tribe member, Denny understands the pain that comes with having Indigenous ancestors who were forced to assimilate to American culture. Both her ancestors and her husband’s experienced residential boarding schools and “genocide through culture and spirit,” she explains. The trauma created from that history gets passed down through generations as Indigenous people are forced to give up parts of their culture so that they can fit in with American norms. “American society has plasticized my culture into leis and bobblehead hula girls… We’re living in pained societies.”
These experiences led her to her master’s thesis focused on intergenerational trauma, which became HIR Wellness in 2017. As she heard feedback from Native American communities, she continued to see this trauma and made a promise to them that she would never charge people for mental health services. “I just knew that [mental health services] had to be different. It had to heal intergenerational roots,” says Denny. So, she built HIR Wellness as a nonprofit that could receive grants and donations to fund healing. By not accepting money or insurance from patients, she wasn’t constricted by the rules that were already built into the existing mental health system that has done so much damage.
Community Activated Medicine
Instead, Denny created a new method of therapy and healing based on her years of research and community feedback. Her approach, that she calls Community Activated Medicine or CAM, helps people heal alongside their community members. The traditional clinical therapy approach isolates the individual, but Denny learned that communities of color often heal in groups, such as church services or pow wows. “I knew from my experience working in communities that grieving is communal, so healing needed to be communal too.”
In order to offer an accurate mental diagnosis, Denny explains, you must first understand where a person comes from and the environment in which they live. Only after analyzing the factors that affect someone’s health and mental state can you begin to heal them. Her healing services involve a licensed therapist or social worker alongside healers from the community. So, community input is present in every step of the healing process.
Denny is determined to change the norms of therapy and redistribute the structure of power that is built into the mental health field. “The only place where therapy is actually welcome is in places of affluence,” she says. She wants to normalize seeking help in Indigenous communities, which starts by making services accessible and integrated into their culture. Healing starts with the acknowledgement by all of us that our society is still damaging these communities. “The losses in the communities from homicide to suicide to missing and murdered Indigenous women and people—the genocide—is still happening. It just looks different.”
Learn more about the HIR Wellness Institute at hirwellness.org.
View this story on the Shepherd Express, part of the regular column Hero of the Week.