Keywords

FormalPara Learning Objectives

This chapter discusses environmental influences stemming from past and current oppressive societal critical events that may disrupt the intergenerational transmission of resilience and interfere with client or constituency social functioning. When social workers recognize the intersection of historical and structural oppression and present-day concerns, they are better able to help clients resist discrimination-related stress and to support the transmission of personal and collective resilience. On completing this chapter, you should better understand how group affiliation and personal identity are intertwined and can be strengthened using micro to macro level skills from the resilience-enhancing stress model (RESM). You should be prepared to answer the following questions:

  • What is the connection between historical critical events and current individual and collective discrimination-related stress or risks?

  • What is the role of culture in bolstering resilience?

  • How does a social worker use a grand narrative to foster group affiliation and resilient social functioning?

  • How is resilience transmitted across generations?

This chapter discusses the use of the RESM narrative method with members of oppressed communities who may face chronic discriminatory risk. Although every person’s story is unique, the narrative method of interviewing has the potential to reveal social and cultural life meanings that can be tapped to enhance resilience at both the personal and community levels. The social worker’s clinical interview is therefore expanded from a narrower focus on personal concerns to broader historical and sociocultural factors. This shift in practice focus involves social workers synthesizing narrative assessment data that can then be used to ameliorate personal, community, and societal distress.

To inform skills and to help social workers accomplish these practice goals, this chapter is divided into two sections. The first section describes narrative skills that can be used to address historical trauma related to the past long-standing US government practice of forcibly removing tribal nation children from their homes and relocating them in boarding schools. The ways in which Indigenous tribal nations have resisted the effects of this negative critical event and transmitted resilience from generation to generation are described. The second section discusses how citizens of New Orleans’s Ninth Ward struggled with environmental racism associated with their experience during Hurricane Katrina in 2005. The ways in which their mutual aid efforts dovetailed with their inherent resilience are explored.

11.1 Historical Trauma: Indigenous Boarding Schools

11.1.1 The RESM and Responding to Stress

Resilience is people’s capacity to deal with stressors and sustain, maintain, or reconstruct functional competence (Greene, 2014). Stress may be acute or arise from a sudden event. Stress may be chronic or stem from the wear and tear of ongoing everyday life, or it may have historical origins that are related to past adverse critical events.

According to Strumpfer (2002), the process of “resiling” starts when someone perceives a challenge or threat. He contended that resilience can be an individual or collective response and can be manifested during life transitions, in the aftermath of natural disasters or war, or during experiences of discrimination or persecution.

11.1.2 A Person–Environment (P-E) Shift

11.1.2.1 Interacting Ethnosystems and Institutions

Ecological theorists suggest that stress is the result of an imbalance between a person and the environment. From this point of view, a social worker’s role is to increase clients’ understanding of and resistance to such stress and to help them strengthen their functional capacity.

The shift in emphasis in resilience-enhancing practice to an all-encompassing P-E point of view can further the social worker’s capacity to enhance resilience as a multilevel phenomenon. The perspective also expands the reach of the narrative interview to an examination of macrolevel forces that allow social workers to examine the history of unjust interactions between a particular ethnic subpopulation and larger US societal institutions.

Understanding the United States’s many ethnosystems as a group bound together by their shared, unique historical and cultural ties, with each group exerting a relative degree of societal power, can provide insight into how the group has interacted with mainstream society over time (Solomon, 1976). Has the group had equal opportunity to participate in society and an equitable distribution of goods and services? Do its members now experience a sense of local control?

Unfortunately, ethnic groups may bear the brunt of prejudices that limit their members’ full participation in society. These oppressive prejudices may restrict their political power and limit environmental justice, and they may be manifested in environmental and structural racism. (Brulle & Jenkins, 2005; Brulle & Pellow, 2006). This prejudicial environmental context places a responsibility on social workers to use anti-oppressive practice strategies.

Using an anti-oppressive process necessitates having knowledge of historical and current social policies and services and the role of policy in service delivery through a rights-based, anti-oppressive, and anti-racist lens (Council on Social Work Education, 2022, p. 10). Basic terms and processes (Table 11.1) and timelines of critical historical events experienced by Indigenous (Table 11.2) and African American (Table 11.3) ethnic groups illuminate factors that may help inform resilience-enhancing practice from an anti-oppressive point of view.

Table 11.1 Basic terms and processes
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Table 11.2 Timeline: Historical and sociocultural events experienced by US tribal nations
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Table 11.3 Timeline: historical and sociocultural events experienced by African Americans
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11.1.3 Understanding Multiple Levels of Resilience

As social workers cocreate and reconstruct client and constituency narratives at a sociocultural societal level, their clinical attention is focused on stressors at all levels of resilience:

  • The personal level of resilience encompasses how an individual perceives a critical event (e.g., discrimination). It involves ascertaining clients’ inner meaning of events and fostering their competence under difficult conditions.

  • The interpersonal level of resilience refers to interactions among family and friends. It encompasses facilitating clients’ formation of nurturing relationships that provide support during adverse situations.

  • The sociocultural level of resilience refers to the social meaning associated with experiencing adversity while living in a certain society in a particular time and place. Clients’ sociocultural resilience is enhanced when they participate in their culture of origin as well as learn about others.

  • The societal/structural level of resilience encompasses social policies, power relations, and economic conditions that affect institutional structures in which clients participate. It also involves clients being able to obtain resources such as housing, education, and health care.

  • Large-scale ecological resilience involves the stability and well-being of habitats in which people, many species of animals, and plants live. A classic definition of ecological resilience is a “measure of the persistence of systems and of their ability to absorb change and disturbance and still maintain the same relationships between populations” (Holling, 1973, p. 14). Disruption in habitats, such as erosion caused by climate change, can have a negative ripple effect throughout all social systems in which people interact.

The practice example in Box 11.1 describes the consequences of a sociocultural and societal crisis among tribal nations that involved the US government forcibly removing tribal nation children to boarding schools for the purpose of acculturation or “reeducation.”

Box 11.1: Practice Example: Personal Is Political: Returning to the Sacred Path

It is not uncommon for members of tribal nations who experience behavioral health issues to first seek out help from their tribal elders. Therefore, Mr. and Mrs. River, and their 12-year-old son Nova (“chaser of butterflies”) met with tribal elders to discuss their worries about Nova’s difficulties in school. In addition, Mr. River relayed that he was having flashbacks of his confinement in a US government boarding school during the late 1960s. (The reaction to this wounding, which Brave Heart, 1998, called the historical trauma response, often includes survivor guilt, depression, symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder, physical symptoms, psychic numbing, anger, suicidal ideation, and fixation to trauma.)

The elders discussed plans to help the family “return to the sacred path,” a balanced place of peace found through the enactment of tribal customs and rituals. As they sat together in a healing circle, the elders and the River family shared information about Indigenous healing ceremonies. The family was encouraged to use traditional tribal healing techniques such as spiritual songs, dance, and meditation to reduce Mr. River’s feeling that he was personally responsible for undoing a painful historical past. The family was also referred to a group intervention program on resolving grief and reducing collective group trauma. The program, which was held at a local clinic, was specially designed to incorporate Indigenous cultural beliefs.

11.1.4 Practice Analysis: Steps Taken

11.1.4.1 From Historical Trauma to Posttraumatic Growth

Maria Brave Heart (1998), a licensed clinical social worker and member of the Lakota tribal nation, was among the first to call practitioners’ attention to the concept of historical trauma in clinical practice with Indigenous people. She recommended an evidence-based approach to practice that embeds information about a client’s or constituency’s cultural heritage into the narrative helping process.

There is increasing evidence that this perspective on trauma strengthens ethnic group membership and cultural ties, which serve as protective factors, buffering people from the negative effects of trauma and supporting resilient functioning across generations. This is in tune with research that suggests that most people who have undergone trauma rebuild their lives and that some experience posttraumatic growth (Bonanno, 2012; Greene et al., 2009; Janoff-Bulman, 1992, 2004). The concept of posttraumatic growth suggests that many people who have experienced trauma may encounter new possibilities or find anchors in their lives and then move forward to create positive change (Goldfein, 2004).

11.1.5 Practitioner Readiness: Adopting a Theoretical Framework

To help ameliorate trauma and help an Indigenous family return to the sacred path, social workers may want to adapt their practice to fit the cultural context of the family. To do this, practitioners who work with populations experiencing discriminatory stress may turn to Terry Cross’s (1998) relational view of the development of the self. The relational view holds that the development of the self is shaped by the collective in which one lives, connecting community, clan, culture, and social history.

In addition, personal identity involves the characteristics of mind, body, and spirit:

  • Mind encompasses a person’s thoughts, memories, knowledge, and emotional processes.

  • Body includes all physical aspects of the person.

  • Spirit incorporates metaphysical and innate factors.

As seen in the practice example in Box 11.2, Ronald, the social worker at the local behavioral health agency, began to apply these concepts to better understand how past critical events had become rooted in the River family’s present-day grand narrative.

Box 11.2: Practice Example: Family Communication: Returning to the Sacred Path

Ronald::

Hello. I am proud to know that the elders sent you to us. I am hoping to start to get to know you today. What can you tell me?

Mr. River::

I am not sure why the elders sent us here. Many years ago, I returned to the reservation to work after finishing trade school. I am proud to say that I have held down a job ever since. My wife, who is a teacher’s aide, is much younger, and we have a wonderful son, Nova.

Ronald::

What else should I learn about you all?

Mrs. River::

I think we are good parents. We tell our son about the sacred path. I don’t know why he doesn’t get along at school.

Ronald::

I hope you are willing to spend several meetings with me to learn just what that is about. I have found that such conversations create a family story.

Nova::

I wouldn’t mind doing that. I knew nothing about the boarding school business before we met with the elders.

Mrs. River::

We didn’t think telling you would be a good thing. Why do you want to know?

Nova::

My teacher says we should know our history and be proud.

Mr. River::

Why be proud? We were rounded up, driven miles away, thrown into a school, and pushed around.

Nova::

Maybe that is why you have bad dreams and I can’t sleep?

Mrs. River::

Don’t tell me you are one of those boys who sleeps in class?

Ronald::

I think you have set the topic for our conversations at our next meetings. Does that work for you three?

Mr. River::

If the two of them listen carefully.

Ronald::

Okay then. Why don’t I give you some homework to help you with that. Can you each bring a letter of introduction that you write about yourself to our next meeting? We can read them together.

Mr. River::

Sounds like a place to start.

11.1.5.1 Practice Analysis: Steps Taken

The amelioration of the negative lingering effects of historical trauma in the River family began when the family met with the tribal elders. It was followed up by Ronald at the behavioral health agency. Both helping processes emphasized the effects of the separation of families and the forced assimilation of the boarding school experience that had led to acculturative stress. It became clear that the negative feelings Mr. River was experiencing had begun when he had been forced to incorporate the values, beliefs, language, and customs of the dominant society at boarding school.

11.1.6 Engagement

As can be seen from this practice example, building a RESM relationship necessitates an understanding of the historical and sociocultural factors of the organizations, communities, and people for whom practice has been designed. Therefore, resilience-enhancing social workers take a learning stance and, when possible, first engage with and learn from local leaders.

Engagement also means demonstrating transparency about wanting to attain an anchored understanding of the community to be served. Achieving an anchored understanding requires having the knowledge and skills to comprehend the space that other people occupy. In the practice example of the River family, social worker Ronald drew on tribal grand narratives to uncover local knowledge related to historical legacies, spiritual ceremonies, and prayers, all of which was intended to help the family heal. A third space is developed when “a client and social worker from different cultures negotiate and communicate to co-create new meanings and relationships” (Yan & Wong, 2005, p. 186).

11.1.7 Assessment: Coconstructing a Grand Narrative

The cocreated narrative is composed of intertwining strands that come together to create a grand narrative or master plot. Thus, it can be said that a narrative is both personal and political and shapes how people see themselves and their world. According to Kenyon and Randall (2001), this perspective on the narrative leaves the door open for it to be “re-storied” or transformed and increases the storyteller’s capacity to grow.

Assessment from a RESM perspective involves social workers listening to constituencies’ voices and learning about critical historical events. Practitioners then chart clients’ P-E dimensions and develop an assessment profile. They also turn to concepts associated with the relational self to learn about the balance among mind, body, and spirit (Brave Heart et al., 2011).

11.1.7.1 Listening to Voices

Listening to the grand narratives of ethnic minority communities is a means of understanding the multiple losses expressed across generations of oppressed people that often shape individual and collective identity. Unfortunately, the voices of the oppressed are often silenced (Bruner, 1986). However, when social workers engage in cocreating a client narrative, the storyteller and story listener become partners in the helping process (White & Epston, 1990). In other words, therapeutic conversations are a form of action or “personal liberation” (Anderson & Goolishian, 1992, p. 25).

11.1.7.2 Learning About Critical Historical Events

A RESM assessment allows a social worker to learn how a client or constituency has made meaning of critical events as well as how they have mustered their personal and collective resources to deal with overwhelming demands (Gutheil & Congress, 2000). Practitioners hopefully tap these resources and assets as they work with oppressed groups. The skills in Box 11.3 may be useful in this regard.

Box 11.3: Skill Box: RESM Interview Skills for Societal Inclusiveness

Skill

Definition

Diffusing power differentials

Partnering with clients in the helping process

Challenging stigmas

Confronting false personal and collective images

Building on cultural beliefs

Learning about and encouraging local values and views

11.1.7.3 Mapping P-E Dimensions: The Assessment Profile

11.1.7.3.1 P-E Dimensions

Ronald conducted a RESM assessment that began with mapping 10 P-E dimensions (Chap. 5, Box 5.3) as they related to the River family’s risks and protective factors. The mapping of the River family’s P-E dimensions appears in Table 11.4 and reveals the close connections among personal, tribal, and historical critical events. Identifying and affirming these important social links acted as healing factors that contributed to Mr. River’s and his family’s return to their sacred path.

Table 11.4 Person–environment (P-E) assessment chart: the River family
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11.1.7.3.2 Mind, Body, and Spirit Balance

Ronald’s assessment in collaboration with the River family also involved reflecting on mind, body, and spirit. This revealed that Mr. River’s thoughts and memories of his boarding school days dominated the family narrative.

11.1.7.3.3 Assessment Profile

Although historical trauma can be transmitted from generation to generation, so too can resiliency. When reflecting on the River family’s assessment profile, the social worker and client family turned to solutions that encompassed strong family and cultural bonds that acted as powerful healing factors.

11.1.8 Intervention

Interventions to resist societal structural inequities can encompass family therapeutic services and larger scale interventions that mobilize social change, develop innovative programs, and take congressional action.

11.1.8.1 Uniting Therapeutic Techniques

As was the situation with the River family, tribal nation child welfare facilities can combine traditional healing methods with behavioral mental health techniques. According to Brave Heart and Deschenie (2006), behavioral interventions may involve individual, family, and group therapy; telepsychiatry; parent support groups; coaching and training; emergency mental health support; and case management. Traditional healing methods rooted in cultural understanding and traditional practices of childrearing can include being in nature, storytelling, planting, traditional song and dance, beading, and horseback riding.

11.1.8.2 Mobilizing Social Change

Child welfare programs for Indigenous children have not always been under local control. One initiative that has led the way in empowering community members and creating child welfare systems of care congruent with local practices (Blackstock & Trocmé, 2005) is the National Indian Child Welfare Association (NICWA). Led by executive director Terry Cross, a clinical social worker and member of the Seneca tribal nation, NICWA has spearheaded a movement of organizational change to return the auspices of child welfare services to local communities. As can be seen in the practice example in Box 11.4, NICWA works with communities to better match services with community needs and resources, deepen relationships and partnerships, and strengthen cultural ties. As this knowledge is disseminated and adopted locally, resilience is enhanced.

Box 11.4: Practice Example: Community-Based Advocacy and Sociocultural History

To advance social change, NICWA conducts local research forums with Indigenous tribal nations and people of color who are interested in cultural sensitivity and increased local control. The movement attempts to redress the historical fact that in 1860, when the US government’s Bureau of Indian Affairs established the first boarding school, traditional childrearing practices were severely disrupted. The purpose of the boarding schools, which were usually located far from local communities, was to educate or acculturate Indigenous children in the United States with White mainstream values and culture (Bureau of Indian Affairs, 2021). Parents who resisted could be imprisoned, and children could be removed from their homes by force. This practice continued into the late 1960s.

Advocacy activities conducted by NICWA are shaped by the knowledge that Indigenous families and communities originally based their systems of child care on their cultural practices, laws, and traditions. It is hoped that children can once again be viewed as gifts from the creator and that parents, extended family, and the clan can be responsible for fostering the spirit of the child.

11.1.8.3 Actualizing Innovation

In the spirit of local control, the Cheyenne River Sioux tribe has developed a first-of-its-kind intentional community of foster care for Indigenous families and their children. In 2020 the Sioux tribal nation built a children’s village called Simply Smiles on their reservation in La Plant, South Dakota. The children’s village was built with the collaboration of the Department of Social Services, tribal elders, and Native foster parents and can house up to 18 children. The priorities of the Simply Smiles children’s village include providing mental health services when needed, keeping sibling groups together, and supporting the reunification of children with the biological family.

11.1.8.4 Continuing Advocacy

The legacy of the forced assimilation of Indigenous children in government-run boarding schools remains today. In 2021, under the direction of Deb Haaland, President Joe Biden’s Secretary of the Interior and the first Native American to serve as a US cabinet secretary, the Department of the Interior released a historic investigative report on the federal Indian boarding school system (Bureau of Indian Affairs, 2021). According to Haaland,

We continue to see the evidence of this attempt to forcibly assimilate Indigenous people in the disparities that communities face.… It is my priority to not only give voice to the survivors and descendants of federal Indian boarding school policies but also to address the lasting legacies of these policies so Indigenous peoples can continue to grow and heal. (Scherer, 2022, paras. 5, 35)

11.1.9 Evaluation

The practice strategies devised to return members of tribal nations to their sacred path have been evaluated by Maria Brave Heart and her team at the Takini Network. The Takini Network is a collective of Lakota, Sioux, and other Native natural, grassroots helpers and human service professionals whose mission is to improve the quality of life for Indigenous people by helping them transcend and heal from historical trauma. Takini is a Lakota word meaning “survivor or one who has been brought back to life.”

Researchers from the Takini Network have found that participants in various locally run, culturally sound programs have a reduction in feeling responsible for undoing a painful historical past; experience less shame, stigma, anger, sadness; and have decreased guilt, increased joy, an improved valuation of their true self and of the tribe, and an increased sense of personal power.

11.2 Historical Trauma: Hurricane Katrina

This section of the chapter expands the perspective on resilience to an examination of large-scale ecological resilience. It explores how disruption in the ecology or habitat of the Gulf Coast surrounding New Orleans has had a negative ripple effect across the region. The remainder of the chapter describes the effects Hurricane Katrina had on human functioning as well as the discriminatory stress that resulted from the sustained social inequality experienced by citizens of New Orleans’s Ninth Ward. The manner in which residents of New Orleans’s Ninth Ward manifested their inherent resiliency is also explored.

11.2.1 New Orleans’s Ninth Ward: A Disenfranchised Marginalized Community

Some communities experience a long-standing pattern of neglect. Such a pattern may emerge more frequently in communities in which there has been inequality and discrimination (Blundo, 2012). This was true of New Orleans’s Ninth Ward, where over the years low-income African American residents received proportionately fewer goods and services. According to the U.S. Census Bureau Data Center (2022), as of 2022, 91% of New Orleans’s Lower Ninth Ward was Black, and 71% of its population lived below the poverty line (see Box 11.5).

Box 11.5: Practice Example: Hurricane Katrina, the Mississippi River, and Environmental Justice

The Ninth Ward, the poorest neighborhood in New Orleans, was once home to barbershops, banks, churches, and family homes. Then Hurricane Katrina made the problems of environmental racism and the need for environmental justice a stark reality. For years before Hurricane Katrina, scientists, journalists, and emergency officials worried about what would happen if a major hurricane were to hit New Orleans. In addition, it was well known that the Ninth Ward was in a flood zone with poorly structured levees.

Issues related to a proper response to the degradation of the surrounding ecosystem prevailed. A rise in sea levels and climate change put the region at environmental risk. To further compound the ecological damage, Mississippi wetlands were drained. Oil and gas companies contributed to the disruption by digging canals and burying pipelines. This caused nearby land to erode and wash away. By 2003, much of the area around New Orleans was 4.92–9.84 ft below sea level (U.S. Geological Survey, 2003).

The erosion of the Mississippi River was exacerbated by the fact that the levees that protected New Orleans had not been properly maintained by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which administers the system of levees and floodwalls. As a result, Katrina resulted in more than 50 failures of the levees and floodwalls protecting New Orleans and caused flooding in 80% of the city. “In particularly hard-hit areas, like the Lower Ninth Ward, the water reached depths of up to 15 feet” (Pruitt, 2020, para. 4).

Hurricane Katrina did not just disrupt the ecology of the region; it caused hard-hitting damage to all social systems, including schools and hospitals. The practice example in Box 11.6 illustrates how the storm threatened the lives of residents.

Box 11.6: Practice Example: Hurricane Katrina, Sally Moore, and Her Family

Hurricane Katrina was one of the deadliest and costliest hurricanes to hit the United States. An estimated 1833 people died in the hurricane. The flooding that followed caused approximately $161 billion in damage, and millions of people were left homeless (Mohr & Powell, 2007).

Just before Katrina hit, Sally Moore, a 50-year-old African American grandmother with diabetes, her daughter and her husband, and her two grandchildren drove around the Ninth Ward, a low-income neighborhood in New Orleans, trying to find a shelter that was not full. None were available. They returned to sleep at Sally’s home in the Ninth Ward.

By two or three in the morning, the floodwaters, which had risen precipitously, were flooding the house. The family went across the street to the roof of a five-story apartment house, where they called 911. There was no response. They then tried to signal several helicopters circling them, but they were never airlifted.

By the next morning, Sally Moore and her family determined that the floodwaters were too high for them to remain on the roof and that they needed to get to the Louisiana Superdome taking shelter on their own. They took a camper top from a nearby truck and created a little boat for the children. Sally was put on a floating air mattress. Sally’s daughter and son-in-law swam and pushed the makeshift boat and mattress to the bridge near the Superdome. There they encountered the Louisiana National Guard armed with tanks and pointing rifles. Sally yelled, “Don’t scare the children! Put the rifles down!” The family was finally allowed to enter the Superdome.

After 2 weeks in the Superdome, Sally Moore was bused to a temporary shelter in Texas, where a social worker found her a home in a new high-rise apartment donated by a local philanthropist. Sally was referred to a doctor and attended church services and soon adjusted to her new environment. However, she told the social worker that she hoped to someday return to the Ninth Ward, where she could be reunited with her family, hang up her clothes on the outdoor clothesline, and say hello to her neighbor. Sally’s social worker assessment profile appears in Table 11.5.

Table 11.5 Person–environment (P-E) assessment chart: Sally Moore and her family
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11.2.2 Rebuilding a Naturally Resilient Community

It took 17 years for New Orleans’s Ninth Ward to begin to show signs of recovering from the widespread destruction of the hurricane. Insufficient resources and services compounded the stress of rebuilding. But on August 27, 2022, the Ninth Ward community held a celebration of what was termed their inherent resiliency. A local pastor was quoted as saying the following:

I think it showcases it [resiliency] to the highest level. When we came back from Katrina, there was nothing here. We have twenty feet of water where we stand. To see that people are coming back, now let me be perfectly clear. It’s work, to rebuild this community and to bring it back to a level where people can understand and respect this community again. (Brand, 2022)

11.2.3 Phases of RESM Recovery

Social workers are often involved in recovery efforts following disruptive events such as Hurricane Katrina. They may work with the American Red Cross, FEMA, or international organizations such as the World Bank. The application of RESM practice principles is briefly described below.

11.2.3.1 Pre-engagement

Creating disaster recovery plans is a cardinal rule of disaster management. Such plans spell out the actions that must be taken by all major stakeholders before, during, and after a natural or human-made adverse critical event.

11.2.3.2 Engagement

Engagement following natural and human-made disasters is best accomplished through community development efforts that identify and bring together community stakeholders and local officials. Social work planners identify and reach out to vulnerable groups. Agendas for meetings should be transparent and reflect the needs of various subpopulations of the community.

11.2.3.3 Assessment

Social workers who collaborate on planning a risk assessment assist in outlining the parameters of the large-scale infrastructure and geographic location of the potential critical event. Equity in setting priorities and goals is paramount. Social workers practicing with individual clients and families such as the Moore’s assess the critical event from an interpersonal person-environment perspective.

11.2.3.4 Intervention

The intervention phase of a recovery plan needs to consider how different social systems and levels of resilient functioning come into play. What can contribute to recovery at the personal, interpersonal, sociocultural, societal, and larger scale ecological levels of resilient functioning?

11.3 Summary and Conclusion

Historic traumatic events reflect a group’s experience with loss and pain. When appropriate, the pain needs to be distinguished as stemming from a natural disaster or an event linked to societal injustice. In this way, the transmission of traumatic historical events from generation to generation can be understood within the context of resilience and posttraumatic growth.

Summary of Learning Outcomes

Keep in mind the following:

  • Social workers can identify power abuses that result in systemic oppression.

  • Social workers can play a role in combating oppression by ameliorating environmental and structural racism.

Discussion Questions

  1. 1.

    How does culture act as a protective factor for oppressed communities?

  2. 2.

    How would you learn about large-scale historical factors that influence your client’s situation?

Chapter Exercise

Write a reflection paper on a client who has demonstrated a natural resilience response. How was this manifested?