December 14, 2025 ā€¢ 10:00 ā€“ 11:30am PST
Indigenous Ways of Knowing in Mental Health, Wellness, and Healing
In this gathering, renowned Blackfoot scholar, legal thinker, and ceremonial philosopher Leroy Little Bear offers a rare window into Indigenous ways of knowing as they relate to wellbeing, healing, and mental health. Speaking from a lifetime of teaching, advocacy, and cultural stewardship, Little Bear invites us to rethink what it means to be wellā€”not as a solitary state of balance, but as a rhythm of relationality, ceremony, and continuity with the land.
This conversation challenges dominant mental health paradigms that isolate the self from community, the mind from the body, and the human from the rest of nature. Little Bear brings forward the deep teachings of the Blackfoot worldviewā€”a cosmology in which energy, motion, and interconnection shape understanding. He weaves stories of quantum physics, songs of the buffalo, and protocols of ceremonial life to illuminate the radical difference between Indigenous and Western knowledge systems.
Rather than positioning Indigenous knowledge as a complement or alternative to Western psychology, Little Bear reveals it as a sovereign paradigmā€”one that engages mental wellness through relational integrity, ontological humility, and intergenerational coherence. From healing through land-based practice to the role of language, dreams, and metaphysical law, he offers a vision of mental health, not as a diagnostic endpoint, but as a lifelong tuning to lifeā€™s energetic patterns.
Together, we will explore these guiding questions:
- What does it mean to be well in a relational, rather than individual, paradigm?
- How do language, story, and ceremony shape pathways to healing?
- What can quantum physics and Blackfoot metaphysics teach us about energy, motion, and the unseen?
- How might we repattern dominant frameworks of mental health toward deeper coherence with land, kinship, and spirit?
This dialogue is not just about Indigenous perspectives, it is a call to repattern how we listen, how we name harm, and how we collectively orient toward healing in a world shaped by histories of dispossession and ongoing colonial violence.
We invite participants to enter this conversation, not as consumers of content, but as co-sensemakers, willing to unlearn and to reweave their understandings of healing, identity, and being human.
