Catherine E. Mckinley – författare

This book focuses on promoting health equity and addressing health disparities among Indigenous peoples of the United States (U.S.) and associated Territories in the Pacific Islands and Caribbean.

It provides an overview of the current state of health equity across social, physical, and mental health domains to provide a preliminary understanding of the state of Indigenous health equity. Part 1 of the book traces the promotive, protective, and risk factors related to Indigenous health equity. Part 2 reports promising pathways to achieving and transcending health equity through the description of interventions that address and promote wellness related to key outcomes.

The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Ethnic & Cultural Diversity in Social Work.

This book focuses on promoting health equity and addressing health disparities among Indigenous peoples of the United States (U.S.) and associated Territories in the Pacific Islands and Caribbean.

It provides an overview of the current state of health equity across social, physical, and mental health domains to provide a preliminary understanding of the state of Indigenous health equity. Part 1 of the book traces the promotive, protective, and risk factors related to Indigenous health equity. Part 2 reports promising pathways to achieving and transcending health equity through the description of interventions that address and promote wellness related to key outcomes.

The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Ethnic & Cultural Diversity in Social Work.

For almost five millennia, in every culture and in every major religion, indigo-a blue pigment obtained from the small green leaf of a parasitic shrub through a complex process that even scientists still regard as mysterious-has been at the center of turbulent human encounters.

Indigo is the story of this precious dye and its ancient heritage: its relationship to slavery as the "hidden half" of the transatlantic slave trade, its profound influence on fashion, and its spiritual significance, which is little recognized but no less alive today. It is an untold story, brimming with rich, electrifying tales of those who shaped the course of colonial history and a world economy.

But Indigo is also the story of a personal quest: Catherine McKinley is the descendant of a clan of Scots who wore indigo tartan as their virile armor; the kin of several generations of Jewish "rag traders"; the maternal granddaughter of a Massachusetts textile factory owner; and the paternal granddaughter of African slaves-her ancestors were traded along the same Saharan routes as indigo, where a length of blue cotton could purchase human life. McKinley''s journey in search of beauty and her own history ultimately leads her to a new and satisfying path, to finally "taste life." With its four-color photo insert and sumptuous design, Indigo will be as irresistible to look at as it is to read.

This book focuses on the inequities that are persistently and disproportionately severe for Indigenous peoples. Gender and racial based inequities span from the home life to Indigenous women’s wellness—including physical, mental, and social health. The conundrum of how and why Indigenous women—many of whom historically held respected and even held sacred status in many matrilineal and female-centered communities—now experience the highest rates of gendered based violence is focal to this work. Unlike Western European and colonial contexts, Indigenous societies tended to be organized in fundamentally distinct ways that were woman-centered and where gender roles and values were reportedly more egalitarian, fluid, flexible, inclusive, complementary, and harmonious. Understanding how Indigenous gender relations were targeted as a tool of patriarchal settler colonization and how this relates to women more broadly can be a key to unlocking gender liberation—a catalyst for readers tobecome ‘gender AWAke.’ Living gender AWAke encompasses living in alignment with agility (AWA) with clear awareness of how gender and other sociostructural factors affect daily life, as well as how to navigate such factors. To live in alignment, is to live from ones’ center and in accordance with one’s authentic self, with agility, by nimbly responding to life’s constantly shifting situations. This empirically grounded work extends and deepens the Indigenist framework of historical oppression, resilience, and transcendence (FHORT) by delving deep into the resilience, transcendence, and wellness components of FHORT while centering gender. Understanding the changing gender roles for Indigenous peoples over time fosters decolonization more broadly by enabling greater understanding of how sexism and misogyny hurt people across personal and political spheres. This understanding can foster the process of becoming gender AWAke by identifying and dismantling of sexism and by becoming decolonized from prescriptive gender roles that inhibit living in alignment with one’s true or authentic self.

Readers will gain: