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Abstract
In New Zealand attempts to develop an inclusive bicultural mental health system requires negotiations between Indigenous and Western sciences and cultures. The negotiated spaces in the boundaries of these knowledge systems were the focus of this dissertation. Reporting on findings from a year-long critical ethnography of the mental health system in New Zealand, I placed specific focus on how service providers negotiate Indigenous-being in Westernized clinical settings. Drawing on decolonial theories, this study utilized a mix of participant observation, document analysis, and korero mai interviews as data. Interviews engaged a range of stakeholders in the mental health system in a dialogue regarding Indigenous and Western worldviews of health and healing; critiques of the mental health system in its current state; and the strategies used by practitioners to negotiate between cultural, clinical, Western, and Indigenous knowledges. This dissertation contains a review of New Zealands current and historical perspective as a bicultural nation and the effects of colonialism on mental healthcare. Following this introduction, the dissertation comprises two manuscripts reporting on connected, yet unique analyses. The first manuscript is an autoethnographic account of the decolonialization process of a settler-colonial researcher. In this study, I sought to best understand my role in the research to be accountable to my research participants and the community in which I lived and studied. Recommendations are made for scholars engaged in cross-cultural research. The second manuscript presents the findings from a situational analysis that maps the major positions taken and describes the negotiation strategies employed by service providers in navigating between the positions taken in integrating Indigenous knowledge with Western clinical worlds. The collection of these studies presented together contribute to the growing scholarship on integration of Indigenous and Western knowing and offer novel insight on decolonializing processes for research and therapeutic practice. Conclusions and recommendations for family therapists are provided at the end of this work. It is my hope that through this study, clinicians, researchers, and policymakers become more aware of how they enter the negotiated spaces of research and clinical practice, so treatment has resonance for all clients living in multi-cultural, yet, Western-dominant societies.