Indigenous resilience and healing through dreams and spirituality.

Abstract

Through Indigenous dream knowledge, Indigenous youth are beginning to find or achieve a new resilience. Their new set of guidance is coming from the dream narrative's contribution to healing their trauma as more and more people take back their stolen culture, especially, regarding dreams and spirituality that may aid in the building of resilience and healing of trauma. This article looks at the concept of Indigenous dream narrative from the intersections of resilience, spirituality, healing, and trauma by looking at traditional knowledge shared through lived experiences to understand this essential part of Indigenous culture. There are many ways of interpreting of dreams, however, this article will focus on the wisdom and knowledge of Elders and others, who are familiar with Indigenous social-cultural and spiritual perspectives. Analyzing dreams or "dream weaving" is a conduit with a message that can bring about healing and wellbeing (Lorenz, 2013;Riley-Mukavetz, 2021). An evaluation of dreams, lucid dreaming, and dream knowledge will be included along with spirituality and two-eyed seeing. This enables a duality for assessing how dreams are interpreted within a healing context. Interpreting dreams through the areas of spirituality and healing puts this method in conjunction with the Elders' roles. This knowledge presented, reflects my own lived experience as an educator of settler-Indigenous background, as I acknowledge how dreams are used to interpret one's spiritual, emotional, physical, and mental stability.