Welcome to the Mad in America podcast, your source for science, psychiatry, and social justice.

David Edward Walker is the author of Coyote Swing, a memoir and critique of mental hygiene in Native America, which was published

in February by Washington State University Press.

A psychologist, novelist, public speaker, poet, and singer-songwriter, Walker is a Missouri

Cherokee descendant.

For more than three decades, he's worked as a professor, psychotherapist, and consultant based in Washington State,

including four years as a psychologist for the U.S. Indian Health Service, IHS, and afterward more than 20 years consulting for the Confederate tribes and bands of the Yakima Nation.

In much of his writing, including Coyote's Swing, he addresses the devastating impact

of the Western biomedical mental health system on indigenous peoples, and their experiences

across the centuries of intergenerational oppression and trauma, both personal and systemic. Five years ago, Walker

wrote a series of articles for Indian Country Today that zeroed in on such oppressive practices,

including the harms of psychiatric treatment on native individuals, and the history of labeling

native children with feeble-mindedness and later ADHD.

He holds a doctorate in clinical psychology from the University of Detroit.

David Walker, it is a pleasure to have you with us today.

Amy, I'm very glad to be here. Thanks for having me.

I have to say your book, Coyote Swing, there is so much packed into

that book. There's a ton of history, you know, colonialism, imperialism, oppression, genocide.

There's your personal story in there, too, stories of youths you've worked with, stories of your

time with IHS and the reliance on

the disease model, stories of your time working with the Yakima people. And this is all,

it all comes together. It's this really absorbing read, and you dig deep into all of that.

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