It’s hard to write about something that I am continuing to process
7 weeks later, which is one of the reasons it took me so long to write this. 7
weeks ago I got to take a trip to Pine Ridge, South Dakota with my cultural
psychology class at Warren Wilson College. Pine Ridge is a Native American
Reservation in the United States and it is one of the most statistically
impoverished places within this country. Before we went on this trip we took
half a semester (8 weeks) to learn all about cultural psychology, a discipline
that takes apart our Western views on what we think psychology is universally.
We learned about how people aren’t all the same, but they actually differ quite
a bit cross culturally and what we expect from each other could be very
different from what another culture expects from each other.
People keep asking me if my experience on Pine Ridge was life
changing. And yes, it was, but it was also more “normal” than I thought it was
going to be. One of the reasons I decided to go on the trip was because I had
heard so much about it from friends who had gone previously. They had described
it as shocking, spiritually draining, and extremely life changing. They arrived
back at Warren Wilson needing space from friends and the culture surrounding
them that was so different from the one they had just come from. Naturally, I
expected to have similar experiences after going to a place so different from
my own culture.
Although parts of the trip were
different from what I had experienced in my own culture, I didn’t feel
extremely shocked by them. This could be because of the timing, the particular
people we saw, or just who I am as an individual. I’m not saying I didn’t learn
an incredible amount, because I did, I just wasn’t as culturally shocked as I
first suspected I would be.
Part of my realization about this
happened after one of the first days we were there. One of our incredible
leaders told us to ignore all of the education we had gone there with and
instead be ourselves. It was fine if we ended up making mistakes, he said, we
all make mistakes. This advice sent me down a path of conflicting ideas. How
could we go into a place being culturally aware, but still be ourselves
completely? How could we hold onto our cultural backgrounds (who we are) and be
aware of other cultural backgrounds at the same time?
It’s hard to explain the circular
thoughts that continued and still continue in my head today about this
phenomenon, but I found myself coming to a better conclusion when I ignored
what I was thinking and simply was myself. I found that I was reminded of how I
am uncomfortable at first in any situation and then I begin to warm up. As I
remembered this I realized I was letting who I was shine through more and more
as the days of our trip went by. And I was letting myself really learn from the
people who were surrounding me because I wasn’t so focused on making a cultural
mistake.
As I let this happen I began to gain
more awareness about how people try to connect and about the Lakota people in
general. I could let my guard down and really experience what was going on
around me while still feeling culturally sensitive. Of course, I didn’t know
what was going on in any of the Lakota people’s heads as I interacted with
them, but I found they would smile at me when I would smile at them, some of
them seemed shyer than others and some of them were very direct. I don’t know
if these terms are what they were necessarily feeling because some cultures
might not really even have those things, but what I wasn’t expecting was to see
such great similarities. I am aware that those similarities could be because I
just put my own cultural lens over what I experienced.
One of the cultural differences we
learned about the Lakota people before we went there was that sustained eye
contact was considered disrespectful. This was something I was pretty worried
about failing at when I first arrived on Pine Ridge because it is something so
ingrained within our culture as a sign of respect. At first, I tried really
hard to look at the person I was talking to and then look away quickly.
However, once I was being more myself, I got to really observe the people
around me (like I said earlier). I noticed that people made longer eye contact
than I first thought they would. Upon realizing this, I remembered how you
can’t really know how people are by reading textbooks and listening to other
people’s experiences, you have to experience people yourself to really begin to
know who they are.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that getting to know people in any culture is pretty similar; there are awkward parts and comfortable parts. However, the way in which you get to know the people you are meeting might be very different than what you usually do to get to know someone. They might have different values and ideas about how to interact than you would first expect. Also, it takes time to begin to understand people and you can never really understand people fully without being completely immersed within their own personal culture, which would mean getting inside of their heads. And we all know that is pretty impossible.