Warrior Princesses Strike Back

There are some weirdly unpolished aspects to this book. For example, each chapter ends with a reflection section, each of which opens with a “Lakota Laws” heading. On its own, this is an excellent way to both introduce readers to the authors' culture and tie those values to the reflection that follows. The problem is that across ten chapters they only provide five unique examples, and occasionally the two given in one chapter are identical to the two from the previous chapter, often with no rewording. Now, this need not be a dealbreaker — for those that had already been defined, the authors could have given examples rather than definitions, and those examples could have been used to inform the rest of the reflection. But there lies the second snag: the laws and the reflection are at best tangentially related.

The narration is another quirk. Having just read Let This Radicalize You, which was also written by a duo of authors, it's hard not to compare the two books. Both feature individually written chapters as well as co-written ones, but the proportions are reversed. Let This Radicalize You is mostly co-written. Hayes and Kaba do inject their individual stories, but they always tell those stories in third person. By contrast, all but the first chapter of Warrior Princess Strike Back were written in first person by a single author.

I also question the book's intended audience. The book is described as self-help, and the first reflection focuses on allyship. This suggests it's aimed at a primarily non-Native audience. The bulk of its advice, however, is rooted in Indigenous traditions, the appropriation of which is rightly condemned early on. Later reflections seem geared toward those with Indigenous ancestry but no connection to any Native community, but they're often tied to specifically Lakota culture that that feels reductive. It's tough to pin down.

All of this is to say that the authors are clearly not writers, and that's perfectly alright. The stories they have to share have been enlightening nonetheless. Maybe I've been looking in the wrong places, but detailed accounts of Native cultures and history are mostly absent from the web. Obviously this is the legacy of centuries of deliberate cultural destruction driven by the American and Canadian governments, but it wasn't until reading this book that I connected that legacy to its greatest tragedy: the people who are now in positions to share that culture might themselves not know it. Even setting aside the human cost, I lack the words to describe the sheer scale of historical and anthropological waste my country continues to facilitate. It's unspeakable.

One of the great successes of this campaign is how it has flattened our understanding of Native peoples as either an indistinguishable monolith or hopelessly subdivided into endlessly squabbling tribes. The latter serves as a justification for Western expansion: we had to force them off their land, because they couldn't unify it like we could. It's perhaps a silly point of comparison, but my mind is drawn to Obsidian's Tyranny as a rebuttal to this line of thinking. When asked why the Tiersmen refuse Kyros's efforts at unification, Eb replies that their conflicts were minimal compared to the wholesale slaughter brought by Kyros.

I must remark upon Emma's chapter “Life and Death”. She mentions a therapy called “brainspotting”, and something about her description didn't sit right with me:

[Prior to taking training], the only thing I knew about brainspotting was that it came from eye movement desensitization and reprocessing therapy (EMDR), which is a specific protocol, whereas brainspotting is looser in its structure. This resonated with me because I could more easily combine it with cultural practices such as smudging.

Brainspotting was first discovered in 2003 by Dr. David Grand through his work with EMDR, and since then, over thirteen thousand therapists around the world have taken the training. Brainspotting works by utilizing the body's natural self-scanning and self-healing abilities to bypass our conscious thinking processes and unlock our emotional and body-based processes instead. This is an advantage over talk therapy, which activates the surface level of the brain where language is encoded, while brainspotting accesses the nonverbal and somatic levels of the nervous system…Brainspotting circumvents the need to explain cognitions and beliefs by directly tapping into the brain-body, where many traumas get stored.

The instructor was demonstrating on me what Dr. Grand calls the brainspotting “outside window” technique. How it works is, while I think of the activation issue, the instructor looks for the associated brainspot by using a pointer to guide my gaze along the different horizontal, vertical, and depth axes of my vision. The instructor was able to determine where my brainspot was by watching my eyes for reflexive cues, such as excessive blinking, while they tracked the pointer. When and how often the client blinks while thinking of the activation issue is a window into the clients's mind of where a trauma occurred.

EMDR is a practice with its own dubious base of evidence [1], but it does (at least to my untrained mind) make a certain sense as a PTSD treatment. Human memory is surprisingly plastic. Invoking a traumatic memory while focusing on an external stimulus might indeed be able to reduce the severity of PTSD triggers [2]. Brainspotting, on the other hand, sounds heavily derived from NLP and similar “body language” pseudoscience. Dr. Grand's core claim is, “where we look reveals critical information about what's going on in our brain,” a claim shared by “body language experts”. Even a surface look at the topic reveals some other red flags, from the overly grandiose title of Dr. Grand's book (Brainspotting: The Revolutionary New Therapy for Rapid and Effective Change) to its broad claims of applicability (anxiety, depression, chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, ADHD) to its publisher (Sounds True, which has a catalog containing just as much woo as its name would suggest).

I want to walk a careful line with my criticism here. I don't believe there is anything wrong with incorporating spiritual elements into therapy if those elements are of value to the client. The authors talk at length about how much strength they draw from the spirits of their ancestors and their connections to the Great Spirit, and plenty of people across the globe have found healing in religious-based therapy. To what exactly any outsider attributes those effects is immaterial — the goal is to improve the client's well-being. A therapist's intuition can absolutely play a role in understanding the client when the two have a strong rapport. However, I am deeply uncomfortable with how grifty brainspotting seems. The way Emma and others describe it, it's effectively magic mind healing. The book's primary source is Brainspotting Trainings LLC, which charges thousands of dollars for training and certification (and appears to be run by Dr. Grand himself). Just scratching the surface has led to an absolute rabbit hole of “holistic” practitioners selling workshops on topics described in suspiciously vague ways [3]