For a month earlier this year the Battlefords was home base for a PhD student undertaking an area of research regarding the Plains Cree that’s never been investigated before.
Joyce Frey is working toward a PhD in international psychology from the Chicago School of Professional Psychology.
“It’s such a new field,” says Frey. “This program at the Chicago school is the only one like it in the world, and it started in 2009.”
She’s looking to join a small club.
“Right now, at the last number I had, there were 32 international psychologists in the whole world,” says Frey. “We’re cutting edge, we’re making it up as we go along.”
International psychology moves away from the typical Western European-led perspective to a more global perspective – embracing cross-cultural rather than mono- or even multi-cultural views.
Her research topic is that of human intelligence. The title of the document that will be based on her research is Exploring Intelligence From a Plains Cree Perspective, A Qualitative Study.
“I teach psychology at a college in Kansas and I have a real interest in the topic of human intelligence,” says 70-year-old Frey, who’s been teaching for the past 25 years. “It’s been fascinating to me forever, because there are so many ways to look at it, and there’s no real one definition of it. We’re still, after centuries and centuries … trying to figure out exactly what it is, or at least define it.”
While a doctorate in this emerging field would be a feather in any academic’s cap, it means more than that to someone who has been an advocate for Native Americans for decades.
Historically, says Frey, First Nation people have been exploited by academics.
“They come in, grab information or knowledge, and then they leave and use it to their gain. They don’t reciprocate in any way,” she says. “So that’s not what I’m here to do.”
She is committed to continuing her relationship with the First Nation people in the Battlefords area and hopes to establish a scholarship fund with the Treaty 6 Education Council for aspiring college students.
She hopes, also, that her findings will be useful to future research and even policy making.
“It will add to the overall body of knowledge on the topic of intelligence, of course, because that’s a perspective that hasn’t been discussed in academic circles,” says Frey, “and it also opens the doors for better understanding in educational settings.”
One thing she hopes it will impact specifically is the use of standardized IQ testing skewed toward a Western European perspective that attempts to quantify intelligence.
“I’m not convinced that that’s the correct way to do it,” says Frey. “In the process of that quantification it has placed marginalized people, any indigenous people anywhere, at a disadvantage educationally because they don’t do well on those types of standardized tests.”
Finding out about and publicizing the First Nation perception of human intelligence is one way to improve opportunities for First Nation students.
“I’m hoping it will be one small plank in a bridge that needs to be built to broaden the education system’s understanding of what intelligence is and open more doors for indigenous students,” says Frey.
Another aspect of her research is, of course, political, she says. It’s about getting a different perspective to policy makers. The Americas may be in a post-colonized era but there are echoes of history, such as the residential school experience and retribution issues, still unresolved.
“Pieces of information that may seem unrelated can maybe have some impact on some people’s broader scope and understanding of how the indigenous people here perceive intelligence, how they use it, what is meaningful to them,” says Frey. “They are not ‘ignorant savages,’ they are not unintelligent, and that perception is gradually disappearing, but it still needs to be broadened.”
Ideally, she would like to see her research have an impact on policy-making decisions somewhere down the line.
That means getting her information published in as many places as possible, starting with academic journal articles.
“I don’t know if it will ever reach
any type of mainstream publications,” she says. “Sometimes journal articles do.”
But before it gets to the publication stage, Frey has still to make it through the dissertation stage.
Right now, she’s back in Kansas (the round trip was 2,490 miles by car) in the midst of a several-month transcription and analysis of the data she has collected from the interviews she did while in Saskatchewan. She hopes to have her dissertation deposited with the college and to be ready for a final oral defence of her findings by the end of the year, the last step toward earning her degree.
Doing a dissertation is probably the most difficult thing she has done in her life, says Frey.
She’s also undertaking this intensive project at a time in her life when others her age are retired, or at least slowing down.
“I’m kind of a late bloomer when it comes to education,” she says.
“One of the reasons I chose international psychology is because, historically, the field of psychology has been European and American and Americans think they own it,” says Frey. “They think that this is the only way to address these issues.”
International psychology has a broader view.
“This looks at the world view,” she points out. “It is cross cultural and ‘international’ means that it involves at
least two different countries, but it can be global, which means it affects everybody.”
She believes her topic of research is global.
“International psychology wants to broaden people’s horizons, open their minds a little bit more about understanding the way other cultures and other nations perceive the workings of the human mind, how we think, what motivates us, what makes us tick.”
Born in Kansas, Frey has lived in California, Texas and Oklahoma and she has done a good deal of travelling. As a psychologist, Frey is on to her third career.
“I taught performing arts, ballet, for many years.”
She also raised horses, showing and racing Appaloosas.
“I came to this education process later in life,” she says, adding with a smile, “Late bloomers last longer.”
She’s planning to stay in academia, to continue teaching and eventually hopes to start a consulting practice in international psychiatry.
“It is going to be very interesting and lots of fun.”
Frey moved away from her life as a ballet teacher and horse breeding and toward a life in academia when she decided the time had come when she could no longer do what she was teaching.
“It comes down to physicality,” says Frey. “ I could have stood with my little stick and counted while I watched my students, but I needed more than that. So I decided to get out of dancing and off the top of a horse and do something with my brain.”
She says, “The opportunity to go back to school came up and I finished my undergraduate degree at Fort Hays State University in Fort Hays, Kan., and at that time there weren’t online classes available and I wasn’t able to go at that point in time to sit in a classroom to get a PhD. I had family obligations, life obligations and financial obligations, so I just started this three and a half years ago.”
She saw the program available online through the Chicago School of Professional Psychology and said, “This is it, this is the one.”
The program requires her to be in residence twice, which she has done, and it also requires field experience, “like mini internships or practicums,” says Frey.
“The program is international psychology, which means to do your research you have to cross an international border, physically,” she points out.
“I’ve been to Peru twice for 10 days at a time to study there in that culture, which is quite an experience.”
Frey says, “You think you understand poverty until you are standing in one of those villages. We travelled over the Andes to a very small village to visit a Catholic Jesuit school that had been established there. The sides of the mountains are totally barren, it is desert area, it’s very arid, they have no utilities, no water. Everything is very, very rudimentary and yet they thrive. It’s just amazing to me.”
They have no idea they’re living in poverty, she says. They just live their lives.
She also visited Lima, the capital of Peru.
“Ten million people all driving at the same time with no real traffic laws,” she laughs. “Where I live in Kansas the town is 350 people, and where the college is about 10,000 people, so, culture shock!”
Her decision to include Canada in her cross border studies came from her interest in the American Indian culture and history. That interest has its beginnings in her years as an Appaloosa breeder and delving into the history of the breed, which was nearly destroyed during the Nez Perce War of 1877.
“I started out raising Appaloosa horses and learned how our history, the white man’s history, of what actually happened was really not the correct view.”
Frey says, “I learned about how the United States Army slaughtered the Nez Perce horses … they knew they were [the Nez Perce tribe’s] main strength so they slaughtered their horses and took some of their mares and bred them to draft horses.”
It wasn’t until the 1930s that a man in Oregon began to try to re-establish the breed by breeding them with Arabs and Quarter horses, says Frey.
“Now the breed is back strong again.”
It was during this time that she became an advocate for Native Americans.
“I had this epiphany, this awakening to the injustices that were done to the Native Americans,” she says. “I also, in the ‘80s, had a the rare and distinct privilege of becoming acquainted with Russell Means … one of the main leaders in the American Indian movement of that time.”
Means was involved with the takeover of the Pine Ridge Reservation at Wounded Knee in South Dakotas and during that process a government agent was killed, so it was pretty big news at the time, says Frey.
“I learned from him even more about the truth, what was happening or not happening.”
Putting her interest in indigenous people together with her quest to conduct research on an international scale, she found no evidence of anyone doing the type of research she had planned among the Plains Cree, a group that occupies territory in both the United States and Canada.
“I just don’t think anybody has ever just specifically zoned in on that topic with this population before,” says Frey. “There are other things that have been done and other research in areas that are similar – anthropology and sociology – but not psychology and the idea of human intelligence.”
Frey says, “I put those two things together, wrote a proposal and, 68 pages and 171 references, later I was approved to come and do the study.”
She was to interview 15 people.
“It’s a brief interview, with preset questions, because everything has to be approved by the college before you can do it,” says Frey.
The college’s internal review board has a mandate of protecting human and animal subjects during any research and must be satisfied they are not being exposed to any physical or psychological danger.
To find people to interview, Frey knew she would have to come to the area to make contacts in Saskatchewan. In 2013, she attended the Native American and Indigenous Studies Conference in Saskatoon. There she met Wes Fineday, an elder from Sweetgrass First Nation.
“He was talking, not giving a presentation, but commenting afterwards, and it was just exactly what I knew I needed to learn, so I asked him afterward if he could give me a few moments of his time, and he did,” says Frey.
The contact with Fineday was instrumental in Frey being able to make the contacts she needed. With a second trip north last year, during which she continued to add to her contacts and earned the spiritual name of “Spotted Horse Woman,” she was able to enlist the help of the Treaty 6 Educational Council in interviewing individuals from its nine member bands.
During her interviews, she was also able to use an interpreter, she says.
“I had no previous knowledge of the Cree until I started doing this. I was more familiar with Navaho, Hope, Sioux and Dakotas in the U.S.”
She says she had a difficult time finding literature pertaining to this area in particular. She was grateful to Fineday for taking her, during one of her visits, to Fort Battleford.
“They have a wonderful book store and I found some great books,” she says. “They helped me fill in some gaps.”
About commonly taught accepted information on the history of the colonization of the Americas, Frey says, “I tend to think sometimes misinformation is a euphemism for downright lies.”
You can’t really come in and steal someone’s land without making them less than human, says Frey.
“They set out to do that and they did a pretty good job. Genocide, cultural genocide and actual physical genocide, we hear so much about the Nazis and the Holocaust and we hear nothing about what we did here in the Americas. ‘Let’s whitewash that.’”
Frey is hoping her dissertation can make a difference.
“It’s just a small piece, but the bridges are being built. The more pieces there are that connect people together in common understanding, the stronger it’s going to be,” says Frey. “We can’t go back and undo it, but we can make reparations and restore some dignity.”
