Joseph P. Gone, the Montana State University Katz Family Chair in Native American History, will deliver the 2014 Montana State University Phyllis Berger Memorial Lecture at 6:30 p.m. Tuesday, Nov.18, in the Hager Auditorium of the Museum of the Rockies.

The lecture is free and open to the public. A reception will follow the lecture.

The title of Gone’s lecture will be “’The Thing Happened As He Wished:’ An American Indian Contribution to a Pluralist Psychology.” His lecture addresses one of the principal questions confronting mental health professionals who serve American Indian communities, which is how best to offer genuinely helpful services that do not simultaneously reproduce colonial power relations.  His lecture will survey several tantalizing facets of an alternate indigenous cultural psychology that continue to shape life and experience on a Montana Indian reservation.

Gone is a native Montanan and member of the Gros Ventre /White Clay Nation of Montana. He is visiting MSU for a year from the University of Michigan where he teaches in the Departments of Psychology (clinical area) and American Culture (Native American Studies). 

Gone is a graduate of Harvard College and the University of Illinois. He has published more than 45 articles and chapters pertaining to the cultural psychology of indigenous community mental health.  He is the recipient of the 2013 Stanley Sue Award for Distinguished Contributions to Diversity in Clinical Psychology from Division 12 of the American Psychological Association.  In 2014, he was named a fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He is married to the historian Tiya Miles, who is also visiting MSU for one year.

The annual Berger Memorial Lecture honors the memory of MSU benefactor Phyllis Berger and is offered each year at MSU by a nationally recognized Native American, Native Alaskan or Native Hawaiian scholar, artist or leader speaking on Native history, cultures or contemporary issues of interest and importance to both Indian and non-Indian people.

For more information, call the Department of Native American Studies at 994-3881.

Lisa Stevenson (406) 994-3884, wfleming@montana.edu