Maureen Plante was the recipient of a 2024 CPA Indigenous Psychology Student Award for her work at the University of Calgary studying disrupted orders of eating from an Indigenous perspective.
Maureen Plante is Iroquois-Cree-Métis on her dad’s side, while her mom has a German background. An experience with an eating disorder as a teenager led her to her Master’s research at the University of Calgary, which focused on understanding eating disorders from an Indigenous perspective. She grew up identifying with her Cree side most of all – an Indigenous community that still talks about the days when bison roamed the Canadian plains in vast, seemingly endless herds.
A stark illustration of the clash between Indigenous tradition and European colonial philosophy is the eradication of bison from the Western plains of North America throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. In the late 1700s, there were an estimated 30 million bison living on the Great Plains.
Until that time, the Indigenous people of Western Canada had lived alongside the bison, hunting them for their furs and meat. The land was a reciprocal partner in sustaining the people. When settlers arrived, they brought with them a different mindset, one of extraction and capitalism. The abundance of plains bison and wood bison was an easy opportunity to create enormous profit with very little effort, and the hunting began in earnest.
For Indigenous people, this meant that they themselves had to adapt to the new reality. They now had to compete with white hunters for every last animal, and were forced to shift their relationship with the land from one of cooperation to one of extraction in order to survive. Many became nomadic bison hunters, selling pelts and other parts in exchange for the necessities of life. Food was no longer an obvious and integral part of life, like air and water – it was now a commodity.
It would be a leap to draw a direct line from the eradication of the bison to Maureen Plante’s eating disorder some 200 years later. But at the same time, the connection should not be dismissed. Much has been written in recent years about historical trauma, particularly in relation to the indignities suffered by Canada’s Indigenous people over the centuries. But we have barely begun to scratch the surface of what it actually means, and how historical trauma informs the issues we see today.
Maureen grew up in a very small community outside Edmonton, where access to services was sparse. When she developed an eating disorder in her teenage years, there were precious few resources in her immediate area, and even in nearby urban centres there was little in the way of Indigenous-centred support. At the age of 16, Maureen vowed to help other people who were going through similar experiences with disrupted orders of eating, and has been unwavering in that goal ever since.
She did her honours in psychology undergrad degree at MacEwan University in Edmonton, her Master’s at the University of Calgary, and she is now doing a Ph.D. in counselling psychology at the University of Alberta. Throughout this time, she has worked with the Eating Disorder Support Network of Alberta in a number of ways, including as a volunteer. While Maureen was always outspoken and vocal around disrupted orders of eating, it wasn’t until she did her Master’s that she was able to start to explore Indigenous perspectives in that work.
To this end, Maureen worked with Indigenous women – counsellors, psychologists, social workers – who provided therapy using the IFOT model. Indigenous Focusing-Oriented Therapy is an historically relevant and sensitive modality that takes a strength-based approach to healing. It is in alignment with what Indigenous scholars and practitioners are doing when they’re working with Indigenous people. The ‘grandmother of IFOT’, Shirley Turcotte, worked with FOT creator Eugene Gendlin to create the approach as she believed Indigenous perspectives were missing, specifically the relationship we have to our ancestors and all our relations.
Now undertaking her Ph.D., Maureen has already earned a 2023 Indigenous Student Award from the CPA for the work she is doing. Work that seeks to expand upon everything she has done up to this point.
“I’ve heard from IFOT practitioners, now I want to hear from Indigenous people. Women from urban centres have told me they had experiences with disrupted orders of eating, and maybe went to in-patient care at the hospital. It wasn’t helpful. I also want to understand the role that historical trauma plays in the development of disrupted orders of eating for Indigenous people, because I feel like that’s something that has been missing.”
The bison herds never came close to recovering in full, and today there are an estimated 20,000 wild bison in all of North America – or 0.0007% of the number just 200 years ago. Meanwhile, Indigenous communities that had hundreds of years of agricultural tradition had to change their practices as a new emphasis was placed on monocultures.
It once was the case that the bones of fish from the river fertilized the beans that provided nitrogen to the corn. People lived on the fish, and the beans, and the corn, and the squash that was grown around it to protect it from hungry animals. As the Canadian government started building a railroad across the country, one way they sought to disenfranchise Indigenous people along its path was to commodify farming. This area now grew barley, and only barley. This area flax, this area canola, all with the goal of shipping and selling the product.
Agrarian Indigenous communities had to either change their practices to participate in this new paradigm, or move away to less fertile areas to make an attempt at subsistence farming – hoping they could grow just enough to sustain their families from one harsh winter to the next. Not all of them were able to do so.
One of the central ideas of IFOT is that by focusing inward, people are able to find their own ‘medicine’ – that is, the thing that will work for them specifically in dealing with their mental health issues. When Maureen did her Master’s, she was introduced to this practice. For her, it brought up a lot of grass and wheat, and she discovered wheat was her medicine. It was an odd realization, because her eating disorder had her brain telling her wheat was bad. It was a revelation that changed her perspective on her relationship with food, and gave her some clarity when it came to the intersection of Indigenous identity and disrupted orders of eating.
“A really important thing that was shared by the Elder and knowledge carriers was “When we use things like the DSM-5 [the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the standard classification of mental disorders used by mental health professionals], it’s based on categories and there are all these different types of eating disorders (anorexia, bulimia, etc). The Indigenous knowledge-keepers argue that this kind of euro-centric thinking breaks up interconnectedness. My Masters research really emphasized inter-connectedness and rooting it in this context of colonialism. From contact and throughout history, Indigenous peoples’ access to traditional foods and hunting rights and that kind of thing has been very contentious. There’s a lot of history there that has altered our relationship with food and our connection to the land. Things like the Indian Act, laws that impact our relationship. Something that was really emphasized in my Masters Research was starting to change our relationship with the term ‘eating disorders’ so as not to pathologize them, but rather to situate them within the context of colonialism.”
With disrupted orders of eating, there is a lot of emphasis on a preoccupation with weight and shape and thin idealization. At least, in North America where the DSM-5 is most in use. Maureen is curious to determine whether that thin idealization is something that crosses cultures. Data on Indigenous rates of disordered eating and rural/urban splits is hard to come by, because the preponderance of that data is pulled from treatment programs – where there are very few Indigenous people registered. There are some non-Indigenous scholars who are saying we need more Indigenous voices on the topic.
“A lot of the articles I’ve found still talk about the DSM-5, prevalence rate, and so on. There’s a lack of a narrative piece, and there’s a large chunk of stuff we’re not aware of and I worry this leads us to inadvertently put labels on Indigenous people (or even non-Indigenous people).”
Maureen is well on her way to becoming a strong Indigenous voice on the topic of disrupted orders of eating. Her history is informed by her own personal experience – but also by the decimation of the bison population, the shift to subsistence farming, the starvation that was prevalent in residential schools, and all the other indignities that played havoc with Indigenous peoples’ relationship with the land and their food. Her future is informed by that history – and also by IFOT, by the DSM-5, and by a stellar and award-winning academic journey through some of the best post-secondary institutions in Alberta. We look forward to finding out what valuable insights that bright future will bring!
Get to know me questions
Do you have a favourite book?
I think so…Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. There’s something about it that’s really thought-provoking and philosophical and it has some overall good life lessons. I follow someone on social media who talked a lot about it, and it sounded like something I wanted to get into. I read it between my Masters and PhD, and I was really focused on psychology, and I found that with CBT there’s this Socratic questioning aspect, and this seemed like a book that might be neat to read with that perspective. At the 2022 CPA convention I attended a presentation by two gentlemen on stoicism and CBT, and it made me think of Meditations and it felt like a bit of convergence to me!
If you could be an expert at something outside psychology, what would it be?
I wanted to be a marine biologist when I was younger. I love animals, and I really like stingrays. I’ve been reading a lot about otter behaviour recently. I know that there is some research coming out with otters, and the researchers are working with Indigenous communities to learn how to foster relationships between people and otters.
I read a study talking about otters and dolphins, because otters and dolphins can both use tools, but otters predate dolphins in terms of tool use.
Do you have a sport?
I don’t, really, but I recently started watching hockey with my boyfriend. I like going to the gym and keeping active, so I do weight training and things like that.
If you could spend a day in someone else’s head, who would it be?
I think this is because of where I’m at in this stage of my life, but I’d say my partner. He’s a red seal carpenter and his work is completely different than mine. He works with his hands, he’s a whiz at math, and he can look at a space and just know how to configure things in it. It’s a laborious job, and I would really like to spend a day in his brain to understand his world and how he looks at things. I admire tradespeople, and they do a ton of great stuff, and I acknowledge that I am not terrific at any of it! Another piece of it is that as human beings, we don’t really know how we’re received by others!
What is the psychological concept that blew you away when you first heard it?
My undergrad was in social psychology, and I still really appreciate social psychology. Things like the Stanford prison study, the Line Experiment, I guess you could call them the darker side of human experience, and I find all of it really fascinating. Also personality stuff, like the Big Five traits. Now I’m reading some researchers talking about that in the context of work and academics and all that kind of thing.
You can listen to only one musical artist for the rest of your life, who’s it going to be?
I’m really into classical music, so I’m going to go with Bach.