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The community and health programmatic needs of state-recognized tribes vary in comparison to tribes who are federally recognized. Federal recognition provides tribes with access to federal programs through Indian Health Services (IHS) and ensures a certain level of sovereignty. Little research explores the gaps in community programs experienced by state-recognized tribes as a result of their non-federal status or explores their resilience as a community in filling these gaps through other supports. Through collaboration with a community advisory board (CAB), a qualitative descriptive methodology was used to conduct 31 semi-structured interviews with adult women that self-identify as members of a state-recognized Gulf Coast Indigenous tribe. Using conventional content analysis, the following themes were identified: (a) Wellness Programs and the Power of Connection (b) Transmission of Traditional Knowledge (c) The Need for Women's Support Groups; (d) Gaps in Programs; and (e) Barriers to Participating in Community and Tribal Programs. These results demonstrate the immense importance of community events as opportunities for transmission of cultural knowledge for tribal members, an integral aspect of securing tribal holistic wellbeing. Although social support and enculturation activities contribute to Indigenous groups' overall health, this topic has been less studied for state-recognized tribes, particularly for those in the Gulf Coast tribe. Key implications of this study include the need for federal recognition and increased access to programmatic resources and highlights the importance of increased support and sovereignty for state-recognized tribes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The COVID-19 pandemic has amplified existing injustices in the United States, which is exemplified in Ypsilanti, Michigan. However, the pandemic also provides an opportunity to re-imagine existing ways of being in the world, and mutual aid networks that have provided for people's basic needs during multiple crises while also working towards more radical change provide an opportunity for social workers to examine their relationship to "helping." The author uses their personal experience with a local mutual aid network to examine the power and possibility of mutual aid, particularly in times of crisis, as well as sources of social work resistance to decentralized and non-professional forms of helping and caring. These lessons are carried beyond the COVID-19 pandemic to their consequences for the looming climate crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I draw upon written texts and discussions with white community organizers so as to explore how the discourse of community work secure whiteness not as an act of maintaining privilege but as an accepted, unnoticed, and even helpful way of seeing and acting in the world. This is problematic because it creates a space in which there can be ethical white subjects who are able to understand themselves as outside of relations of racism. I suggest that it would be more useful to understand practices in which white people advocate with racialized communities as acts of ambivalence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]