Research and Teaching Interests:

Indigenous peoples of the USA and Canada; Culture, Coloniality, & Mental Health; Cultural Psychology & Indigenous Community Well-Being; Innovative Community Mental Health Services.

Joseph P. Gone is Professor in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (Anthropology) and the Faculty of Medicine (Global Health and Social Medicine) at Harvard University. As an interdisciplinary social scientist with both theoretical and applied interests, Professor Gone has collaborated for nearly 30 years with American Indian and other Indigenous communities to rethink community-based mental health services and to harness traditional culture and spirituality for advancing Indigenous well-being. He does so from the perspective of a scholar who is trained in health service psychology, inspired by anthropology-style interpretive analysis, and committed to participatory research strategies. Examples of Professor Gone’s projects include comparisons of Indigenous cultural psychologies with the logics of the mental health professions, critical analysis of the concept of Indigenous historical trauma, collaborative development of the Blackfeet Culture Camp for community-based treatment of addiction, and commissioned formulation of the Urban American Indian Traditional Spirituality Program for orienting urban Indigenous peoples to traditional spiritual practices.

Even while undertaking unpredictable community-based partnerships, Professor Gone has published more than 100 scientific articles. He is a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science and of seven divisions of the American Psychological Association. Gone is a graduate of Harvard College and the University of Illinois, and he also trained at Dartmouth College and McLean Hospital/Harvard Medical School. He taught at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor for sixteen years, where he directed the Native American Studies program prior to joining the faculty at Harvard. An enrolled member of the Aaniiih-Gros Ventre Tribal Nation of Montana, he also served briefly as the Chief Administrative Officer for the Fort Belknap Indian reservation. Honored with more than 20 fellowships and career awards (including a Guggenheim Fellowship), Gone was the recipient of the 2021 APA Award for Distinguished Professional Contributions to Applied Research, and the 2023 APF Gold Medal Award for Impact in Psychology. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine.

In sum, Professor Gone’s investigations have entailed intimate familiarity with modern indigenous lives and settings, open-ended investigation of local and emergent indigenous perspectives, adaptable presentation of research findings for both academic and community constituencies, and an intrepid dedication to unsettling the orthodoxies cherished by any of his audiences. Throughout his career, he has sought to merge applied community engagement and illuminating scholarly analysis, and to integrate the dominant approaches of the behavioral sciences with the enduring insights of the human sciences. The resulting contributions speak to pressing issues in cultural and professional psychology, medical and psychological anthropology, social psychiatry and community mental health, indigenous studies, human development, and the medical humanities.

Professor Gone seeks to mentor students with explicit interests in contributing to scholarship in the health sciences concerning Indigenous communities in the USA and Canada.

Curriculum Vitae

Selected Publications:

Gone, J. P. (2023). Community mental health services for American Indians and Alaska Natives: Reconciling evidence-based practice and alter-Native psy-ence. Annual Review of Clinical Psychology, 19, 23-49. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-clinpsy-080921-072950

Gone, J. P. (2023). Origins of antimining resistance in the life of a grassroots American Indian leader: Prospects for Indigenizing psychobiography. Journal of Personality, 91(1), 68-84. https://doi.org/10.1111/jopy.12718

Gone, J. P. (2022). Re-imagining mental health services for American Indian communities: Centering Indigenous perspectives. American Journal of Community Psychology, 69(3-4), 257-268. https://doi.org/10.1002/ajcp.12591

Gone, J. P. (2022). Indigenous research methodologies: X-marks in the age of community accountability and protection. Qualitative Inquiry, 28(2), 164-170. https://doi.org/10.1177/10778004211057286

Gone, J. P. (2021). The (post)colonial predicament in community mental health services for American Indians: Explorations in alter-Native psy-ence. American Psychologist, 76(9), 1514-1525. https://doi.org/10.1037/amp0000906

Gone, J. P. (2021). Decolonization as methodological innovation in counseling psychology: Method, power, and process in reclaiming American Indian therapeutic traditions. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 68(3), 259-270. https://doi.org/10.1037/cou0000500

See Also: https://gonetowar.com/