Indigenous Trauma-Informed Solutions Certificate

Program Description

Ish’kē’nā Biyátí (The Medicine Lives Between Us) is the Chiricahua Apache name for this program, reflecting the foundational teaching that trauma does not live inside a single person. Trauma lives between us, in the spaces where connection has been severed. And so, healing, too, lives between us: in kinship, in story, in ceremony, in the land, and in the shared fire of collective purpose.

The Trauma-Informed Indigenous Solutions™ Certificate Program is a six-month, cohort-based learning journey designed and led exclusively by Indigenous professionals. Offered through Juniper & Pine Consulting, LLC, this program provides the only fully Indigenous-designed, culturally grounded, healing-centered certificate program we are aware of.

We will meet the first Friday of each month, from 7:00 am-2:00 pm PACIFIC STANDARD TIME starting Friday, September 4, 2026 (we will not meet on January 1) and ending February 5, 2027.

Participants will move across six consecutive months, moving together through a carefully sequenced arc that braids Indigenous science, neuroepigenetics, relational ontology, historical trauma, community-based regulation, ceremony-informed practice, and healing-centered leadership.

Where mainstream trauma training centers on pathology and individual deficit, this program centers belonging, kinship, reciprocity, cultural regulation, collective wellness, and the restoration of harmony. It positions participants to apply these teachings across diverse organizational, clinical, educational, judicial, and community settings.

Why This Program Matters

“The wound is not the trauma event; the wound is the disconnection. When we bring the Sacred Wound into circle, we are not reopening trauma. We are restoring relationship.”

— Sacred Wound Framework™ (Olson, 2025)

In Chiricahua teachings, fire is never just fire. It is spirit, relationship, responsibility, and presence. When fire is tended well, it gives warmth, light, and gathering power. When fire is neglected or scattered, it can burn or go cold. The same is true for the people who carry the healing work of Indigenous communities.

For over five hundred years, colonization has disrupted the kinship systems, ceremonial practices, languages, and land connections that kept Indigenous peoples in balance. The impacts of this disruption, including historical trauma, intergenerational grief, ambiguous loss, lateral violence, and the sorrow felt in our bodies from Mother Earth herself, are not relics of the past. They are a living process, carried in the nervous system, in the blood memory (epigenome), in family patterns, and, often, in the very systems designed to help.

This program exists because most trauma training was built on Western, Educated, Industrial, Rich, Democratic (WEIRD) frameworks that do not account for Indigenous worldviews, collective experience, or the sophisticated healing technologies our ancestors practiced for millennia. Before polyvagal theory, we had ceremony. Before narrative therapy, we had storywork. Before somatic experiencing, we had dance, shaking, and sweating. This program reclaims that legacy.

What Makes This Program Different

Healing-Centered, Not Deficit-Driven: Guided by Dr. Ginwright’s shift from trauma-informed to healing-centered engagement, this program centers culture, spirituality, civic action, traditional values, and collective healing. We focus on restoring balance through the path of beauty (intin hozhonii) rather than cataloging wounds.

Two-Row Medicine Approach™: Inspired by the Haudenosaunee Gaswendah (Two Row Wampum Belt Treaty), and Dr. Karen Hill’s description of how this applies to contemporary systems, Indigenous knowledge systems and western trauma science travel side by side as sovereign, equally legitimate paths. Neither vessel steers the other, and both are accessible to Indigenous peoples seeking help.

Embodied and Experiential: This is not a lecture series. Each session includes talking circles, somatic practices, breathwork, creative expression, storywork, land-based connection, and embodied activities that engage body, heart, mind, and spirit—the four directions of the Medicine Wheel of Regulation™.

Rooted in Chiricahua Apache Teachings: The Fire Alliance™, Sacred Wound Framework™, and core teachings draw from Chiricahua Apache lifeways, complemented by Quero Apache contemplative traditions such as doohwaa-gon’ch’aasa (entering the silence) and the understanding that “sacred ground is anywhere beneath your feet.”

Community-Centered: Healing happens in relationship. Cohort members form a circle of kinship—a fire alliance—that carries the medicine of shared learning, mutual witnessing, and collective accountability beyond the six months.

Built on Indigenous Science: Neurodecolonization research confirms what our ancestors knew: that traditional practices like dancing, drumming, complex ceremonial movement, storytelling, and mindfulness create real molecular changes: lengthening telomeres, restoring brain matter, and strengthening the immune system. Western science is running to catch up.

Pedagogical Foundation

This program is rooted in a pedagogical philosophy that honors Indigenous epistemology; ways of knowing that are relational, embodied, storied, circular, and land based. The Quero Apache teachthat knowledge enters through relationship with All That Is; the Chiricahua Apache teach that fire, tended in community, is the original technology of regulation and belonging.

Guiding Principles

“Before polyvagal theory, we had ceremony. Before parts therapy, we had song. Before somatic experiencing, we had dance. We are reclaiming what was always ours.” (Olson, 2025).

This program is guided by six core principles that honor Indigenous knowledge systems while integrating contemporary science:

1. Nīk’eh — Healing Is Relational

Everything in this program—the circle, storywork, leadership, trauma understanding, and repair, flows through relationship. In Chiricahua, and most Indigenous thought, no person exists apart from their web of relations: human, more-than-human, ancestral, and yet-to-come.

2. Doohwaa-gon’ch’aasa — Ceremony Is the Oldest Form of Regulation

The Quero Apache Snake Clan tlish diyan practice of entering the silence (a way of combining meditation, breathwork, and prayer) reminds us that Indigenous peoples carried sophisticated regulation technologies long before western science named them. This program reintroduces ceremony-informed regulation as the foundation for trauma healing.

3. Ish’kē’nā Biyátí — The Medicine Lives Between Us

The Sacred Wound Framework™ grounds the understanding that trauma is not an individual pathology; it is a disruption in the relational field. Healing, therefore, is the restoration of relationship, not the removal of symptoms. As our Elders teach: the wound carries both the grief and the medicine.

4. Kuu’ — Fire Is Relational Leadership

In Chiricahua teachings, fire is spirit, relationship, responsibility, and presence. Leadership is a collective practice guided by the Fire Alliance™ model, tending the fires of self, story, community, and collective future. When fire is tended well, the circle is warm. When it is neglected, the people grow cold.

5. Ts’án Bik’ehgo — Healing Must Serve the Next Generations

Every teaching looks forward to the “faces yet to come,” grounded in Seven-Generation thinking. The Chiricahua understanding is that what we do here ripples forward; our healing becomes their inheritance, just as our ancestors’ survival became ours.

6. Gaswendah — Two Ways of Knowing Walk Side by Side

Named for the Haudenosaunee Two Row Wampum Belt, the Two-Row Medicine Approach upholds the sovereignty of Indigenous medicineways while thoughtfully integrating useful western frameworks. As Professor Maya Chacaby (Anishinaabe) teaches: “You could come and visit my canoe, but while you were visiting my canoe, you would never rip it apart and force your rules on me.”

CHOOSE YOUR PRICE POINT: We ask that your choose your own price point for this course. There are six options. We do not police or gate-keep the options, but ask that you responsibly and respectfully choose the option that best fits your ability to pay. The $595, $695 and $795 options are for Tribal Members and those who identify as Indigenous. The $1095, $1195 and $1295 options are for those who identify as allies and those working in Tribal programs. We also offer at least three work/trade scholarships for Tribal Members and Indigenous participants. Please contact us to discuss this option and/or see if this option is still available.

You can read more about our ethical pricing structure on our Terms Page.