Providing Strength, Relationships, Resiliency and Healing to Indigenous Communities: Meet Kelly Vallo, MSW

November celebrates both indigenous peoples through?Native American Heritage Month ?and?National Veterans and Military Families Month . GlobalMindED is proud to feature leaders from both groups this month.

Today, meet?Kelly R. Vallo, MSW. Kelly is a member of the Navajo Nation. She is of the Bitterwater Clan born for the Sun People clan. Her maternal clan is The Start of the Red Streak People and her paternal clan is Acoma Pueblo.

Kelly received her Bachelor's & Master’s degrees in Social Work from Arizona State University and is a passionate Indigenous Social Worker with over 14 years of experience working with Tribal communities in Arizona. A Navajo Social Worker and an Indigenous Matriarch with the HONOR (Healing Our Nation Offering Resilience) Collective, she continues to implement Cultural Humility in her career, by practicing Respect, Responsibility, Relationship, and Reciprocity. Currently, Kelly is the Native Youth Coordinator with the Inter-Tribal Council of Arizona.

What community-driven projects have you spearheaded/participated in that you are proud of? What did you take away from these experiences?

I co-founded and co-facilitated a Peer Support Group called Medicine H.E.A.L.S. (Healing Every Ancestral Lineage through Storytelling). It is for Indigenous Professionals by Indigenous Professionals and we discuss challenges and barriers that affect Tribal communities. We provide support and kinship all while building ways to overcome the challenges of agencies/organizations/systems that continue to uphold White Supremacy.

How do you connect with your ancestral roots professionally and personally?

As an Indigenous Social Worker and Matriarch, I uphold the philosophy by Indigenous scholars, Kirkness and Barnhardt of Respect, Responsibility, Relationship, and Reciprocity. Through this philosophy, I am able to build connections with our Tribal communities. What is not understood by most Western Professionals is that our Indigenous community has not fully healed from the historical trauma, which has become embedded into our DNA. Through the philosophy I follow as well as the Gathering of Native Americans (GONA), I work towards helping our Indigenous communities reconnect with themselves. This is the first step in their healing journey.

As a leader, what motivates you to move forward in adversity?

Like most Indigenous professionals or even being Indigenous in itself, it is hard to be taken seriously by Western scholars and professionals but most importantly by our own Indigenous community. The lateral violence and oppression run deep in our roots again, learned behavior by the Colonial Experience, however, it creates a barrier to success when it comes to the goal of returning home to help the People. Indigenous leaders who have held leadership roles for so long, become barriers themselves for fear of change. We call that Survival Leadership.

Where do you find your passion?

I find my passion through our Indigenous Youth and their advocacy. They are paving the way in showing the generations before us that their Ancestor's Trauma will not become their Trauma. That is powerful and through their voices, society is listening. Educational costs are still a barrier, despite tuition being offered free for Indigenous persons, this only applies to undergraduate programs and off of income, which can still be a barrier for some to attend. These barriers are my motivation to keep advocating for our Indigenous communities.

What do you see yourself doing in the future?

I see myself continuing to do the work that I am doing and providing a career path for our Indigenous youth. It is time for our People to have their space. We have shared enough space with non-Natives, always educating, always sharing. It is time we create our own space for just our People. When my co-founders and I created Medicine H.E.A.L.S., we created that space with this goal in mind. In the next five or ten years, I would like to see more of our Indigenous Youth in leadership roles, leading the way to provide and offer true Holistic Healing in whatever systems they are in. I am not who I am without my community. In the words of Sutton King, I am not self-made, I am community-made. Each of our successes are our successes, that is how kinship and relations work. We need more lateral love and kindness, than violence and oppression.