An episode of Changing the Conversation podcast.
What does healing look like from different perspectives, ways of knowing, and approaches? Indigenous elder Shannon CrossBear discusses her wellness journey and the lessons she has learned along the way with host Livia Davis.
February 16, 2026
[Music]
Livia Davis (Host) (00:03):
Hello and welcome to Changing the Conversation. I’m your host, Livia Davis, the Chief Learning Officer at C4 Innovations.
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Today’s conversation is part of a podcast series called Learning From Our Recovery Elders to Inform Our Work As Recovery Leaders. We invite recovery leaders to share their wisdom on this podcast series. Our aim is not only to preserve our guests’ invaluable insights, but also to inspire and guide current and future leaders as we work together to continue to expand access to recovery.
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My guest today is Shannon CrossBear, calling in from Minnesota. She’s an enrolled member of Fort William First Nation of the Lake Superior Ojibwe, located in Ontario, Canada. Shannon’s work has included facilitating and consulting with the National Indian Child Welfare Association, the Federation of Families for Children’s Mental Health, Georgetown University, the National Child Traumatic Stress Network, and the Surgeon General’s Conference on Children’s Mental Health. She has worked with tribal and non-tribal communities, providing technical assistance to systems of care and circles of care, utilizing traditional interventions and the promotion of culturally congruent and trauma-informed practices.
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Hello, Shannon. Thank you for joining us today.
Shannon CrossBear (Guest) (01:27): Hello. I’m glad to be here. Mino-giizhigad. That means good day in the Ojibwe language.
Livia (01:33): Shannon, you have been working in the field of recovery for many years now. Could you share with our listeners a little about your purpose and how it has impacted your work as a leader in the recovery movement from an Indigenous perspective?
Shannon (01:49): Thanks, Livia. As I was thinking about it earlier today, because I was thinking about my purpose and I was thinking back about how I arrived at my purpose. I have what you call an “I am statement” that was created many, many, many, many years ago, and it goes like this. I am a beautiful, powerful, spiritual woman and my purpose is to both demonstrate and promote gentle healing, utilizing my skills, my determination and my spirit in order to contribute to a world of unity and wholeness. And that guides me. That purpose statement guides me.
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One of the things I’m very grateful for in my own life is that I’ve had the opportunity to arrive at a purpose statement. And of course, I have to be reminded because I forget sometimes. And so, I actually wrote that purpose statement down and periodically I have to remind myself who I am and what my purpose is. But it really does and has guided me in the work around healing and recovery. It led me, at a very early age, to start exploring what does that look like? What does healing look like from different perspectives, from different ways of knowing, from different approaches? And so, I’ve spent a long time in my life gathering that information.
Livia (03:20): I just love the idea of a north star like that in terms of being a thing you can return to. I know you’re right in that sometimes things can get busy or pressured and it can be hard to remember, “What is the most important thing? What is? Why am I doing this work?” And it really feels to me, in hearing you talk about your purpose, that is something that has guided you.
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Do you feel that your focus on healing or your purpose around healing is something that comes from part of your cultural background as an Indigenous worldview, if you will?
Shannon (04:04): I think it contributes to the way that I see healing and the way that I understand healing. For example, exploring this whole idea of healing from different perspectives. And I went on that journey and I thought deeply about, “What happens?” All healing takes place from the inside out. I don’t care whether it’s a wound. When we have a wound and we have a cut, if it heals too quickly on the outside, there’s always a chance that that infection will be underneath, and it will fester. But it also happens in other realms, not just on the physical realm. And because of my Indigenous perspective, I see that. I see that healing is not one-dimensional. It’s not in one part of our being. It’s in all parts of our being. And so, I think that influenced me and continues to influence me because I believe that. I mean, deeply, I believe that we have multiple ways of being able to heal and that it requires addressing those multiple aspects of our being to be totally on a path, I would say, of wellness.
Livia (05:22): I love that so much. So, in thinking about that holistic perspective, do you have some recommendations to share with our listeners or emerging leaders in how they think about moving the field forward in terms of recovering healthy well-being or in terms of recovery in a holistic way?
Shannon (05:42): Well, I think one of the biggest challenges is getting out of our own way of understanding healing and understanding recovery. And by that, I mean not through ill intent, but because of the, we have all been in a colonized way of thinking is really around what works. And so, we put things in boxes, we put things in boxes like evidence-based practices and other kinds of boxes, and that hasn’t necessarily served us well. And so, thinking about what it takes to actually deconstruct that, and that means that we get wedded to something that has worked.
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Usually, we get wedded to something that has worked for us, and not in ill intent, but we want to share that. And because it worked for us, we believe that it’s going to work for everyone. And that’s not necessarily true. And so, opening up to saying “there are many pathways to recovery. And we need to have them all, and we need to support them all in very real kinds of ways and bring them back together” because that collective knowledge can really lead us forward in the field instead of being protective over whatever method or process or plan that we got wedded to in terms of our own healing or what we have utilized with other people. It gets put into the institutions of education and it gets put into everywhere. So, finding the ways that we can start to… I use the analogy of… Part of it is people’s fear around, “Oh, my gosh, if we really do that, we’ll have to be so individualized. We can’t possibly support that to scale.” And yet it’s the difference between how we’ve approached it to date.
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The example I use is somebody needs a pair of tennis shoes, and they need a pair of tennis shoes. Young boy, 17, needs a pair of tennis shoes. We find a pair of tennis shoes. They don’t fit him, but we can make them work. They’re tennis shoes and he’s going barefoot right now. So, they don’t fit him, but we’re going to stuff the tissue paper into the toes and we’re going to make it work. And yes, he’s going to be able to get down the road a bit. They’re not going to be comfortable. They’re going to create other problems because they don’t fit him. Instead of saying, you need a pair of tennis shoes, then what we’re going to do is we’re going to measure your foot, we’re going to find the right tennis shoe and we’re going to make it for you and thinking about how does that contribute to healing as opposed to the healing that we’re doing now, which is really making the tennis shoe fit.
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My encouragement is to be brave in those spaces where you can influence that and just start doing it differently in your own practices, in your own healing, in your own opportunities that you have to say, let’s be like… I use Felix the cat. Let’s be like Felix the cat and have a bag of tricks and we can just keep adding to those. Right? Or the other analogy I was thinking about is it’s like a potluck, right? Everybody brings something to the potluck. The other thing that happens is there’s always somebody that brings a new dish, and that’s okay because two things can happen. You can go through the line one time and maybe you get all the things that you want and you’re full, but maybe you don’t, so you can go through the line a second time and pick some different items. What would it look like, what would our world look like if we really approached healing in that same kind of way?
Livia (09:15): I love that so much. I come from a culture where we do a lot of communal meals as well, so I can see this big, long table out there with all these different dishes. If you look at having that applied to a system setting or a program setting, how do we think about how to invite people to that table? In my mind, in thinking about your analogy, I see some tables where some of those dishes may be there, some of those pathways may be there, but then there are other tables and they’re not combining. They’re not saying, let’s actually have a potluck. And I’m wondering if you have any thoughts around how to invite that kind of convening and collaboration because I think part of what gets in the way is that we isolate, that we don’t collaborate within programs.
Shannon (10:10): I think that’s so true. I’ve seen it so many places. I’ve been in communities where they have multiple kinds of initiatives happening that could be helping each other, and yet they’re in their separate spaces. But what is the common denominator? The common denominator is the individual, the family, the person that they’re trying to help or are supposed to be of service to. That’s the commonality. And so many times, they’re left out of that conversation. So, I think we don’t do anything until we talk to the people whose lives it’s going to affect.
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That being said, how do you get that on the table? I found that first of all, it takes more than just, we want to do this, and this is good, right, the invitation. It really takes tuning into the one radio station everybody tunes into, WIFM, What’s In it For Me, saying, “How can I be of service to that other organization, that other agency, that other initiative? How can I be of service to what they’re trying to accomplish?” And starting there with that invitation, it switches the conversation.
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The other thing that I’ve found is that in that invitation, it’s all about relationship. I had an experience in Canada many years ago where I was operating in between some government political territorial organizations and Health Canada, and the negotiations weren’t going really well, and this was in a tribal context, until I figured out that Health Canada did not understand what we were trying to say from the Tribal perspective about healing because they had a different approach. They had a very western approach, concentrating on a particular population in a particular way. And this was in conflict with the belief system of the indigenous population.
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And so, the only way that I can think of in the moment was to invite them into ceremony. I invited them into the experience because I remember one of my friends saying a long time ago, “If you want to learn about us, if you want to know about us, go to the library. But if you want to understand us, come and spend time with us.” And so, the only way that could happen was to really be in that relationship, and it did shift as a result of that opportunity. So that would be my other thought, is that really if you’re trying to do collaboration, you have to start with relationship. And sometimes, it takes effort and it takes time.
Livia (12:54): I so agree. I think relationship building over time and authentic relationship building is so key to so many collaborations for them to be effective. So, I very much want to hold that up as an important piece. I think it can be even more challenging when you’re in periods of feeling scarcity rather than abundance. And so, we tend to be a little more introverted, maybe, as a program or service provider rather than looking at collaboration when, really, the opposite should be happening. It’s almost counterintuitive, but when there’s a lot of pressure on resources or how to deliver services, collaboration becomes even more important. And that always starts with relationship building. So, thank you for elevating that.
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Are there other big challenges you want to share that you feel is facing the field of recovery?
Shannon (13:52): I think the biggest challenge is just what you had talked about. It really is, “How do we shift mindsets? How do we shift mental models and the things that we’ve learned in the past and not being a prisoner of our past?” I say that because I know with new leaders coming up is, what can they learn from that past? And I think it’s important that they pay attention to that past, but also understand things take time. And the seeds that they’re planting and the way that they’re contributing to the field of healing now will have those impacts, like we say in our community, seven generations to come.
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I have some great examples of that in my own life seeing now I’m a great-grandmother and I have a great-granddaughter and a great-grandson, and they’re speaking the Ojibwe language as first speakers, and that’s the first time in four generations we’ve had that happen, actually being born into the language. And so, to me that’s… And I’m very grateful that that’s happened within my lifetime, that I get to witness that.
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So, for those that are coming in, learn from what’s happened and respect the sacrifices people have made in order to be where we’re at now, because that’s what you’re building upon and recognizing that we build upon strengths, and we have a lot of strengths out there in the recovery field. We’re continuing to learn about what it means to heal and how we can tap into the collective wisdom, not just the Indigenous wisdom, but the collective wisdom that we have about what it takes to be truly in a place of well-being for our lifetimes.
Livia (15:53): Oh, Shannon, I think we could probably spend another hour together just diving into the power of community and belonging and understanding who came before and how we carry it forward. That is certainly big interest of mine as well, just from my cultural background as a Danish immigrant. So, I look forward to some more discussions with you, Shannon, over tea maybe sometime. What keeps you going?
Shannon (16:19): What keeps me going is, one, that purpose statement that I talked to you about because I do forget it, and I do look at it. I actually look at it. I had a friend of mine, who was a calligrapher, put it on so I could frame it and put it there and remind myself when I forget because I do forget and I think we all forget. The other thing that keeps me going are things like my great-grandchildren. I mean, wow. And what keeps me going is I’ve been around long enough to know that I don’t know the outcome. There are things that have happened in my lifetime that I never thought would happen. I reflected this morning upon my first husband who has passed many, many years ago, but he went to treatment 47 times, 47 times. But you know what? He died sober after 10 years of sobriety. And in that, he had a legacy of giving that he left behind.
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So, we don’t know what the outcomes are, and we have to keep trying no matter what, no matter what, 47 times has somebody achieved a level of wellness that they had not experienced for many, many years.
Livia (17:33): Well, that’s an incredibly powerful and hopeful note to end our time together today. Thank you, Shannon, for joining us.
Shannon (17:43): Thank you for having me.
Livia (17:44): And to our listeners, join us next time on Changing the Conversation.
Lee Locke-Hardy (Producer) (17:49):
Visit c4innovates.com and follow us on LinkedIn and YouTube for more resources to grow your impact. Thank you for joining us. This episode was produced by Lee Locke-Hardy and Christina Murphy. Our theme song was written and performed by Peter Hanlon. Join us next time on Changing the Conversation.
Listen to other episodes in the “Learning from Recovery Elders” series.