American Indian Heritage 2001 Local Heroes: Dr. Leslie Gray
Executive Director and Founder, Woodfish Institute
Leslie Gray is an Oneida/Seminole psychologist who received her B.A. from Reed College, obtained her Ph.D. from Catholic University and completed a clinical fellowship at Harvard University. Leslie has maintained a long-standing psychotherapy practice in the city of San Francisco and taught Native American studies and ecopsychology at numerous Bay Area universities including U.C. Berkeley, California Institute of Integral Studies and San Francisco State. She consults internationally on indigenous psychology, and her innovative work blending ancient and modern healing modalities has been featured in many publications including Re-vision Journal, East West Journal and the Sierra Club anthology, Ecopsychology: Restoring the Earth, Healing the Mind. Leslie is an active member of the Society of Indian Psychologists and she currently serves on the board of the Association for Transpersonal Psychology. Leslie's avocations are calligraphy and acting, and she is a member of the Screen Actors' Guild.
In 1998 Leslie founded The Woodfish Institute to promote ecological education grounded in time-tested indigenous wisdom. The Institute offers unique educational programs and funds projects which preserve traditional knowledge in original ways. This past year Woodfish collaborated with the Japan Institute of Psychotherapy to train Japanese therapists in indigenous psychology; and Woodfish funded the participation of an Ainu shaman in its meetings in Tokyo. A program to enable Australian Aboriginal women elders to educate young girls in "bush medicine" was also supported. However, most of the Institute's educational programs and grants are aimed at the Americas, eg. preservation of California Indian languages, support for traditional learning for urban Indian youth, digital storytelling classes for indigenous students, and the "Woodfish Prize" which is awarded annually for projects involving Native American principles of reciprocity. Leslie passionately believes that the inevitable encounter between indigenous and technological systems can not only be synergistically enhancing, it can generate solutions to many of our world's current grave dilemmas. Her guiding vision for Woodfish Institute is to go beyond a unidirectional model of aboriginal education to create learning situations that are reciprocally transformative.
highlights
african american
local heroes
resources
about KQED
