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I am an indigenous youth who grew up outside of hometown and self-claim "an urban indigenous on the way of self-redemption". "Do I live like an indigenous people?" There is often such a question coming up in my mind and it makes me feel hesitated, panic, afeard and stressed when I was growing up. With this self-reflection, this study will discuss how a group of urban indigenous youth practices the self-identity through social work actions. In using narrative research method, an in-depth interview is conducted on each of the selected three indigenous social workers without rich cultural knowledge, and also includes the researcher’s life experience as a part of resource in this study. The life story of these four people was then overlapped, analyzed and finds out the universals among their life experiences through thematic analysis. There are three findings through the researcher and the three interviewers’ life experiences: 1.The transformation process of sense of self-identity indicates that there is a correlation between the choice of individual identity and ethnic identity. 2.Cultural competence is a core concept, important and indelible, in indigenous social work. 3."No one is an outsider" in indigenous social work, but if the "correctness of ethnic identity" of the social workers is overemphasized, the subjectivity of "the indigenous people" is diluted. After the study, it found that "microaggression is omnipresent". Indigenous social workers must emphasize the ethnic values during service, including indigenous culture, language, history and spirit. Furthermore, we may need to break the existing stereotypes, to challenge the cultural prejudice in mainstream society, to observe carefully the needs of indigenous people, to offer person-centered service, and then find more microaggression in details during service. Therefore, one of the strategies of construction of indigenous social work, is to collect the individual voice from a group of indigenous people who have similar life experiences and can resonate with each other, integrate these individual voices into a group beliefs and express out, in hope of healing and repairing the historical trauma experiences which indigenous people have ever shared together. It is also an important action and practice on the way of self-redemption that it showed in this study.
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