About
Dr. Violette Cloud is a citizen of the Navajo Nation with connections to the Southern Ute Tribe. Violette is a Senior Project Associate at Policy Research Associates, Inc. and owner of VIO Consulting Agency. She holds an interdisciplinary background spanning behavioral health and law, having earned her PhD in Psychology and her JD with an Indian Law Certificate from the University of New Mexico, where her training bridged clinical psychology, tribal jurisdiction, and community-based participatory research. A licensed attorney in New Mexico, Dr. Cloud. Her work is driven by the conviction that Native professionals working across tribal behavioral health, substance use, and justice systems hold a distinct and under-recognized form of Indigenous knowledge, and that present and future Native excellence deserves recognition alongside traditional knowledge as a foundation for tribal systems design. Violette lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico and spends her free time looking for adventure.
Violette’s pilot project is to develop a systems coordination framework built specifically for tribal behavioral health and justice contexts. Guided by a co-researcher council of Native professionals with shared decision-making authority, the project has three aims: 1) identify coordination gaps and the professional strategies Native practitioners use to bridge them, through interviews with Native professionals working across tribal substance use, behavioral health, and justice systems; 2) collaboratively develop a preliminary tribal systems coordination framework through virtual framework-building focus groups; and 3) evaluate the feasibility and cultural acceptability of the C/TBPR process to inform a future full-scale study. The framework is designed to center tribal sovereignty, account for jurisdictional complexity, and reflect the full diversity of contemporary Native identity and expertise.
