Native American Studies

More than 2 million Americans below age 24 self-identify as being of American Indian or Alaska Native descent. Many of the serious behavioral, emotional, and physical health concerns facing young people today are especially prevalent with Native youth (e.g., depression, violence, and substance abuse). In May 2014, the Academies held a follow-up workshop titled Advancing Health Equity for Native American Youth. Participants discussed issues related to (1) the visibility of racial and ethnic disparities in health and health care as a national problem, (2) the development of programs and strategies by and for Native and Indigenous communities to reduce disparities and build resilience, and (3) the emergence of supporting Native expertise and leadership. This report summarizes the presentations and discussions from the workshop.

This unique book examines the physical, psychological, social, and environmental factors that support or undermine healthy development in American Indian children, including economics, biology, and public policies.

Health and Social Issues of Native American Women is the first book that specifically explores and discusses health and related social issues within the world of Native American women, providing strong historical and cultural perspectives as well as other contextual information that is often missing or misrepresented in other works about Native American women. Comprising contributions from mostly Native American women scholars, the work presents key background information on native women's health, health care delivery systems, and sociocultural history, and its chapters address the changing role of native women in Alaska and other parts of Indian country. Each author taps her specific area of expertise and knowledge to spotlight specific native women's health problems, such as nutrition, aging, domestic violence, diabetes, and substance abuse.

This book explores Native American literary responses to biomedical discourses and biomedicalization processes as they circulate in social and cultural contexts. Native American communities resist reductivism of biomedicine that excludes Indigenous (and non-Western) epistemologies and instead draw attention to how illness, healing, treatment, and genetic research are socially constructed and dependent on inherently racialist thinking. This volume highlights how interventions into the hegemony of biomedicine are vigorously addressed in Native American literature. The book covers tuberculosis and diabetes epidemics, the emergence of Native American DNA, discoveries in biotechnology, and the problematics of a biomedical model of psychiatry. The book will appeal to scholars of Native American and Indigenous Studies, as well as to others with an interest in literature and medicine.

Legacy focuses on the role that historical trauma plays in Native American physical and mental health, and how the integration of indigenous perspectives into healthcare can help deal with a lot of the health issues facing native peoples.

Leveraging Culture to Address Health Inequalities: Examples from Native Communities is the summary of a workshop convened in November 2012 by the Roundtable on the Promotion of Health Equity and the Elimination of Health Disparities of the Institute of Medicine. The workshop brought together more than 100 health care providers, policy makers, program administrators, researchers, and Native advocates to discuss the sizable health inequities affecting Native American, Alaska Native, First Nation, and Pacific Islander populations and the potential role of culture in helping to reduce those inequities.

At Ganado Mission in the Navajo country of northern Arizona, a group of missionaries and doctors, persuaded the local parents and medicine men to allow them to educate their daughters as nurses. The young women struggled to step into the world of modern medicine, but they knew they might become nurses who could build a bridge between the old ways and the new. In this detailed history Jim Kristofic traces the story of Ganado Mission on the Navajo Indian Reservation.

This concise reference provides clinicians with the information they need to successfully treat and manage Native American patients. Emphasis is on the unique medical differences between Native American and standard U.S. (anglo) diseases and health care procedures.

In Reproductive Justice, sociologist Barbara Gurr provides the first analysis of Native American women's reproductive healthcare and offers a sustained consideration of the movement for reproductive justice in the United States. The book examines the reproductive healthcare experiences on Pine Ridge Reservation, home of the Oglala Lakota Nation in South Dakota. Her work sheds much-needed light on Native American women's efforts to obtain prenatal care, access to contraception, abortion services, and access to care after sexual assault. Reproductive Justice goes beyond this local story to look more broadly at how race, gender, sex, sexuality, class, and nation inform the ways in which the government understands reproductive healthcare and organizes the delivery of this care.

Erica Prussing provides the first in-depth assessment of the politics of Native sobriety by focusing on the Northern Cheyenne community in southeastern Montana, where for many decades the federally funded health care system has relied on the Twelve Step program of Alcoholics Anonymous. White Man's Water provides a thoughtful and careful analysis of Cheyenne views of sobriety and the politics that surround the selective appeal of Twelve Step approaches despite wide-ranging local critiques.