Despite widespread concern within American Indian communities, the world of research has paid scant attention to how Indian parenting traditions have been undermined by institutions such as boarding schools, urban relocation, and foster care. My goal in this paper is to begin to address some of these questions by documenting, both statistically and with case studies, the ways in which placements outside of Indian families and communities have often compromised the ability of Indian people to parent their children. I will focus specifically on the predicaments of former foster children, for these are people who have often vowed to be good parents, but have frequently been unable to live up to their expectations for themselves as all too often they have seen their children taken by the very foster care system they so hoped to avoid. While the dynamics I will be describing here are to be found throughout Indian country, there is reason to believe that they are especially common in urban Indian communities. In the course of my work in Minneapolis, I met many people who had come to the city after childhoods spent far from their natal communities. These were people who had been largely cut off from the communities into which they were born when they were placed in the homes of foster parents. And, while they now found themselves in the urban environment associating freely with Indian people, their childhood experiences continued to color their adult lives, especially their relationships with their children. The stories of these individuals speak powerfully to us about the predicaments of an as yet undetermined, but no doubt significant, number of urban Indian people.

The misuse of genomic information has generated considerable concern in American Indian and Alaska Native communities. To understand how issues of genomic research misuse are understood by the public this article focuses on the case brought against Arizona State University by the Havasupai Indian Tribe. To understand how the Havasupai was being framed in the print media, this article examines newspaper articles (N=59) from when the story broke in 2004 until 2019. Our findings suggest that news media rarely engaged the concept of sovereignty and framed the story as an issue of research and scientific ethics.

Abstract Background A variety of forces are now shaping a passionate debate regarding the optimal approaches to improving the quality of substance abuse services for American Indian and Alaska Native communities. While there have been some highly successful efforts to meld the traditions of American Indian and Alaska Native tribes with that of 12-step approaches, some American Indian and Alaska Natives remain profoundly uncomfortable with the dominance of this Euro-American approach to substance abuse treatment in their communities. This longstanding tension has now been complicated by the emergence of a number of evidence-based treatments that, while holding promise for improving treatment for American Indian and Alaska Natives with substance use problems, may conflict with both American Indian and Alaska Native and 12-step healing traditions. Discussion We convened a panel of experts from American Indian and Alaska Native communities, substance abuse treatment programs serving these communities, and researchers to discuss and analyze these controversies in preparation for a national study of American Indian and Alaska Native substance abuse services. While the panel identified programs that are using evidence-based treatments, members still voiced concerns about the cultural appropriateness of many evidence-based treatments as well as the lack of guidance on how to adapt them for use with American Indians and Alaska Natives. The panel concluded that the efforts of federal and state policymakers to promote the use of evidence-based treatments are further complicating an already-contentious debate within American Indian and Alaska Native communities on how to provide effective substance abuse services. This external pressure to utilize evidence-based treatments is particularly problematic given American Indian and Alaska Native communities' concerns about protecting their sovereign status. Summary Broadening this conversation beyond its primary focus on the use of evidence-based treatments to other salient issues such as building the necessary research evidence (including incorporating American Indian and Alaska Native cultural values into clinical practice) and developing the human and infrastructural resources to support the use of this evidence may be far more effective for advancing efforts to improve substance abuse services for American Indian and Alaska Native communities.

In an effort to better understand the ancestral state of the human distal gut microbiome, we examine feces retrieved from archaeological contexts (coprolites). To accomplish this, we pyrosequenced the 16S rDNA V3 region from duplicate coprolite samples recovered from three archaeological sites, each representing a different depositional environment: Hinds Cave (~8000 years B.P.) in the southern United States, Caserones (1600 years B.P.) in northern Chile, and Rio Zape in northern Mexico (1400 years B.P.). Clustering algorithms grouped samples from the same site. Phyletic representation was more similar within sites than between them. A Bayesian approach to source-tracking was used to compare the coprolite data to published data from known sources that include, soil, compost, human gut from rural African children, human gut, oral and skin from US cosmopolitan adults and non-human primate gut. The data from the Hinds Cave samples largely represented unknown sources. The Caserones samples, retrieved directly from natural mummies, matched compost in high proportion. A substantial and robust proportion of Rio Zape data was predicted to match the gut microbiome found in traditional rural communities, with more minor matches to other sources. One of the Rio Zape samples had taxonomic representation consistent with a child. To provide an idealized scenario for sample preservation, we also applied source tracking to previously published data for Ötzi the Iceman and a soldier frozen for 93 years on a glacier. Overall these studies reveal that human microbiome data has been preserved in some coprolites, and these preserved human microbiomes match more closely to those from the rural communities than to those from cosmopolitan communities. These results suggest that the modern cosmopolitan lifestyle resulted in a dramatic change to the human gut microbiome.

Recent studies suggest that gut microbiomes of urban-industrialized societies are different from those of traditional peoples. Here we examine the relationship between lifeways and gut microbiota through taxonomic and functional potential characterization of faecal samples from hunter-gatherer and traditional agriculturalist communities in Peru and an urban-industrialized community from the US. We find that in addition to taxonomic and metabolic differences between urban and traditional lifestyles, hunter-gatherers form a distinct sub-group among traditional peoples. As observed in previous studies, we find that Treponema are characteristic of traditional gut microbiomes. Moreover, through genome reconstruction (2.2-2.5 MB, coverage depth × 26-513) and functional potential characterization, we discover these Treponema are diverse, fall outside of pathogenic clades and are similar to Treponema succinifaciens, a known carbohydrate metabolizer in swine. Gut Treponema are found in non-human primates and all traditional peoples studied to date, suggesting they are symbionts lost in urban-industrialized societies.