American Indian Culture and Research Journal

The late Kelly M. West, also known as the “father of diabetes epidemiology,” asserted in his 1974 essay, “Diabetes in American Indians and Other Native Populations of the New World,” that diabetes was extremely rare among Oklahoma Indians prior to 1940. He used no ethnohistorical data, instead basing his conclusions on the absence of the word “diabetes” in medical records and in interviews he claimed to have conducted with Oklahoma Indians. Yet to the contrary, historical and ethnobotanical data reveals that Indians in Indian Territory (made the state of Oklahoma in 1907) began suffering from food-related illnesses, including diabetes or pre-diabetes, before the Civil War. West's theory of 1940 is important. His assertion has not been challenged; his essay has been cited at least 260 times and as recently as 2016. This paper discusses diabetes among Oklahoma Indians before 1940 and reinforces the importance of utilizing ethnohistorical data in medical studies dealing with indigenous health, as well as understanding the connection between the loss of traditional foodways and the modern health crisis.

This article critically explores the heated controversy surrounding screenings of Québécois filmmaker Dominic Gagnon's found-footage documentary of the North 2015, into which he inserted “found” clips of northern Inuit life he had extracted from YouTube as aesthetic capital for southern cinephile jouissance. In conversation with Aileen Moreton-Robinson's theorization of the white possessive, I propose that the vocabulary employed by many of the settler cultural institutions and critics defending the film—e.g., the democratic imperative to protect artistic freedom and allow reasoned dialogue about “difficult” texts to flourish in public spaces—is inextricable from the type of entitlements sustaining settler colonial claims to indigenous lands, and to indigeneity itself, as part of a free and boundless Lockean common. I argue that such default recourse to the democratic imperative of restorative dialogue actually fails to do what it pretends it is meant to do: via mutual understanding and recognition, to solve or resolve the systemic colonial inequalities that Inuit opponents of the film wish to make visible. This common recourse to the “bestowing” of a deliberative public space in the name of a necessary intercultural dialogue reflects the very structure of feeling of liberal colonial settlement and thus reveals a certain cinephilia's subjective and material investment in the white possessive.

Michael Galban and Eugene R. H. Tesdahl have discovered and translated a Seneca version of creation that was provided by René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, and dates back to 1678. Kevin J. White situates this 1678 version alongside other better-known Seneca versions and uses it to demonstrate the many similarities among them, the powerful memory and oratory skills of the Seneca, and the overall stability of oral culture among the Haudenosaunee.

Cervical cancer is a preventable disease that is highly prevalent among American Indian (AI) women. Some types of the Human papillomavirus (HPV) has been identified as causing cervical cancer in women and other less common cancers such as cancer of the anus, vagina, vulva, and oral cavity. Two vaccines, Gardasil® and Cervarix®, are available for primary protection against HPV. Despite its proven efficacy, additional efforts are needed to improve HPV update among AI women. Our project was designed to assess HPV vaccine readiness among AI college students, and identify factors that influence their decision-making. Modifiable risk factors are ideal to identify in that they can be targeted for health behavior education and intervention. Further, risk factors once identified can be tailored for designing effective interventions in high-risk communities.

This article examines how tribal education department leaders perceive the process of educational policy problem recognition and definition in their governments. This piece presents the perspectives of two education department directors working in two different federally recognized tribal governments located in Northern California. The data presented in this article was gathered through multiple interviews with the education department directors. The interviews were recorded, then transcribed and analyzed for themes sentence-by-sentence with the use of open coding methodology. The study argues that policy problem recognition and definition processes are, in part, shaped by (1) the expertise and ideologies of the department leadership within tribal governments; (2) the hands-on work of department leadership in the community; and (3) the flow of policy problem indicators from departments to council.

This article details the development of an innovative, community-based intergenerational youth health messenger program in partnership with local youth which leverages intergenerational relationships within AI/AN families, training youth to deliver health messages to related adult women that encourage preventive health care, specifically breast health screenings. Youth health messengers convince women to attend to their own preventive health care by simultaneously communicating the importance of preventive screenings while utilizing the strength of their intergenerational relationships as both social capital and an inspirational motivator. Implications of the model and its approach for AI/AN women, the participating youth, and the larger community are discussed.