What, within Indigenous modes of health and wellness, can structure a story powerful enough to reduce health inequities in Indian Country? Health inequities in Indian Country have resisted improvements despite considerable effort. Many inequities have stabilized with a few inequities worsening. This article seeks to document the movement of stories for health inequities, focusing in particular on the online presence of wellness programs for diabetes in American Indian communities. Stories, health care providers, those who suffer with diabetes, families, bodies, communities, limbs, tribes, insulin, and traditional medicines all act within a larger narrative that envisions Indian Country without the ongoing devastation of diabetes. The practice of storytelling, as evidenced in each of the wellness programs, itself is an intervention in a health care system that would rather uplift the physicians’ stories of the patients than the patients’ stories of themselves. By considering websites of multiple wellness programs for diabetes simultaneously, the author will synthesize common themes and diagnose gaps in the wellness programs with the goal of identifying components for an innovation that reduces health inequities regarding diabetes. A broad and preliminary assessment of the stories being told about diabetes in Indian Country provides an initial foundation for an innovation powerful enough to improve health in Indian Country.
AdlerN. E. (2006). Overview of health disparities. In ThomsonG. E.MitchellF.WilliamsM. B. (Eds.), Examining the health disparities research plan of the National Institutes of Health: Unfinished business (pp. 121-173). Washington, DC: National Academy Press.
2.
BacharJ. J.LeflerL. J.ReedL.McCoyT.BaileyR.BellR. (2006). Cherokee choices: A Diabetes Prevention Program for American Indians. Preventing Chronic Disease, 3(3), Article 103.
BoyatzisR. E. (1998). Transforming qualitative information: Thematic analysis and code development. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.
6.
BravemanP. (2006). Health disparities and health equity: Concepts and measurement. Annual Review of Public Health, 27, 167-194.
7.
Butler-McIlwraithK. (2006). (Re)presenting indigeneity: The possibilities of Australian sociology. Journal of Sociology, 42, 369-381.
8.
ChinoM.DeBruynL. (2006). Building true capacity: Indigenous models for indigenous communities. American Journal of Public Health, 96, 596-599.
9.
ContiK. M. (2006). Diabetes prevention in Indian country: Developing nutrition models to tell the story of food-system change. Journal of Transcultural Nursing, 17, 234-245.
10.
de CoraL. (2001). The diabetic plague in Indian country: Legacy of displacement. Wicazo Sa Review, 16(1), 9-15.
11.
DuranE.FirehammerJ.GonzalezJ. (2008). Liberation psychology as the path toward healing cultural soul wounds. Journal of Counseling & Development, 86, 288-295.
12.
FeredayJ.Muir-CochraneE. (2008). Demonstrating rigor using thematic analysis: A hybrid approach of inductive and deductive coding and theme development. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 5(1), 80-92.
13.
FreireP. (1998). Pedagogy of freedom: Ethics, democracy, and civic courage. Rowman & Littlefield.
14.
FreundP. (2001). Bodies, disability and spaces: The social model and disabling spatial organisations. Disability & Society, 16, 689-706.
15.
GoemanM. R. (2014). Disrupting a settler-colonial grammar of place: The visual memoir of Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie. In SimpsonA.SmithA. (Eds.), Theorizing native studies (pp. 235-265). Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
16.
GoneJ. P. (2007). “We never was happy living like a Whiteman”: Mental health disparities and the postcolonial predicament in American Indian communities. American Journal of Community Psychology, 40, 290-300.
17.
HokowhituB. (2009). Indigenous existentialism and the body. Cultural Studies Review, 15(2), 101-118.
18.
JackS. (2012). Closing the gap on diabetes—A social determinants of health perspective. Aboriginal and Islander Health Worker Journal, 36(1), 27-30.
19.
KenyonG. (2013). Diabetes care is still failing Aboriginal Australian people. The Lancet: Diabetes & Endocrinology, 1(1), 15.
LaFranceJ. (2004). Culturally competent evaluation in Indian country. New Directions for Evaluation, 102, 39-50.
22.
MillionD. (2013). Therapeutic nations: Healing in an age of indigenous human rights. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.
23.
MillionD. (2014). There is a river in me: Theory from life. In SimpsonA.SmithA. (Eds.), Theorizing native studies (pp. 31-42). Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
24.
MitchellF. M. (2012). Reframing diabetes in American Indian communities: A social determinants of health perspective. Health & Social Work, 37, 71-79.
MorgensenS. L. (2011). Spaces between us: Queer settler colonialism and indigenous decolonization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
27.
MorgensenS. L. (2014). Indigenous transnationalism and the AIDS pandemic: Challenging settler colonialism within global health governance. In SimpsonA.SmithA. (Eds.), Theorizing native studies (pp. 188-206). Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
O’ConnellJ. M.WilsonC.MansonS. M.ActonK. J. (2012). The costs of treating American Indian adults with diabetes within the Indian Health Service. American Journal of Public Health, 102, 301-308.
30.
OlsonB. (1999). Applying medical anthropology: Developing diabetes education and prevention programs in American Indian cultures. American Indian Culture and Research Journal, 23(3), 185-203.
31.
OsterR. T.GrierA.LightningR.MayanM. J.TothE. L. (2014). Cultural continuity, traditional Indigenous language, and diabetes in Alberta First Nations: A mixed methods study. International Journal for Equity in Health, 13, Article 92.
32.
PoudrierJ. (2007). The geneticization of Aboriginal diabetes and obesity: Adding another scene to the story of the thrifty gene. Canadian Review of Sociology/Revue canadienne de sociologie, 44, 237-261.
33.
PoudrierJ.KennedyJ. (2008). Embodiment and the meaning of the “healthy body”: An exploration of First Nations women’s perspectives of healthy body weight and body image. Journal of Aboriginal Health. Retrieved from http://www.naho.ca/jah/english/jah04_01/04Embodiment_15-24.pdf
34.
RifkinM. (2014). Settler common sense: Queerness and everyday colonialism in the American renaissance. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
35.
SandersonP. R.LittleM.VasquezM. M.LomadafkieB.Brings HIm Back-JanisM.TrujilloO. V.BoundsR. (2012). A perspective on diabetes from Indigenous views. Fourth World Journal, 11(2), 57.
36.
Seva Foundation. (2013). Celebrating the “diabetes talking circles”: How one woman’s vision provided a successful model for health practitioners and educators and improved the health for Native Americans and Alaska Native people affected by Type 2 diabetes. Retrieved from http://www.seva.org/site/DocServer/Seva_Native_American_Diabetes_Talking_Circles.pdf
37.
SimpsonA.SmithA. (2014). Introduction. In SimpsonA.SmithA. (Eds.), Theorizing native studies (pp. 1-30). Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
38.
SmithA. (2014). Native studies at the horizon of death: Theorizing ethnographic entrapment and settler self-reflexivity. In SimpsonA.SmithA. (Eds.), Theorizing native studies (pp. 207-234). Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
39.
Smith-MorrisC M. (2004). Reducing diabetes in Indian country: Lessons from the three domains influencing Pima diabetes. Human Organization, 63(1), 34-46.
40.
SmylieJ.MartinC. M.Kaplan-MyrthN.SteeleL.TaitC.HoggW. (2004). Knowledge translation and Indigenous knowledge. International Journal of Circumpolar Health, 63(Suppl. 2), 139-143.
41.
TeufelN. I.RitenbaughC. K. (1998). Development of a primary prevention program: Insight gained in the Zuni Diabetes Prevention Program. In Clinical Pediatrics, 37, 131-141.
42.
Tripp-ReimerT.ChoiE.KelleyL. S.EnsleinJ. C. (2001). Cultural barriers to care: Inverting the problem. Diabetes Spectrum, 14, 13-22.
