Native America Research Articles

Multiple sclerosis in Indigenous Peoples of the Americas: A systematic review of incidence, prevalence, and outcomes.

The incidence, prevalence and outcomes of multiple sclerosis (MS) are unclear in Indigenous Peoples (IP) who are more likely to be underrepresented in research. We completed a systematic review of MS in IP of the Americas. A systematic review was conducted using PubMed, Web of Science, and Cochrane databases as well as references of retrieved papers. Inclusion criteria were: peer-reviewed publications (January 1990- December 2021), incidence, prevalence, or clinical outcome measures of MS in self-identified IP in the Americas. Incidence, prevalence, morbidity and mortality data were summarized and stratified by location and year of publication. Study quality was evaluated by risk of bias or confounding. Out of 416 titles, thirteen studies met inclusion criteria. Four studies evaluated incidence, seven prevalence, three clinical outcomes and one mortality. Most studies were completed in Canada or the United States (US). Incidence rates per 100,000 ranged from 0.48 (in US Indian Health Service records) to 8.15 (First Nations Manitoban Canadians). Prevalence ranged from 0 (Lacandonian Mexicans and Panamanians) to 188.5 (First Nations Manitoban Canadians). Incidence and prevalence are consistently lower in IP than comparator White populations. IP with MS were reported to have higher disability and faster disability progression than non-Indigenous comparators. MS-related mortality is low compared to White people. There is an absence of high-quality studies evaluating MS in IP. Available evidence indicates low, but increasing incidence and prevalence of MS in IP of the Americas. IP with MS may have worse disability than non-Indigenous comparators. Future studies should evaluate the factors influencing the increases in incidence and prevalence as well as better characterize possible disparities in MS care among IP.

(Mis)Trust and Pragmatism as Grounded Normativity

(Mis)Trust and Pragmatism as Grounded Normativity

Genetic diversity and population structure among native, naturalized, and invasive populations of the common yellow monkeyflower, Mimulus guttatus (Phrymaceae).

An ongoing controversy in invasion biology is the prevalence of colonizing plant populations that are able to establish and spread, while maintaining limited amounts of genetic variation. Invasive populations can be established through several routes including from a single source or from multiple introductions. The aim of this study was to examine genetic diversity in populations of Mimulus guttatus in the United Kingdom, where the species is considered invasive, and compare this diversity to that in native populations on the west coast of North America. Additionally, we looked at diversity in non-native populations that have not yet become invasive (naturalized populations) in eastern North America. We investigated population structure among populations in these three regions and attempted to uncover the sources for populations that have established in the naturalized and invasive regions. We found that genetic diversity was, on average, relatively high in populations from the invasive UK region and comparable to native populations. Contrastingly, two naturalized M. guttatus populations were low in both genetic and genotypic diversity, indicating a history of asexual reproduction and self-fertilization. A third naturalized population was found to be a polyploid Mimulus hybrid of unknown origin. Our results demonstrate that M. guttatus has likely achieved colonization success outside of its native western North America distribution by a variety of establishment pathways, including those with genetic and demographic benefits resulting from multiple introductions in the UK, reproductive assurance through selfing, and asexual reproduction in eastern North America, and possible polyploidization in one Canadian population.

Niche and Range Shifts of the Fall Webworm (Hyphantria cunea Dury) in Europe Imply Its Huge Invasion Potential in the Future.

The fall webworm (Hyphantria cunea Dury) has a strong impact on agricultural systems in Europe. However, its invasive potential, which was inherited from its native niche in North America, remains unknown. Here, we investigated the climatic niche and range shifts of the fall webworm in Europe and compared them with those in native North America, then assessed the worms' invasive potential in Europe. Compared with the fall webworm in Europe, those in North America survived in more diverse climatic conditions, which was closely associated with their broader niche and larger potential ranges in Europe. If the fall webworm in Europe could exploit the native niche inherited from those in North America to adapt to climatic conditions in Europe, their potential ranges in Europe could be 5.5-fold those based on the niche as introduced in Europe. The potentially unfilled ranges of the fall webworm in Europe were mainly detected in vast regions of Europe, excluding Norway, Sweden, Finland, North Russia, Hungary, Croatia, Romania, and Ukraine, suggesting that, without strict control, these vast regions might be preferably invaded by the fall webworm in Europe in the future. Therefore, strict control against its invasion is needed. Given that small niche shifts in this invasive insect could result in large range shifts, the niche shifts represent a more sensitive indicator of invasion risk than range shifts.

Medicine, Education, and the Arts in Contemporary Native America: Strong Women, Resilient Nations. Edited by Clifford E. Trafzer, Donna L. Akers, and Amanda K. Wixon

In their collection of essays, Medicine, Education, and the Arts in Contemporary Native America, Strong Women, Resilient Nations, editors Clifford Trafzer, Donna Akers, and Amanda Wixon have gathered the life stories of twenty American Indian women who illustrate the significant roles that Native women have always held among their People. One of the strengths of this work, which focuses on lives between the late nineteenth- and early twenty-first centuries, lies in the breadth of its diversity: the women represent Native nations from California, Southwest, and Columbia River Plateau to Alaska, Northern Plains, and Oklahoma. The editors have structured their collection around three major themes—Women in the Arts; in Education, et al; and in Health/Medicine. Yet the versatility of these women often defies categorization. For example, the Piapot Reserve (Cree) folk singer and activist Buffy Sainte-Marie appears under the arts but could easily fit elsewhere. Essay collections invariably offer challenges for reviewers. Here the challenge lies in the profiles’ unevenness: some authors rely heavily on secondary sources, offering cursory overviews of their subjects; others draw on a variety of sources, offering greater length and analysis. This variation often correlates with the subjects’ prominence. Buffy Sainte-Marie, who has earned national, even international fame, attracts extensive coverage; a woman who has earned regional impact generates less attention and fewer sources for her biographer. The strongest essays here often reflect the subjects’ prominence and available source material.

Disability and Latin American indigenous peoples

Disability among Latin American indigenous peoples is frequent and has particular characteristics. On the one hand, people understand and experience disability from their own worldview and cultural practices, but on the other hand, these cultural characteristics coexist with the reality of a disability produced by colonialism, colonization and forced assimilation into the states. Additionally, the socioeconomic conditions in which indigenous peoples live, as well as the political violence to which they are subjected, create a complex panorama that challenges disability studies to dialogue with other philosophies. Decoloniality, interculturality, epistemologies of the South, and indigenous thought can be approaches that discuss and problematize the study of disability in indigenous cultures from a more just and situated perspective.

‘Genocide is climate change’: a conversation about colonized California and Indigenous futurism

This written conversation unpacks a phrase, ‘genocide is climate change,’ which co-author Christine Howard Sandoval wrote and featured in her video artwork, Niniwas- to belong here (2022). The authors discuss scholarship linking the genocide of Indigenous peoples in the Americas to climate change and contextualize the assertion within an expanded archive of the Spanish missions in California. They address Howard Sandoval’s multimedia work in dialogue with Indigenous women’s basket weaving and land care practices, including the cultural use of fire, in order to consider how Indigenous arts can illuminate the intertwined apocalypses of colonization and climate change.

The Ex-pats Go to War

The present research is devoted to the post-WWI social and cultural milieu that made possible the intellectual and artistic effervescence characterizing the literary production of the American ex-pat writers in Paris during the 1920s and 1930s. The research is structured in an Introduction, four chapters, and Conclusion. After a necessary general presentation, the researcher goes deeper into the analysis of the identity crisis experienced by several American writers in exile, whom Gertrude Stein, herself an ex-pat, called “the Lost Generation” – among them, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, Sinclair Lewis, and Samuel Putnam. Starting from the assumption that by discovering Europe, the American writers discovered themselves, the researcher chose Hemingway to represent the post-WWI generation of American ex-pats and followed the writer’s search for identity, seen as a process of singularization based on recognizing that we share a common origin or circumstances with another person or community. Ample space is devoted to Hemingway’s novel The Sun Also Rises, where a feeling of uselessness and nonsense accompanies the characters. Having (re)discovered their identity in Paris, many returned to their native America, rediscovering her as more disappointing than expected.

The Ecological Disaster of the Covid-19 Pandemic: the Care for our Common Home from the Perspective of the UN and Indigenous Peoples

This paper aims to reflect on indigenous peoples’ knowledge of nature and the way it may contribute to sustainability in the context of the ecological disaster of the Covid-19 pandemic. This study is justified given the current situation in which humanity finds itself, as the UN’s assessment regarding the need to take care of nature, our “common home”, and the ancestral knowledge of indigenous peoples stands out. It is realized that the values preserved by the native peoples of the Americas, by contributing to the sustainability of the planet, could also help to improve the living conditions of present and future generations.

Sumac

The spice sumac is prepared from the fruit of the small deciduous tree Rhus coriaria L. (family Anacardiaceae), cultivated mainly in the Mediterranean region, North Africa, and the Middle East. The genus Rhus contains well over a hundred individual species of flowering plants, some varieties of which are edible, including not only R. coriaria but also R. glabra L. (or smooth sumac) used by the indigenous peoples of North America, Rhus typhina L. (staghorn sumac), and R. aromatica Aiton (fragrant sumac), among others. In the Middle East and Turkey, sumac is commonly included in food preparations to impart a tangy, citruslike flavor. Primarily in the Middle East, sumac is used extensively in traditional medicine. Sumac extracts may be used to treat diarrhea, diseases of the mouth and throat, gastrointestinal distress, inflammatory conditions of the skin, and pain, to name a few. Recent human studies examining the potential health benefits of sumac are limited and mainly explore the actions of R. coriaria toward cardiometabolic risk factors. This narrative overview summarizes these clinical trials, as well as relevant, associated animal experiments, and suggests opportunities for future research.

Silko, Kimmerer, and Plantationocene Storytelling

ABSTRACT: According to the Plantationocene narrative, human nature changed in or around the year 1610, when the genocide of Indigenous peoples in the Americas may have caused a drop in atmospheric carbon dioxide. While many environmental humanities scholars in the Global North have replaced the term "Anthropocene" with "Plantationocene" to highlight environmental inequities, they still impose a global historical narrative on many peoples who already have their own origin stories, modes of understanding history, and environmental relationships. Like the Anthropocene, the Plantationocene reinforces western narratives of a singular linear "fall" from an ecological paradise to a laborious agricultural system. The essay highlights parallels between the Plantationocene narrative and foundational western origin stories, including the fall of Adam and Eve and the descent from the Golden Age to the Iron Age in Greco-Roman mythology. Both narratives posit prehistorical Earth as a leisurely, pastoral space in which the land gave freely to humans. Both also include a fall, in which the land stops giving and humans must suddenly work and suffer in order to eat. Plantationocene scholars must center Global South environmental narratives, which seldom subscribe to a linear rendering of time, or risk recreating the universalizing Anthropocene. Indigenous writers such as Robin Wall Kimmerer (Potawatomi) and Leslie Marmon Silko (Laguna Pueblo) do not cite the Columbian Exchange as the solitary event that forever marred their nations' environmental relations. Instead, in Braiding Sweetgrass (2015) and Ceremony (1977), they posit many environmental inflection points. Rather than reading the contemporary world as "fallen," they leave room for growth and wholeness even as they hold accountable the perpetrators of Indigenous genocide and environmental destruction. Rather than splitting history in two—a leisurely "before" and a laborious "after"—they imagine fulfilling agricultural work before European contact and environmental tragedy that postdates the seventeenth century.

The Evolution and Continuation of Powwows in Native American Communities

The Powwow is generally associated with the indigenous peoples of North America. The Powwow is a cultural tradition of Native American communities that has been celebrated for centuries. Native Americans have reappropriated the word, limiting the meaning to a primarily secular event involving group singing and ballroom dancing. Although there are various types of Powwows, today, the focus is always on a dance competition organized by class, gender, and age that attracts hundreds to tens of thousands of people. This paper focuses on the significant annual Powwows held on Native American reservations that bring together people from diverse Native American groups and geographic regions, the significance of Powwows, and the future of Powwows.

What to Read Now: Indigenous Horror

What to Read NowIndigenous Horror Heather Hall (bio) ERIKA T. WURTH White Horse Flatiron Books DEVON A. MIHESUAH The Hatak Witches University of Arizona Press STEPHEN GRAHAM JONES The Only Good Indians Saga Press Click for larger view View full resolution WHAT THE WORLD THINKS it knows about Indigenous peoples of North America could be likened to a Polaroid snapshot taken off the deck of a cruise ship in a foreign land, over which European spectators will forever sigh and wax poetic, exclaiming, "This, then, is an Indian." It is not uncommon for n8v folks dressed in regalia to be asked such guileless questions as Where is your teepee? and Do you still hunt buffalo? We live in a world that uses as the foundation for its caricature of us such Hollywood inventions as Espera Oscar de Corti, an Italian American actor who lied for many years about his heritage while working under his chosen nom de plume, "Iron Eyes Cody." It was inevitable that in the face of such willfully comedic misunderstandings of an entire continent's people that we would, ourselves, begin controlling the narrative through a practice that is foundational to most Indigenous cultural life—storytelling. I have been extraordinarily fortunate to take up my bookselling vocation at a time that is remarkably rich in Indigenous voices across all storytelling genres. I have celebrated each new Indigenous children's book, every volume of poetry—each Indigenous voice is a miracle—but it is Indigenous horror that somehow most delights me. It's hard to imagine a genre more perfectly suited to a people whose resilience has persevered in the face of the horrifically dehumanizing force that is colonization and its concomitant atrocities—from forced removal to forced sterilization and everything in between. [End Page 26] ERIKA T. WURTH White Horse Flatiron Books I had the opportunity to meet Erika T. Wurth at a bookselling conference and was intrigued by the premise of her new novel, White Horse, which centers Chikashsha culture and highlights the contrast of urban and reservation Natives. The Lofa (Sasquatch and Bigfoot's gorier Chikashsha cousin) is featured as the primary villain of this story, though one could argue that the primary horror is intergenerational trauma, with the Lofa as scapegoat. This book follows Kari James, as she retraces her mother's life in an effort to discover why she abandoned her husband and days-old infant. Wurth sprinkles in enough mysticism to mask this horror story as fantasy—until the very end, when the nature of the story is revealed in gut-punching fashion. Wurth tells this story with scenes from Kari's favorite Indian bar, an ongoing obsession with Stephen King, and complex family relationships. It's an utterly enjoyable read and feels both foreign and familiar to me, as an Oklahoma Chikashsha who lives in that space that exists between urban and reservation Native but occupies neither. DEVON A. MIHESUAH The Hatak Witches University of Arizona Press In The Hatak Witches, by Devon A. Mihesuah, we follow detective Monique Blue Hawk through a murder investigation in a story that blends truth and fiction with remarkable aplomb. This story, set in Oklahoma, features a place called the Hollow, whose description closely resembles my grandfather's stories about the Cross Timbers, an ecological region of Oklahoma. His stories painted the Cross Timbers as a terrifying place, so I was delighted to find it in a horror story set in my home state. This story features shapeshifting witches, awesome Oklahoma skies, and the deep, abiding belief that owls are bringers of evil. STEPHEN GRAHAM JONES The Only Good Indians Saga Press Stephen Graham Jones's The Only Good Indians follows a group of Blackfeet youth via a series of increasingly fantastical newspaper headlines and their matching backstories. The first half to two-thirds of this story is more a tale of woe than true horror, but in the moment the genre proves true, the reader is met with the most exquisitely casual depiction of brutality. In this way, Jones aptly elucidates the casual relationship Indigenous people have with resilience in response to violence. This story has a sharp, sometimes dry wit—slipping social...

Silko, Kimmerer, and Plantationocene Storytelling

ABSTRACT: According to the Plantationocene narrative, human nature changed in or around the year 1610, when the genocide of Indigenous peoples in the Americas may have caused a drop in atmospheric carbon dioxide. While many environmental humanities scholars in the Global North have replaced the term "Anthropocene" with "Plantationocene" to highlight environmental inequities, they still impose a global historical narrative on many peoples who already have their own origin stories, modes of understanding history, and environmental relationships. Like the Anthropocene, the Plantationocene reinforces western narratives of a singular linear "fall" from an ecological paradise to a laborious agricultural system. The essay highlights parallels between the Plantationocene narrative and foundational western origin stories, including the fall of Adam and Eve and the descent from the Golden Age to the Iron Age in Greco-Roman mythology. Both narratives posit prehistorical Earth as a leisurely, pastoral space in which the land gave freely to humans. Both also include a fall, in which the land stops giving and humans must suddenly work and suffer in order to eat. Plantationocene scholars must center Global South environmental narratives, which seldom subscribe to a linear rendering of time, or risk recreating the universalizing Anthropocene. Indigenous writers such as Robin Wall Kimmerer (Potawatomi) and Leslie Marmon Silko (Laguna Pueblo) do not cite the Columbian Exchange as the solitary event that forever marred their nations' environmental relations. Instead, in Braiding Sweetgrass (2015) and Ceremony (1977), they posit many environmental inflection points. Rather than reading the contemporary world as "fallen," they leave room for growth and wholeness even as they hold accountable the perpetrators of Indigenous genocide and environmental destruction. Rather than splitting history in two—a leisurely "before" and a laborious "after"—they imagine fulfilling agricultural work before European contact and environmental tragedy that postdates the seventeenth century.

Use of a Two-Eyed Seeing Approach to Increase Client Satisfaction with Psychiatric Services Among an Indigenous Population

IntroductionPsychiatry has historically had difficult relationships with Indigenous people, tending to dismiss their views on mental health and illness as superstitious or primitive. Indigenous people have responded by refusing to come for services, missing appointments, and dismissing treatment offered. Canadian Mi’qmak elder Albert Marshall introduced the term, etuaptmumk, to highlight the idea that Indigenous Knowledge and Practice has equal value to contemporary psychiatry. While translated as two-eyed seeing, the term refers to explanatory pluralism and invites a respectful dialogue among cultures as equals.ObjectivesWe implemented a two-eyed seeing research in Indigenous communities to explore the differences of some Indigenous North American cultures in their view of mind and mental health from conventional Euro-American psychiatry and how their cultural practitioners negotiated those differences. We wondered how perception of services would change if mental health practitioners were aware and were more respectful of those differences.MethodsWe engaged in a series of discussions with traditional knowledge keepers about their views on mind and mental health. We used constructivist grounded theory methods to identify what was common among these views. We developed a training program to engage mental health clinicians in understanding and responding to these differences. We engaged community members receiving services in a discussion about their perception in the change in the quality of the services. We summarized their responses.ResultsDifferences between Indigenous views and those of conventional psychiatry included (1) greater emphasis on the role of community and socio-environmental influences on mental health, (2) inclusion of spirituality and spiritual beings in their expectation for cause of problems and treatment, (3) greater emphasis on inter-generational trauma and historical trauma in addressing mental health. After inclusion of practitioners in the mental health services who had been oriented to these differences and integration of ceremony into the mental health services, ninety-four percent of respondents asked if the service had improved responded in the positive. Attendance at scheduled appointments increased from 56% to 81%. Adherence to recommendations increased from 27% to 67%, which were significant.ConclusionsAwareness of cultural differences in beliefs about causes of mental illness and acceptable types of treatment increased client satisfaction with services offered, improved attendance rates, and improved adherence rates to treatments offered among Indigenous people. These results could generalize to other populations who hold different views than those of conventional psychiatry. The concept of two-eyed seeing, or explanatory pluralism, holds heuristic value for psychiatry by allowing multiple points of view to be true at the same time.Disclosure of InterestNone Declared

Native Foodways: Indigenous North American Religious Traditions and Foods by Michelene E. Pensatubbee and Michael J. Zogry

Native Foodways: Indigenous North American Religious Traditions and Foods by Michelene E. Pensatubbee and Michael J. Zogry

The Long View: Leadership at a Critical Juncture for “African Art” in America

The Long View: Leadership at a Critical Juncture for “African Art” in America

Deletions in DNAL1 Cause Primary Ciliary Dyskinesia Across North American Indigenous Populations

We report 4 cases of primary ciliary dyskinesia in unrelated indigenous North American children caused by identical, homozygous, likely pathogenic deletions in the DNAL1 gene. These shared DNAL1 deletions among dispersed indigenous populations suggest that primary ciliary dyskinesia accounts for more lung disease with bronchiectasis than previously recognized in indigenous North Americans.

Predicting current and future potential distribution of Cynaeus angustus (Coleoptera: Tenebrionidae) in global scale using the MaxEnt model

The larger black flour beetle, Cynaeus angustus (LeConte), as a fauna extending storage insect has rapidly spread globally from its native North America to other continents and countries in the last three decades. Based on the occurrence records and environmental variables, the current and future potential distribution on a global scale are predicted using MaxEnt model. The results showed that the current suitable area involved in China, South Korea, North Korea, Japan, Kazakhstan, Afghanistan, Australia, Argentina, the Republic of South Africa, North America, and most of European countries. Under future climate change scenarios, this insect is predicted to remarkably expand its fauna range to the north and Representative Concentration Pathways 8.5 (RCP8.5) provides the largest expansion, and the suitable area expands in the northern hemisphere whereas contraction in the southern hemisphere. The annual mean temperature, temperature annual range were the key factors influencing the potential distribution of C. angustus. The results of this study provide basic data for pest monitoring, early warning measures, and quarantine strategies in high-risk countries.

Review: Religion and Culture in Native America, by Suzanne Crawford O’Brien with Inés Talamantez

Review: <i>Religion and Culture in Native America</i>, by Suzanne Crawford O’Brien with Inés Talamantez