Indigenous Public Health Summit held at Salish Kootenai College

PABLO — Healthcare workers from across the state attended the Indigenous Public Health Summit on Wednesday at Salish Kootenai College to address critical public health issues Indigenous communities face.

“It’s important to recognize Indigenous cultural strengths and Indigenous cultural knowledge in public health,” said Dr. Amy Stiffarm who is the director of the American Indian initiative at Healthy Mothers, Healthy Babies.

Dr. Stiffarm, who focuses her work on integrating cultural practices into Western medicine, says addressing cultural practices already in place in Native communities will help healthcare workers serve tribal people.

“Approaching public health inequities and these disparities that you hear so much, about approaching it with that Indigenous knowledge and recognizing those strengths, you’re automatically going to be able to see like what’s working in that community already,” Dr. Stiffarm said. “What is the power within the culture that they practice in that community? And how can that strength be harnessed and utilized to combat these inequities?”

She says during her time in healthcare research she found a lack of accurate data for Indigenous communities and that often meant ineffective health care for indigenous populations. But with new partnerships, providers are learning how to care for Indigenous populations holistically.

Western Montana AHEC director Amy Matheny says cultural knowledge falls short for healthcare providers and wants to learn more.

“This is just such an incredible opportunity for us to learn and...make a space for those voices for this summit to be Indigenous, led to really help us understand both for those that are here as Indigenous public health and health care practitioners,” Matheny said.

Many Indigenous healthcare workers like Misty Pipe are welcoming back cultural care for their communities, especially when it comes to childbirth.

She works as an Indigenous doula, giving birth is a ceremonial time for the mother which was a common practice for Indigenous mothers pre-colonialism.

"There's a lot of things that doulas help kind of culturally connect this process between birthing and the natural process of it,” Pipe said.

Pipe says building a relationship with the mother before and after birth can help craft a health care plan that’s more traditional in ways that were prohibited during the boarding school era

"Boarding school really hurt...people,” Pipe said. “I pinpointed down to boarding schools all the time because so much was lost and so much shame was brought to our people for those things. So, if we can bring it back and it's still there, it's still there.”

"It’s understanding that these, that these people -- Indigenous people -- have different perspectives and that it’s new, and it’s different and it’s innovative to the Western world. And that impact that that can have is really important,” Dr. Stiffarm said.