UMN Morris Professor Heather Peters will never forget the day she told Teresa Peterson, a colleague with whom she has since come to have a more than 14-year research partnership, that many health professionals consider Native identity as a risk factor for poor health. Peterson, a member of the Upper Sioux Community, was taken aback.
“It blew my mind,” says Peterson.
It’s true that many Native communities have higher rates of some health afflictions: obesity and diabetes, coronary heart disease, and substance abuse. But Peters says the way in which Western medicine often frames these issues, coupled with one-size-fits-all research and medical approaches that disregard Native culture, has ingrained such a negativity around Native health that Western-based measurement tools and interventions may very well be part of the problem.
“So you get this stereotype that if you're Native you're going to be overweight, you're going to have diabetes,” says Peters. “That leads to learned helplessness. The idea that … why do anything if there's nothing I can do that's going to make a difference?”
It’s what is called an external locus of control, the idea that your destiny is predetermined by outside forces you have no control over, which then exacerbates unhealthy behaviors. And there is plenty of research that clearly links an external locus of control to poor health outcomes. For example, higher levels of external locus of control predict higher levels of stress, depression, intake of junk food, substance abuse, and physical illness.
Ultimately, says Peters, it leads to what she and Peterson call the “cycle of Native health disparities.” And so they decided to do something about it through an approach that views Native culture as an asset.
In about 2010, Dakota Wicohan (DW), a Native nonprofit organization near the Upper and Lower Sioux Communities that is dedicated to preserving the Dakota language and Dakota ways of life, began partnering with Peters on work to disrupt the cycle of health disparities.
Peterson was the director of DW at the time. She and other DW staff wanted to evaluate whether DW’s cultural programming was improving community members’ “wicozani”—a Dakota term for overall health and wellbeing.
The result was the creation of the Wicozani Instrument, a nine-item self-report tool that measures mental, physical, and spiritual health from an Indigenous worldview, as well as the perceived importance of those measures to an individual's quality of life.
What they found after thorough study was that the Wicozani Instrument worked. By focusing on overall health and wellbeing, rather than on ailments and sickness, individuals had the space to consider what health looks and feels like and to take control of their own health.
An ongoing collaboration
Today, the UMN Morris collaboration with DW has resulted in the development of five additional Indigenous measures which have been used by Native and non-Native entities, says Peters, including doctors, school counselors, psychologists, and other health professionals.
In some sense it is a reflection that, “Western science is finally catching up to Indigenous perspective and thought and knowledge,” says Peterson.
Peterson is also grateful for UMN Morris’s role in the community. “It isn't just to be this isolated institution,” says Peterson. “They're there to be in service to the community and to the people, and especially with its history as a former [American Indian] boarding school. And so having that commitment to serving Indigenous and Native populations and communities, I think, is a good model for other universities to look at.”
UMN Morris Chancellor Janet Schrunk Ericksen agrees.
“Professor Peters sees a need and figures out what she could do—and what we could do as a campus—to address it. Her deft blending of cultural humility and academic expertise provides an extraordinary model for responsible and effective research and teaching.”