Native Voice One Podcast

Fort Peck Tribal Health Department is a success story showing how a community can reduce diabetes rates. From left: Janene Padilla, Diabetes Coordinator Tessie LaMere. Cheryl Bighorn-Savior (RN), and Laurel Cheek.

Across America diabetes rates are exploding. Recent data show diabetes rates increasing in nearly all of the 2,992 counties in the U.S. And ten of those counties showed a decrease.

Here is the thing: Two of the ten counties showing a decrease in rates are found on Indian reservations, Fort Peck, Montana, and Rosebud, South Dakota.

Indian Health Service data also shows a slowing of the diabetes epidemic. From 2001-2005, there was a relative increase in age-adjusted diabetes prevalence in American Indian and Alaska Native adults of 2.2% per year on average. Contrast that with 2006-2013 numbers that show diabetes prevalence increased at a rate of 0.8% per year on average.

We hear all the time about how bad things are in Indian Country. But when you look at the spike in rates of diabetes across the country — it’s clear that Indian Country is showing what can be done to reverse a dangerous trend.

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Williams family photoMike Williams and his granddaughter Megan at a hunting and fishing rights rally last year in Anchorage.

Alaska's tribes are setting up a new system to give them a say over salmon.

On May 8, Twenty-eight tribes created the Kuskokwim River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission.  "The people of the Kuskokwim River are no longer satisfied with serving in an advisory role to state and fishery managers,"  says a news release from the new commission. "The message, Kuskokwim River tribes and rural residents desire a "meaningful role" in the management of fish and wildlife as it is expressed by Congress in section 801 (5) of the Alaska National Interests Lands Conservation Act, a role that until now most Western Alaskans agree has been meaningless."

I am convinced that co-management works. In Washington, Oregon and in Idaho there are salmon streams that would have gone extinct without a broader, more comprehensive management approach. Even small tribes hire people to work on habitat restoration or protecting baby salmon from predators. And it's hard to understate the importance of creating natural resource jobs because it gives Native people a new purpose, working on the land to improve wildlife.

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Photo by Mark Trahant

House and Senate negotiators have reached a deal on a budget resolution. Let’s be clear about this plan: It would require deep spending cuts in federal Indian programs.

The Associated Press reports the spending plan adds some $40 billion to the military and deeply cuts all domestic programs (which would include the Indian Health Service and the Bureau of Indian Affairs).

In past budget years, American Indian and Alaska Native programs have been able to get support from the appropriations committees, but in this cycle, there will be less flexibility because of the instructions in the budget. So Democrats say the Republican budget is both “insufficient and fundamentally flawed.”

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President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama have lunch with youth from the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe at We The Pizza/Good Stuff Eatery in Washington, D.C., Nov. 20, 2014. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

Today’s Native American youth are digital natives. Even on remote reservations or Alaska villages this is the digital native generation. They have grown up collecting more data on their phones — music, Facebook posts, video and photographs — than any other generation in history. They grow up connected to other Native youth across the country making deep digital friendships with dozens, even hundreds of other Native American youth. That’s new. It’s exponential.

This represents a digital opportunity for young people who live in a remote community. You can live anywhere in the world and produce videos for YouTube. Or write computer code. In 1971 a Unix computer had a couple hundred thousand lines of code. Today the software for a modern car has more than 90 million lines of code. That’s a lot of jobs for young people who have the right skills. And why not Generation Indigenous?

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Valerie Davidson, Commissioner for Alaska’s Department of Health and Social Services, makes the case for Medicaid Expansion.

Two states with large native populations, Montana and Alaska, continue to explore Medicaid expansion.

In Alaska the case for expansion is being made by Valerie Davidson, who’s Yupik, a longtime Native health advocate, and the former chair of a Medicare & Medicaid committee. In other words: She knows the process cold.

In Montana, the legislature has passed the legislation and Medicaid expansion will likely become law. The Kaiser Family Foundation estimates that one-third of IHS patients are uninsured and the cost to IHS for that care was at least $2.1 billion in 2013.

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Expansion of Medicaid in Alaska could bring millions of dollars into the Alaska Native health system. (Trahant photos)

Two states with large native populations are considering expanding Medicaid: Alaska and Montana. The decisions made in Juneau and Helena could add millions of dollars to improve Native health. In Washington state, Medicaid expansion has already increased revenues to Indian health clinics by 38 percent, adding some 14 million new dollars.

The total amount of Medicaid funding in Alaska is even bigger -- a potential pool of some $200 million.

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Participants at a First Alaskan Institute retreat look at what the next 10,000 years could be like.                  (Trahant photo)

What will Alaska look like in 10,000 years? Who will be here? What will they do? And, most important, what will preserved from the past kilennium? These are not easy questions. Even thinking about the next decade, let alone thousands of years, gets interrupted by every crisis that requires our attention. There is business to transact. Cell phones buzz. Unanswered emails compound. And, so, we think about the now, not the next.

The First Alaskans Institute recently gathered a group of people together for a week in Bethel to think about the future.  Elizabeth Medicine Crow said: “I think intuitively it makes a lot of sense for Native people. But I also think for most people it’s really hard to wrap their arms around, ‘what does that mean? For 10,000 years.’ It’s really not so much of a mystery for us because we can actually turn around and look directly at our past because we’ve been here for longer than that. We know that as stewards of our time, on behalf of our people, that we have at minimum a trajectory of that much time to look forward to.”

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The battle over federal spending is about to get ugly. Many Republicans made campaign promises to balance the budget within ten years. But other Republicans fear that cuts that deep would hurt the military.

American Indian and Alaska Native programs are a tiny fraction of federal spending, far less than one percent, but a new round of budget cuts will impact tribal communities across the country.

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A new coalition? A group of Republicans working with Democrats could be good news for Indian Country in this Congress. (Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images)

Every once in a while there is a melt down in tribal government. One side or the other refuses to budge and government stops. Then, after a while, that divide is healed and the work goes on.

That's exactly what happened in Congress. And it's messy. But a recent coalition, a majority vote, shows there is another way to move forward with Republicans and Democrats working together. If this holds, it's great news for Indian Country.

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Native American voters have been successful in recent years, helping to swing elections from Arizona to North Dakota. Just last year Alaska Native voters helped dump a hostile state governor and replaced him with Gov. Bill Walker, an ally, as well as electing Byron Mallott, a Tlingit leader, as the Lt. Governor.

But you want to know something really cool?

The demographic shift that reflects Native voting power is only beginning. What’s more the landscape is changing faster than expected and should bring about dramatic changes in states as “red” as Alaska and Oklahoma. A new report looks at the numbers and the results are stunning.

Read more here.

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