Revolutionizing Women's Healthcare by Hannah Dudley-Shotwell

Author:Hannah Dudley-Shotwell [Dudley-Shotwell, Hannah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, General, Women's Studies, History, Women, Medical, Public Health, Gynecology & Obstetrics
ISBN: 9780813593043
Google: d9rKDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Published: 2020-03-13T04:04:22+00:00

Self-Help at the Native American Women’s Health Education Resource Center

In the late 1980s, Charon Asetoyer, a Comanche Indian from San Jose, California, with a background in health education and intercultural management, brought self-help to her community on the Yankton Sioux Reservation in South Dakota. Though she personally identified as a feminist, Asetoyer, like many other women of color and indigenous women, thought that mainstream feminism did not accurately reflect the diversity of women in the movement. “For Indigenous feminists, it did not make sense to separate women’s issues from larger community issues,” she said.114 In order to address the myriad difficulties that plagued indigenous women and their communities, Asetoyer developed a new self-help approach that took indigenous traditions and spirituality into account.

Native Americans on South Dakota reservations faced myriad health concerns. In South Dakota, over half of all domestic violence cases occurred in Native American households, though Native Americans made up less than 7 percent of the population. Seventy-five percent of Yankton Sioux Reservation residents over forty had diabetes. Eighty-five percent of the Native American adults on the reservation were unemployed. Only about a third of indigenous women in the state received regular prenatal care. The infant mortality rate in South Dakota was on the rise; there were 28.8 deaths per 1,000 births (more than double the national average). Three percent of all children on the reservation were born with fetal alcohol syndrome.115

At the heart of many feminist self-help efforts was a desire to prevent health problems before they occur; this was certainly the case with Asetoyer’s work. Native Americans in the United States still felt the effects of exploitation by European and American settlers spreading across the continent, seizing land, and wreaking havoc on Native civilizations. Asetoyer recognized that many of the health issues her community faced grew in part out of long-term effects of colonialism, including poor healthcare and alcohol abuse. In the mid-1980s, over 90 percent of the Yankton Sioux Reservation population relied for healthcare on the federally funded Indian Health Service (IHS), which existed as a result of treaty obligations that required the U.S. government to provide healthcare on reservations.116 Many people did not feel a sense of confidentiality and security when dealing with the federally funded IHS, so they were hesitant to take advantage of its services. Women were often especially loath to use IHS services for reproductive care, because they resented the intrusion of the federal government into practices long controlled by women.117 Among Plains tribes, older women had traditionally delivered children, then mentored girls through puberty and into adulthood. When those older women grew too old to care for themselves, the children they had delivered and mentored took care of them. When the IHS took over healthcare on reservations in the mid-twentieth century, many elderly women were pushed out of their role as midwives and purveyors of Native women’s health traditions and threatened with legal penalties if they failed to comply. This disruption in traditional care left many Native women without healthcare they could trust.

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