Trailer for Don’t Get Sick After June: American Indian Healthcare

I recently watched two films on Native American health distributed by Third World Newsreel . The first is a 2000 documentary directed by Beverly Singer titled Diabetes: Notes from Indian Country. The film draws on the perspective of many people in painting a well rounded picture of this disease. It includes interviews with American Indian health professionals and their experiences engaging patients. One of the more memorable interviewees is nurse Lorelei De Cora who discusses a grant project which will examine the successfulness of the talking circle, a traditional method of education, as an educational and preventative tool. She notes the importance of taking a multifaceted (physical, mental and spiritual) approach to combating the disease. De Cora also provides an interesting oral history by noting other challenges to combating this disease. Before Housing and Urban Development (HUD) housing was introduced, she notes, her community used gardens to manage their nutrition in a healthier and self sufficient way.* HUD’s clustered housing and income-based pricing format seemed to encourage unemployment and reliance on the commodity system with all its health consequences. Other professional interviewees also provide information in an accessible format, while the community members interviewed are people living with the disease, or people who have helped loved ones combat it, or who give their impressions and anecdotes about this killer. In this sense, the film is yet another educational tool for the community to be used in conjunction with talking circles and other outreach methods. I just noticed that my posts typically end by noting that scholars or teachers or students studying a particular topic can avail themselves of one film or another. But in a recent post on diabetes, I express my interest in having American Indian communities themselves watch the films and pass them on to community members and I feel the same about this film.

The more recent 2010 documentary Don’t Get Sick After June: American Indian Healthcare, directed by Chip Richie, is an indictment of the federal government’s mismanagement of American Indian health care. While health care is a federal obligation under treaties between the U.S. government and sovereign American Indian nations, but insufficient funding has resulted in unacceptable conditions. Some reservations have healthcare only one week per month or provide outsourced ambulatory service that have in some cases arrived too late to save a life. In this very informative and integrated film, Richie attacks the issue as one of not only inadequate healthcare, but other systemic and foundational problems of the colonization project. This project ushered in several systems that have had a profoundly negative effect on these communities. One of these is the commodity system based on processed, canned, and food lacking nutritional value. Another was the boarding school system which extricated children of their traditional knowledge, spirituality, and languages and has had a negative effect on familial and community relations. The startling statistics presented in Don’t Get Sick After June – like the much higher rate of diabetes, homicide, and suicide in Native American communities – point to the negative consequences of the way that American Indians have been treated historically. Although the reality is stark, the film does point to positive changes. In some reservations, casino profits have been used to improve health care, including the re-incorporation of traditional medicine. I particularly appreciated Comanche interviewee Rodney T. Stapp (I had trouble removing the subtitles so I couldn’t tell his professional affiliation), who provided a succinct and articulate explanation of how medicine is approached in American Indian versus Western medicine. I also thought it was important that the documentary, while ensuring that the record is straight in terms of the government’s historical culpability, ends on a note of self determination. As I noted above, this film would be of interest to American Indians themselves who have a vested interest in fighting the lack of funding in their communities. This film would also be of interest principally to those studying healthcare and disease, but some segments could also be very interesting to those researching food, American Indian perceptions of the U.S. government, and women.

In a broader sense, this documentary is one that everyone in America can relate to from a nutritional perspective since the topic of obesity is regularly on the news and is being fought with such efforts as the First Lady’s Move campaign. The topic was brought home in a radio interview I recently heard with the director of A Place at the Table, a new documentary about the many millions of people in this country who suffer “food insecurity” every day. These people include those who technically eat, but they eat detrimental food void of nutritional value, which fills bellies and is cheap in the short term but has an expensive long term effect in disease and medical costs.

[*This was particularly interesting to me because in other films, like Good Meat, interviewees on the Pine Ridge Reservation refer to infertile land and their history as a hunting community as deterrents to farming. Perhaps De Cora is referring to Nebraska and not South Dakota, or perhaps in Good Meat, they were referring to pre-Contact days and not to the 20th century, as De Cora is.]

Diabetes: Notes From Indian Country trailer