The S-Word: Discourse, Stereotypes, and the American Indian Woman

What’s in a name? Plenty when it comes to the ability of words to establish identity. In 2005 in Oregon, for example, 142 land features carried the name ‘‘squaw’’—Squaw Gulch, Squaw Butte, Squaw Meadows, and Squaw Flat Reservoir (U.S. Geological Survey, 2008). This article examines the term squaw, its presentation in popular culture, and how this framing constructs Native womanhood in the public imagination. Two primary representations are revealed in the discourse defining squaw: as sexual punching bag and as drudge. The opinions and attitudes of reporters, citizens (Indian and non-Indian), government officials, agencies, and tribal representatives are included as reflected in journalistic accounts of the land form debate about the use and meaning of the label squaw. The psychological impact of this racial and sexual slur has a significant negative impact on quality of life, perceptions, and opportunities for Native American women (ethnostress) due to the consistent use and reification of the squaw stereotype through more than 400 years of U.S. history. This article is written as part of a larger body of work that argues for an expansion of Schroeder and Borgerson’s (2005, 2008) representational ethics of images to include words

In: Biomarkers in Inflammatory Bowel Diseases

Adverse drug reactions (ADRs) result in morbidity and mortality as well as placing a significant financial burden on health-care resources. In Europe and North America, they are responsible for approximately 6% of all hospital admissions. Patients with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) commonly experience adverse drug reactions. Whilst the explosion of new IBD therapies has improved patient outcomes, ADRs remain a significant challenge and for many drugs the major cause of discontinuation. Most ADRs cannot currently be reliably predicted prior to starting treatment, and therefore clinical and laboratory monitoring, which is expensive and inconvenient for patients, is recommended for the duration of treatment. An ability to accurately predict an individual’s risk of developing an ADR prior to treatment may allow the dose to be altered or the drug avoided in at-risk individuals. Pharmacogenetic biomarkers are particularly attractive for the purpose of predicting ADRs as they are present at diagnosis and unaffected by disease phenotype, disease activity or other treatments. Discovery of these biomarkers has been made possible by the increasing availability of reliable, robust and cheap high throughput genotyping and sequencing platforms. In this chapter, we describe several inflammatory bowel disease ADR pharmacogenetic biomarkers, as well as the process of biomarker discovery and the barriers which hinder the successful ‘bench to the bedside’ translation of these tests into routine clinical care