The changing landscape of health care provision to American Indian nations

Health service provision has been an aspect of indigenous-United States relationships for over two hundred years, yet America's First Peoples continue to suffer from poor health outcomes when compared with other racial or ethnic groups in the United States. An important change over recent decades is that more and more tribes are managing their own health care services—a realignment of administration and authority that has the potential to substantially improve American Indian and Alaska Native health in years to come. This paper describes the history of health care provision to federally recognized American Indian tribes. It continues by documenting the sparse research literature on tribal management of health care services and identifying information still needed to bring knowledge of this topic up-to-date. Five challenges for tribal management of health-care services that should be considered by tribes and policymakers in their health-care efforts and brought to bear on future research are discussed. By addressing both tribal control of health-care services and the role of tribes in changes to federally provided health care, this paper adds the lens of tribal sovereignty to current discussions of the history and policy context for American Indian and Alaska Native health

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander secondary students' experiences of racism

The issue of race and racism within varying Australian contexts is hotly contested politically and across a wide range of media narratives. These debates often center around questioning the very existence of racism, while simultaneously ignoring and denigrating the voices and lived experiences of minoritorized groups within Australia. This is particularly notable for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples who have been continually forced to navigate the oppressive nature of systemic racism throughout Australia’s “colonial history.” Drawing from the theoretical and methodological foundations of Indigenist research (Rigney, Wicazo Sa Rev 14(2):109–121, 1999; Martin, J Aust Stud 27(76):203–214, 2003) and Indigenous and First Nations standpoints on Historical Trauma (Brave Heart and DeBruyn, Am Indian Alsk Native Ment Health Res 8(2):56, 1998; Pihama et al. 2014), this paper will commit to a parallel mixed-methods design to explore how Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander secondary school students both understand and are impacted by racism today. These findings will be extended through an Indigenous quantitative methodology that will fully articulate the impact of racism over Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students’ well-being. Themes emerging from the interviews (n = 17) suggested the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students understood racism to be much more systematic and endemic (e.g., individual, teacher, community, politics, epistemic) than has been portrayed within previous literature. The quantitative analyses (n = 49) also revealed that a more complex understanding of racism is necessary to understand how racism, in its many guises, can negatively impact Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students today