- [Rita] In the season finale of the Native Report Show, we check back with the Native Medical student we introduced to you last season, whose goal is to become a physician and make a difference in Indian country and beyond.

- [Ernie] And we share about a program that grants funding to support the many native peoples out there working to make a positive difference in their communities.

- [Rita] Plus, we learn more about the Oneida Nation Museum that hopes to share accurate stories of its people, ultimately to promote the dignity and respect of the Oneida people and culture.

- We also learn what we can do to lead healthier lives and hear from our elders.

- That was the beginning of all of our Ojibwa practices, I'll say (traditional flute music) - [Announcer] Production for Native Report is made possible by grants from the Blandin Foundation.

Anishinabe Fund and Alexandra Smith Fund, in support of native American treaty rights administered through the Duluth Superior Area community foundation, and the generous support from viewers like Jack and Sharon Kemp.

(upbeat instrumental music) - Welcome to Native Report, and thanks for tuning in to the final episode of season 17.

I'm Rita Karppinen.

- Thanks, Rita.

I'm Ernie Stevens.

In our final episode, we're exploring how philanthropic work and giving back to communities are constant in Indian country.

We'll highlight some natives looking out for the welfare of people, land, and beyond.

- Many believe native representation in medicine is crucial to combating public health disparities among native peoples.

In the last season in Native Report, we met several Native Medical students and followed them during their journeys into the challenging industry.

We checked back in with one of the medical students working to become a physician as she was wrapping up her psych rotation at Minneapolis Medical Center.

(mellow instrumental music) - You don't have to be a genius to go to medical school.

You just have to be persistent really.

A lot of people who would make great doctors are often, you know, just feel like it's too long of training, or it'd be too difficult when, you know, they would be a good fit.

Medical school itself has a lot of ups and downs, and everyone kind of will struggle here and there.

I'm Jenny and I'm a third year medical student.

Like I said before, I'm from Idaho.

I went to my undergrad there at Idaho State, and then I went on to work on my reservation at a clinic there.

The Shoshone-Bannock Community Health Center.

I was interacting with my community and seeing and helping elders and children.

I feel like every day it was a small nudge, you know, telling me that this was the right path for me, and kind of motivated me as well to go get my Master of Public Health.

So I went to the East Coast for that.

I did a one year program at Dartmouth, and then applied to medical school during that year, and I ended up at the Duluth campus.

So right now, I still have all of third year rotations to get through and then fourth year as well is filled with more electives and also applying to residency program.

And then probably for me, it'd be about three or four more years of extra training before I'm done with all of it.

Here at Fairview I'm working on a team, Blue 22.

It's like a psychiatry unit that's inpatient.

My day mostly consists of working with the resident and another medical student directly, and then later in the morning or early afternoon I will round with the whole team, including our attending physician.

In the afternoon, sometimes I'll have like, ILT time for assignments I have as a student, or just doing more research on, you know things for our patients.

There's really such a need, you know, everywhere for more primary care physicians, as well as psychiatrists, and we see that need, you know, even tenfold in native communities.

Our school is prestigious.

I think we're the second in the country for graduating Native American medical students, and Dr. Mary Owen is the head of the Center of American Indian and Minority Health.

And that's one of her big initiatives.

Definitely less than 1% of the medical students identify as American Indian.

And just from my own experience, you'd be lucky to have one Native American medical student in a class, and so it's really important for medical schools to just help address that need.

There's a lot of different health disparities that our communities face and seeing that first hand in my community, and then in other communities that I visited, was definitely a motivation factor for me.

A lot of our clinics and hospitals are very underfunded.

They are understaffed.

There's just a lot of issues with access to care in general.

Having more native American medical students, trainees, and physicians can really help address that need.

(mellow piano music) Just give more culturally competent care really, 'cause we are such a unique population.

And some of the things, you know, historically that our people have been through, there's this distrust of the medical profession in general.

Just kind of the whole history of colonization, and these different institutions, and government agencies that, you know, have caused a lot of pain for our people, including the boarding school era.

There were a lot of reports of even sterilization of Native American women, even into the seventies.

There's just a lot of history there, and I think a lot of people don't really always appreciate.

It's not always necessary to have someone of the same culture to be treating someone, but it definitely helps in a lot of ways.

And I know physician turnover is also a really big issue in a lot of tribal clinics and hospitals, so having someone maybe that's from that community is a good solution to someone that maybe would stay for longer than just a few years.

(upbeat instrumental music) It is generally four years of undergrad.

I mean a fair amount of people end up doing some some sort of Master degree, or like maybe a post-bac, because medical school is just so competitive.

And most people I talk to quite of maybe 10 to even 30, 'cause it can be so competitive, can be very expensive too.

That's something that is a real barrier to a lot of people applying to medical school, especially you know, underrepresented minorities.

Once you matriculate, it's generally the four years of medical school and then you apply to your residency and complete your training that way, and it can be anywhere between like three to like, seven or eight years depending on the specialty.

And if you choose to do fellowships also on top of that.

(upbeat instrumental music continues) My main advice would just be to not give up.

- Now that we've heard from Jennifer, here's another update.

Last season we also introduced to you Jaja Green Sky.

The last we shared is she was accepted into UMD's medical school.

Now we're learning she has put her start in schooling on hold as she focuses on being a new mother to twins and participating in traditional practices with them.

She's hoping to start medical school in the future when the time is right for her and her family.

- We spoke with the Northland Foundation's Senior Program Officer who works heavily with the foundation's Maada'ookiiwin program, which means distribution in Ojibwa.

The program is focused on engagement and grant support for indigenous people and communities in Northeastern, Minnesota.

We also hear from one of the foundations general grant recipients using the funding for community sobriety feasts.

That same grant recipient is also a recipient of a Maada'ookiiwin Grant for youth singing practices and hand drum making.

(mellow instrumental music) (tribal chanting music) - We have the drum.

There's always a lot of laughs.

It's a good, sober event.

(tribal chanting music continues) - Hello.

Yeah.

Oh, hi.

How are you?

- How are you?

- Good.

- Our drum is alive, and by being near that drum and having access to being near that drum, it can change how you see the world.

It can change how you interact in the world.

(tribal chanting music continues) - Food always brings everybody together, you know?

We have a smudge.

Right now we're in midst of a pandemic with people losing their lives, and that's set forth what we do here today with the sobriety feast.

(tribal chanting music) We get many different from people that come through the doors, you know, being sober from one day to plenty years.

While we were in the pandemic, we applied for the grant and got the grant, and we were able to do a little more things as far as food, and supplies, and small incentives for speaking.

And Duluth itself has a large native population.

I see a lot of people struggling with the pandemic, alcohol and drugs, and that's another reason why we step forward to start this.

It's a hard thing to watch.

You know, there's a lot of young people that are losing their lives over the the pandemic.

In this community alone, it's quite often more than it should be.

- They embed cultural values into the work that they do, so it is really important to recognize Native philanthropy and people who are invested in that.

Northland Foundation distributes grants to support, you know, some basic areas.

We do children, youth, and families, community, individual and community wellbeing.

And Maada'ookiiwin is a new initiative that really focuses on indigenous community.

There was a study that showed that less than 1% of grants go to native organizations nationally.

So Northland started to track data internally and found that they were distributing about 2%, but wanted to increase it, and now it's about 9% of grants, but at the same time wanted to really learn and listen with the native community to find out like what the needs are.

We have a Maada'ookiiwin board that is made of, it's all indigenous led.

So they set the priority areas, and it goes anything from strengthening culture, to language revitalization, to grassroots community response.

Our culture really has been fragmented in that some families or some communities really have retained cultural practices and they have access, but what I see is that it's really been disrupted across you know, in different places.

The word maada'ookiiwin, it means the distribution, and it's an Ojibwa word.

It's a long history of different, I would say federal policies and historic events of why we don't have as many resources right now.

Native people, if you look at the data, we are under resourced.

Like, we don't have high incomes for the most part and yet here you have a community that when they see a need they pick up and they do something.

- I've went, I've been through treatment.

I've been through, you know, things like that myself, so never be afraid to ask for help.

(traditional drumming music) (mellow instrumental music) - I'm Bunny Jaakola.

My real name is Julia.

There's no connection to the name Bunny, but it's something I've had since I was born.

I've lived on this land for my whole life, actually.

- Bunny, can you tell us about growing up as Ojibwa?

- My grandpa and grandma were from the boarding school era, and especially my grandpa didn't want his kids to really become Indian, so all of the kids went to public school in Coquet and we were able to, when grandma and grandpa would go make rice and come home, we were able to watch them do process, but we couldn't do any of it.

As I was learning more about being Ojibwa and finding the the way we were raised, it just didn't fit right.

But when my oldest daughter took a Indian Studies class at St. Scholastica, one of her courses involved talking to an elder.

So she talked to my grandpa, and that was the first time.

And that was about 1973-74.

The first time that we ever had grandpa talking about being Indian.

And he did such a great job that I had him and grandma come to the Coquet public school art class, and he, they began to teach these kids in the art class.

That was the beginning of all of our Ojibwa practices, I'll say, because we were bombarded with information then.

True, experiential Information that we would've never known.

(mellow instrumental music) - We take a walking tour of the Oneida Nation Museum to learn about the importance of preserving artifacts for the Oneida nation's peoples and beyond.

The Wisconsin museum was opened in 1979.

- The mission of the museum is to preserve, protect, maintain and interpret the Oneida traditions, artifacts, language, customs, and history; ultimately to promote the dignity and respect of the Oneida people and culture.

(mellow instrumental music) - Indigenous people need to learn about who they are from who they were.

The importance of the museum is so that people from being children onto the elders can come and experience the history, the culture, and the traditions of the Oneida Nation from an Oneida Nation perspective.

So there's a repository of items here that have been donated and collected that are actually Oneida artifacts, Oneida memories.

A very dear friend of mine made these corn husk dolls and she was amazing.

And to see her legacy here today shows me that it wasn't forgotten, and one of the stories about the corn husk dolls is they have no face.

I have seen this exhibit, the corn husk doll, for the very first time, and it's amazing.

It represents the chiefs of the Oneida from the Bear, the Wolf, and the Turtle clans.

So something that's important is people perceive a chief as one ruler who is over everybody, and the Oneida had several chiefs.

They had medicine chiefs, they had war chiefs, they had peace chiefs.

So the chiefs all served a different purpose and they were selected by the women of the tribe.

Our clan mothers were the most revered, respected, knowledgeable, and powerful women amongst the Oneida Nation and many of the Iroquois, and the Hoid and Shoshone tribes.

So the clan mothers selected the chiefs.

They appointed them based upon their virtues, their values, what they seen exhibited as good, strong men who would see the best interest of the tribe.

Now, if a chief fell aside and no longer held the best interest, or no longer acted in the manner that was responsible of a chief, the clan mothers could take their horns away.

She could dethrone him.

Had we had women making decisions in the US history, we may not have gone to war as often.

We may have found peace and we may have been able to build bridges with the countries rather than build walls.

- The collection was started by the first director of the museum, Florence Jones.

She had items from her personal collection that she used to start the acquisition of museum artifacts.

From then we received artifacts and various items pertaining to Oneida culture and history from the community.

Since the 1980s we had six major acquisitions, and those acquisitions encompass now over 6,000 artifacts.

We have Oneida language incorporated within our exhibits, within our text panels, and our interpretive content.

As much as we possibly can incorporate them, we try to.

(man speaking Oneida) - [Female Narrator] Long ago, before there was any land here, there was water all over.

The only things were the creatures that lived in the water, and the birds that flew up the waters.

Now further above, there was land which is called the Sky World.

And there were people living there, but these people had supernatural powers, but she could not hold on and she fell through.

As she fell through, the birds and the water animals saw light through the hole that was made, and they could see something falling.

So the birds went up to see what it was and they noticed it was a woman from the Sky World.

- These are some of the accessories also from our collection.

And this would include silver work, as well as raised bead work.

We are known for our raised bead work in the 1850s in in New York state.

Raised bead work actually developed as a result of the tourism trade at Niagara Falls.

And so this art form is one of the art forms that we took, brought with us here to Wisconsin, and our Oneida people today still foster that art form, and they're getting better and better in, you know, so we have examples of that in our collection.

These are some of the wampum belts that we have.

Again, these are replica wampum belts, so they're not the real thing or the original thing.

And the Hiawatha Belt is representative of the five nations at the time that accepted the Great Law of Peace, which is the oral constitution that the Hodi and Shoshone Confederacy abides by.

The US constitution is modeled after the Confederacy.

Most of the founding fathers were very well aware of how the Confederacy was governed at the time that they were looking at how to form a union.

And there is several writings from Benjamin Franklin and other founding fathers stating that they sat in on these councils and watched how we conducted ourselves in the Confederacy, and so they took examples of that.

I believe there was a house concurrent resolution in 1988 that acknowledged, the United States acknowledged our contribution to the formation of the United States, because of that.

The physical collection also is a representation and solidifies our sovereignty as a nation here.

And so I think the physical collection serves as a reminder that we're unique and we're separate from other nations, but we, you know, we also have our own culture, and our own history, and what sets us apart from other tribal nations.

- I like to think that everybody has a history, and each group, rather they be Oneida, of another tribe, or perhaps they're Finnish, or Polish, or Swedish, or French.

They have a history.

They have a country.

Most of them have a country they can go back to where they can get their language, and they can see their history, and they can see what their ancestors are.

United States, this is our home.

This is the only place we can go back to.

When our history fails and when our history begins to fade, so do the Oneida people and I think you'll find with most indigenous groups, there's something that is in their prophecies that say maybe someday we won't exist as we had in the past.

So, for all these other cultures and groups to come here and see this while it's here, and while we're here, they have to appreciate.

The Oneidas are not just a casino.

The Oneidas are not just dancers with feathers and jingles and bright colors once or twice a year.

The Oneidas are people with a heart, and a history, and a family foundation.

And they had land, and they had so many things that contributed to where we are today in terms of our cultural practices, our agricultural practices, our legends, our histories our stories, our food sustenance; all those things contribute to today's society in one way or another, and this museum and other places like this help that public realize the value of the Oneida Nation.

- The museum provides accurate information about the Oneida and the Iroquois culture, history, and nationhood.

Visitors can have a unique and enlightening experience to be valued by all ages for the next seven generations.

(upbeat instrumental music) - I tested positive for COVID-19.

I've had two doses of the Moderna vaccine.

My wife, Ivy, and I have been careful to wear masks and keep our social distance.

Healthcare workers are naturally at higher risk for infectious diseases.

Hand washing and personal protective equipment are mandatory for everyone doing patient care during the pandemic.

Our clinic does weekly COVID-19 surveillance testing of all employees to catch infections before they spread.

In spite of that, I tested positive for COVID-19.

This is called a breakthrough infection.

I didn't have any symptoms, but with a documented infection had to isolate at home for 10 days.

I unknowingly exposed some good friends, my wife's grandparents, and some of my family I hadn't seen in a long time.

Luckily, all were vaccinated and all of them tested negative for COVID-19.

Keeping distant from my wife was tricky, and I wouldn't want to repeat that experiment.

I was doing hospital work the week before.

I had several patients with serious COVID-19 infections on ventilators in the intensive care unit.

I saw them every day and I was careful with personal protective equipment and hand washing in the hospital.

I was in the ICU for a brief time each day.

The ICU nurses spend long shifts and sometimes double shifts with patients who are very sick.

Having COVID-19, when I know what it's capable of, really made me think about what is truly important.

I've seen how sick people can get and I see what it does to their families.

No one went to medical school or nursing school with plans for working in a global pandemic.

I'm grateful to do what I do.

I'm grateful to work side by side with people who went to school to make everyone's lives better.

I'm grateful for the COVID-19 vaccine.

Preventing severe illness and hospitalization is what it was made to do, and that's exactly what it did with me.

The vaccine protected those people most important to me.

Remember to call an elder.

They've been waiting for your call.

And while you're at it, thank a nurse.

I'm Dr. Arne Vainio and this is Health Matters.

(upbeat instrumental music) - If you missed a show or wanna catch up online, find us at nativereport.org and follow us on Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram for behind the scene updates.

And drop a comment on social media if you enjoyed the show.

- Thanks for spending time with your friends and neighbors from across Indian country, and that's a wrap for season 17 of Native Report.

I'm Ernie Stevens - And I'm Rita Karppinen.

We'll see you back for the next season of Native Report.

(upbeat instrumental music)