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Cure the women and you cure the tribe (continued)
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| McCormick and booth at the Indian Health Services facility in Crow Agency. |
Hurdles
McCormick, with her savvy and leadership, and Christopher, with her science and drive, recruited and trained those Crow women who were already natural mentors in the tribe. Their work would be quiet and steady, done in grocery stores, around kitchen tables, in the waiting room of Head Start -- places where women met and talked.
From the beginning, the Messenger mission has been to educate Crow women about early detection of cervical cancer -- important, because according to the most recent data from the Indian Health Service, rates of cervical cancer mortality were significantly higher for American Indian and Alaska Natives than in all races combined. Additionally, rates were particularly higher for Northern Plains Native women.
Perhaps the largest hurdle to increasing cervical cancer screenings on the Crow has been a mistrust of the Indian Health Service, which occurs on many reservations. Messengers combat that fear by volunteering to be in the room during examinations to explain and comfort wary women. They drive women to their checkups and find programs that pay for checkups if women choose to use private health facilities.
"Messengers for Health has been a fundamentally important program in terms of education of the Crow people " said Dr. Deborah Sogge-Kermani, a family physician at the Indian Health Service in Crow Agency. Sogge-Kermani, one of about a dozen physicians at the facility, has worked on the reservation for eight years and has been a member of the Messengers' advisory board since its inception.
"(Messengers) has worked particularly well in terms of empowering (Crow) women to take responsibility for their own health."
Last year the Messengers set education of the physicians and staff at Indian Health Service as their annual goal. The group thought that if the doctors and other providers understood Crow viewpoints toward illness, health and healing, they would be more effective in treating them. The result was a video, "Medical People Take Good Care of Us," that explained the Crow use of chanting and praying, smudging and the tobacco culture. Produced by Gene Brodeur, now retired from MSU and Montana Public Television, and Eric Chaikin, a graduate of MSU's Science and Natural History Filmmaking program, hundreds of Crow showed up at the DVD's debut in May.
One-to-one
Perhaps the greatest accomplishment of the program is its use of woman-to-woman communication. This traditional way of sharing information is important in a community where newspapers, television, radio and Internet use is inconsistent. The technique soon may be expanded statewide.
| "Messengers has worked particularly well in terms of empowering Crow women to take responsibility for their own health." --Dr. Deborah Sogge-Kermani |
Christopher and her MSU colleagues, Linda Hyman, Sara Young and Mike Babcock, learned this fall that they will receive a $6.5 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to expand the Messengers' brand of community and campus partnership work to the rest of Montana's reservations. The grant will support a Center for Community Based Research for Native Communities at MSU and link Montana researchers with communities in areas of health interest that the communities desire. Christopher would like to use part of that grant to develop a program for men's health on the Crow Reservation.
The additional funds will help Christopher train more MSU students in community-based participatory research. This summer 11 students, mostly Native American, interned with Messengers. Vanessa Watts, a graduate of MSU who has worked with Messengers since its inception, is nearly done with her Ph.D. at Harvard University School of Public Health.
"We are overcoming barriers, I'm certain of that," McCormick said as she set up yet another booth at the Indian Health Service facility in Crow Agency. "Our program has developed trust. Women can talk about (cancer) now. We started something good here. Now we need to do more work."
For more information on Messengers for Health, check out our Web Exclusives.
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