This past Wednesday, the First- Year Leadership in Health and Medicine Leader Scholar Community hosted an event called "Eliminating Stereotypes: Native American Culture and Medicine Through a New Lens." It examined Native American history, contributions and myths through a presentation by Claudia A. Fox Tree, a speaker and workshop presenter for the Massachusetts Center for Native American Awareness. The event was co-sponsored by the International Center for Ethics, Justice and Public Life, the Brandeis Pluralism Alliance and Brandeis AHORA!

Fox Tree began the event with a song, inviting the 30 or so audience members in attendance to participate in a traditional song and giving everyone rattles to use along with her drum.
"We are an oral tradition culture," she said, explaining why singing is so important to Native American culture. "We pass on things by talking about it, pass along the stories."

She then began by clarifying exactly who Native Americans are as "indigenous people of the Western hemisphere before 1492." She said that providing this definition was important because defining who the people are makes them more than simply stereotypes in people's minds.

After she made this distinction clear, Fox Tree began to speak about the contributions that Native Americans have made to modern life. When speaking of a group of people for which oppression is a big part of their story, she said that "it's really important to know what wonderful things that group did." She explained that an estimated 60 percent of food eaten in the world today is of Native American origin, such as potatoes, corn and much more. She also told of many medical advancements made by the native people, including treatments for malaria and optic surgeries, among others.

Following the positive contributions, Fox Tree described many of the issues surrounding Native American culture today. On reservations, where only about 22 percent of Native Americans live today, the mortality rate from alcohol abuse is 627 percent greater than that of all other races combined. As well, one in six teens attempt suicide and only about half even graduate from high school. Though she said that these statistics were about 10 years old, she said they had not changed much over the years.

Fox Tree spent the rest of the event talking about different stereotypes and myths about Native Americans and how they are still extremely prevalent and harmful.

Fox Tree had participants engage in a discussion of common stereotypes, beginning by speaking of several of the most common ones. She mentioned that some of the most common are that all Native Americans look the same, that they all wear the same clothing, that they are all violent warriors and that they live in teepees. She then had people engage in a free-association exercise, naming several words-including Winnebago, Pontiac and Redskins-and discussing what we associate with them and how that can be problematic. Winnebago and Pontiac are both Native American words that are more often associated with vehicles than with their original meanings, and Redskins refers to the tradition of scalping Native Americans, yet is now used to name a football team.

She then discussed the negative representation of Native Americans in popular culture as well, citing a statistic that 91 Massachusetts schools had "Indian" mascots or logos for their sports teams as of 2011. Fox Tree also told the group how they are rarely portrayed in film or on the news. From 1990 to 2000, there were 5,868 blockbuster films made, and only 12 of them included Native Americans at all, and they were often extremely stereotyped as savage or alcoholics. From 1990 to 1999, there were 175,889 news reports, and only 98 of them were about Native American. Of those 98, the majority of them were negative, speaking of problems with Native American culture rather than anything positive about it.

Fox Tree ended by presenting ways to help rectify these problems, primarily by becoming an ally and standing up against pejorative representations of Native Americans.

Organizer Irene Wong '17, a member of the Leadership in Health and Medicine Leader Scholar Community, said that the community chose to bring Fox Tree to campus because she said that there is such a low representation of Native Americans among the student body. "We want people to be more aware of the culture and... many stereotypes that we don't normally think of," Wong said in an interview with the Justice.
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