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My Father’s Stories: Remembering Oklahoma

Eva Marie Garroutte is the author of��Real Indians: Identity, Community, and the Survival of Native America. In this talk, Professor Garroutte blended her father’s stories of growing up in the Cherokee Nation of the 1930s with her own recent experiences as a tribal citizen working in the field of American Indian health.

“As an enrolled citizen of the Cherokee Nation, I’m concerned with making my research responsible not only to the values and interests of the academy, but also to those of American Indian communities. My current research focuses on American Indian health. My main project is funded by the National Institute on Aging and examines ethnic disparities in patient outcomes and their relationship to patterns of interaction between doctors and elder patients. I’m trying to determine whether providers vary their communicative behavior according to their American Indian patients’ cultural characteristics, and whether ethnically distinctive patients use distinctive communication patterns. The long-term goal of the project is to design health interventions that improve the medical care of American Indian elders.”