An Indigenous Imagination? Illness and Meaning-Making Among Urban Indians

• In Event: Decolonial Knowledge(s)

Abstract

While population health research documents consistent health disadvantage and short life expectancies among American Indians/ Alaska Natives (AIAN), seldom sociological research centers AIAN perspectives on their own health. This paper asks: How do AIANs make meaning of their health? I leverage interview data with 38 Urban Indians (American Indians residing in metropolitan areas) to answer this question. By incorporating situational analysis (Clarke, Washburn, and Friese 2022) with an Indigenous methodological lens this paper examines Urban Indian meaning-making of their health and wellbeing. I present data in a “vignette” style to portray the richness of Indigenous respondents’ stories that also captures the general themes found within the larger sample. I found that when describing their health, respondents shared accompanying stories and situated their health within the context of their entire lives, their parents, and tribal histories. Namely, to make sense of their vulnerable health by tying it to macro-level social processes such as 1) the current material, cultural, and political landscape and 2) “deep” history and settler colonialism. Rather than a “sociological imagination” (Mills 1959), I argue that Indigenous peoples have an “Indigenous imagination”. Indigenous people tie their health to lived experience shaped by the broader historical, political, and social fabric that is shaped by existing as Indigenous Peoples under settler colonial power.

Author

• Kiana Kristine Wilkins, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign