I N D I G E N OUS HEALT H
A ME RICA N INDI A N HE A LT H DIS PA RI T IE S
IN THE 21ST CENTURY
Two UND faculty publish world’s first book on health disparities in Indigenous populations “The COVID pandemic is a microcosm of the health disparities affecting American Indian/Alaskan Native peoples. SARSCoV-2 has hit poor, underserved, and vulnerable populations especially hard throughout the U.S., and persons of color are disproportionately affected.” So begin editors Donald Warne, M.D., M.P.H., and Cornelius “Mac” Dyke, M.D., in the first chapter of their new anthology American Indian Health Disparities in the 21st Century. Published by Cambridge Scholars on Indigenous People’s Day 2021, the first-of-its-kind book describes in often painful detail the disparities in both incidence and outcomes between the American Indian/Alaska Native (AI/AN) community and the rest of the population living in the United States—for the same conditions. The book was almost ready for release when COVID emerged last year to both delay publication and put a capstone on the physicians’ argument that for reasons historical, structural, and socioeconomic, AI/AN communities suffer poor health at much greater rates than non-Indigenous populations—and have been doing so for centuries. COVID, which has “struck AI/AN
Department of Surgery, was the database he’d built of such
communities particularly hard,” was only the latest example.
disparities in cardiac patients years ago.
“It is vitally important to identify and quantify health disparities
“When I came [to North Dakota] I noticed that we were taking
in the American Indian population so we can prioritize interventions and determine the best path forward to improve health outcomes,” said Warne, director of the UND School of Medicine & Health Sciences Indians Into Medicine (INMED) and public health programs. “I appreciate all of the co-authors for their efforts in developing this important resource.” 22
Part of the project’s genesis, added Dyke, chair of the School’s
North Dakota Medicine Holiday 2021
care of a lot of American Indian patients,” said Dyke, who reached out to Warne—who was then at NDSU in Fargo—for help. “It seemed to me that [Indigenous] patients were sicker and had more comorbidities by the time they got to me in the hospital for cardiac surgical problems. But I wanted to prove that, so I started a database where we looked at 1,200-plus
