PhD Student Profile: Lauren White

LAUREN WHITE: “I GREW UP KNOWING THAT NATIVE PEOPLE WERE SCIENTISTS AND PROBLEM SOLVERS”

We go forth in sorrow, knowing that the wrong

has been done.”

So wrote Choctaw leader George W. Harkins in 1832, as the Choctaw faced removal from their ancestral lands in Mississippi out to Indian Territory, now the state of Oklahoma. Their path, over which they passed in three waves from 1831-1877, is called the Trail of Tears for the toll taken by disease, freezing weather and racial violence along the way. Lauren White is a joint PhD student in Social Work & Psychology. Her ideas for research and her calling came together when she heard about a project in which contemporary Choctaw women would retrace the Trail of Tears; researchers would study their sense of well-being before and after. “When I heard about this project,” says White, “all the parts of my world came together.” White was born in Idabel, Oklahoma (pop. 6,800), on the post-removal lands of the Choctaw Nation in the southeastern part of the state. “My mom homeschooled us,” she recalls. “We spent a lot of time outside in the garden, with animals and identifying plants. My grandfather was a farmer. In spring he sent us corn seeds; we put them in damp paper towels, noted the percentage that sprouted and reported back to him, so he