A Conversation with Johns Hopkins Center for Indigenous Health
This interview is part of The Daisy Chain Spotlight: Glasshouse’s feature series on the nonprofit beneficiaries of the Daisy Chain Fields music festival.
If you’re excited about the music and messaging behind the festival, we encourage you to read more about these incredible organizations and the vital work they do for women and their communities.
This interview was conducted with Melissa Walls, Co-Director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Indigenous Health. Responses have been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Glasshouse: Daisy Chain Fields, Olivia Rodrigo's new all-women festival, just named the Center for Indigenous Health (CIH) as one of its beneficiary organizations. First off, congratulations. For music fans who might be reading this and not know exactly what your organization is or who you are, can you give a little bit of background?
CIH: The Center for Indigenous Health is administratively housed in academia at Johns Hopkins University, so a lot of us in the center are faculty members or researchers. Over 80% of us are Indigenous community members ourselves, so we live all over, most of us on or near our tribal lands.
The work we do is all in the spirit of our vision, which is thriving Indigenous communities worldwide. A lot of the efforts are about healing the harms associated with colonization and the attacks that we’ve experienced on our peoples, our culture, and our children. We’re uplifting Indigenous strengths to address all kinds of issues from maternal child health to the opioid epidemic to diabetes.
Glasshouse: I read that the center has been around for over thirty years. What do you think has stayed the same in that time and what do you think has changed?
CIH: We’re celebrating our thirty fifth anniversary this year, and I think what’s the same about the center is that the origins of the center were all grounded in relationship. For Indigenous health work or any kind of work with Native communities, relationships are the foundation. Everywhere we are, we’re in relationship with the land, the peoples, the communities. The secret sauce of the center is maintaining those relationships and trying to nourish them and pay attention to them.
Another constant that I would say is the center is extremely entrepreneurial and extremely innovative. I credit one person in our center, Allison Barlow, who’s a non-Native ally, who is just always encouraging us to think big and to remember that the resources exist in this world, there’s abundance. It’s just that we as Native communities don’t always have access to them. And so opening doors like this campaign, this concert, and Olivia Rodrigo’s vision for what this could be is about abundance. There’s plenty to go around and we should celebrate and uplift each other.
What has changed is so much. We’ve grown a ton. What started as a center of maybe 30 people is now over 350, and what started as a center grounded in infectious disease work has expanded to include behavioral health, mental health, maternal child health, and training programs. There have been all sorts of innovations in how we work, like including elders and relationships with these elders who are figures within our center that we can go to for help, whether it be guidance on a project or conflict resolution.
Glasshouse: You mentioned that a vast majority of your team lives and works within their own communities. Why does that matter so much specifically when working in public health?
CIH: The old models or what we might call the “conventional” models of science pretend to be objective and have what we call a veil of objectivity, this idea of separating ourselves from our subjects. That is so antithetical to a relational approach, and so I really do think that Indigenous health research is leading the field.
We’re demonstrating how being in community and relationship shows that members often have the answers to address the issues. They have so many smart ideas. They just maybe don’t always have the resources and, sometimes, it’s just about bringing the right people together at the right place at the right time.
What we preach is a place based approach. Let us stay home. Let us stay in our communities. Why do we have to all move to the East Coast? We all earned these fancy degrees or we got this specialized training in public health. Why should we take it away from where we live? Let’s keep it at home.
For me, as an Ojibwe person, to be able to be on my ancestral homelands, to be able to be immersed in our culture and our ceremonies, it would be a lot harder if I had to move away. I would lose some of that identity, which is part of the acculturation process that we’re trying to mitigate. So it’s practice what you preach.
Glasshouse: The center often talks about the idea of “braiding” Indigenous cultural strengths with Western science, which I think is a really interesting approach. How do you go about that and what does that end up looking like?
CIH: Western scientific methods, things like randomized controlled trials, quantitative methodologies, even qualitative methodologies, all of those things are important tools, but they’re not the only tools. Unfortunately, over the past several hundred years, humans have really narrowed our lens of what we count as legitimate knowledge. As a center, part of our purpose is remembering that Indigenous ways of knowing might look a little different, but that doesn’t mean they’re not legitimate.
We’ve been scientists in our own rights forever. We have incredible teachings and oral traditions that have been passed down for generations. The approach is really about decentering Western thought as the only way of knowing and recentering Indigenous ways of knowing because I don’t think we could ever overcorrect. There’s plenty of stuff going on there in the Western scientific world, and it’s a helpful tool, but it’s not the only tool.
The planet is really sick right now. And there's so much we know from our original instructions about how to be well with animal beings, with the planet itself. That may sound a little mystical, but it's not meant to be. It's very practical.
Glasshouse: What do you think that the traditional Western public health community gets wrong when it goes in and tries to work with Indigenous communities without any regard to their approach?
CIH: So many things. It could be a whole other conversation. One major shift that people new to Indigenous health sciences quickly recognize is that we take a strengths-based approach.
In conventional biomedical health sciences and public health, we often center disease or pathology. There’s a deficit narrative. It’s a prescriptive approach and it involves these experts coming in, telling you what the problems are, and showing you your risk factors. Some of that can be helpful, but I look at many of the major public health problems, whether it be substance use problems, despair and mental health issues, or cardiovascular disease, and they’re getting worse. The root problem is, in part, that we forget to celebrate and uplift strengths.
One small concrete example are adverse childhood experiences or ACEs. They’re so important because they predict our health over our lifespan, but a counter narrative is: what are the positive childhood experiences? In Indigenous science, we frame early childhood experiences in terms of cultural strengths. For example, when Native kids are raised by an extended family, which is part of our historical kinship, they tend to do better than those raised by a nuclear family of just one or two parents.
The entire orientation to how you do research is radically different in Indigenous context. We preach a model of community-based participatory research, meaning that science is co-created. We all have roles in it, whether we’re researchers or community members, and respect and shared values have to be underneath all of it. When we do that, we innovate and come up with things we never thought we’d come up with. We have real impact and things actually change.
Glasshouse: Is there a song or piece of music that captures what this work feels like to you?
CIH: Oh my goodness. That is a hard one. I love Brandi Carlile's "The Joke" and the lines: it's your brother's world for a while longer. I watch young Native scientists or allies who are coming into this work, and really trying to do things a little differently, trying to be celebratory about these strengths - and I watch these new folks coming in and I kinda think: the joke is on the folks who don’t believe us or minimize and erase us. Instead of getting angry, I’m like, oh, but don’t you see?
I hate to say the joke's on them because it sounds a little mean-spirited, but it's a gentle thing. Yeah, we're going through hell here, but we know we're going to be okay. We're going to get there.
Glasshouse: You’ve awarded over 2,000 scholarships, trained thousands of Indigenous scholars, and are about to launch the nation’s first Indigenous focused doctoral program. Can you tell me a little bit more about that? What does it mean to make such a big impact and how does that feel internally for the folks at the center?
CIH: The new DRPH program, which is a doctorate in public health, starts to roll out this fall, and it’s the very first to be a DRPH focused exclusively on Indigenous health. The coursework includes a lot of Indigenous focused classes as well as generalized training around policy, practice, and research. We are so underrepresented as Indigenous peoples in the public health workforce, so this is one way for us to make a little dent in that. Johns Hopkins is often ranked as a top public health school, so we want to harness that power and social capital for our own communities.
To me, the most important thing about impact is that we’ve been able to model for other organizations and other universities that when you let people stay home, we have better impact. We are healthier. We are more grounded. I’ve had young students say: “What you all did by creating these hubs across the country allowed me to advocate to stay home, and that saved my life.” Sometimes our impact looks like big programs, but the structural change we've been able to model, showing that people can stay home and still do powerful work, is what I find most incredible.
Glasshouse: Is there a moment or memory from your years at the center that still sticks with you?
CIH: So many, yes, but I think a few stand out.
During COVID, our communities, especially those in Navajo Nation and Diné folks, were really hit hard by this virus and a lot of elders were lost. I just remember all of these old elders and ladies pulling out their sewing machines all over the place and making masks, back when we didn’t know we could buy them.
We were making these cloth masks. Delivering water to elders. Getting medicine to people in creative ways and keeping social connections. We had social distance powwows online. That stands out, those moments of being able to harness the power of the institution we’re in to get some resources out to community who’s already doing the work.
And then one other thing is seeing the individual stories of impact. Just as a small example, here in Minnesota at the Great Lakes Hub, we run a longitudinal study that’s been following the same Indigenous kids since they were 10. They’re now in their mid thirties. I happened to be at a conference, and I could feel this younger girl staring at me. She came over and said, "Is your name Melissa?" And I said yes. And she said: “That study you’ve been running for over a decade, Healing Pathways, I’m one of the participants and I just got my PhD.”
Sometimes you think you’re just doing surveys but, because of the community members bringing the surveys into the homes of these young people, they get to know who we are and feel proud to contribute to these efforts. We’re a collective, and it just reminds us we’re all connected.
Glasshouse: To go back to Daisy Chain Fields, the festival was directly inspired by Lilith Fair and this idea that women's voices deserve their own stage, built by women for women. Does that philosophy of carving out space resonate with the work the Center does for Indigenous communities?
CIH: Absolutely, and it’s so exciting to see a new version of that.
To give you a concrete example, here in the Midwest, our Ojibwe people are a water people. Historically, we would travel through the water on canoes, and many Native communities have these canoe journeys, so we can reclaim those connections to our waterways and canoe culture. So we’ve very purposefully built up a canoe team that’s all women led and inclusive of nonbinary individuals, for exactly the reason you say. The world already has been built to be safe for men in many ways, and for women, we still don’t have that privilege.
We wanted to create a space where people could make mistakes and not feel like they’re gonna get shunned or shamed. Where they could be in their bodies - of all beautiful sizes - and not feel like someone’s looking at them in a certain way. We as women, we carry water. We carry water when we carry our babies and we make new water. That collective solidarity is so critical and is somehow scary to some men.
We’ve gotten some pushback: where are the men, why don’t you include the men? My response to that is: Oh my gosh. I would love to support you. Please create a men’s group, and I will do whatever I can to support that. I think that’s wonderful. And, also - some of our women and girls have experienced real harm at the hands of men, and we don’t want that in our space right now.
In our culture, women historically have had really powerful important roles, and some of that has been pushed away by colonial misogyny, so creating safe spaces where women come together as leaders feels like one way to reclaim that.
Glasshouse: What would you want a Glasshouse reader, someone who loves music, maybe is excited about the festival, but hasn't thought much about Indigenous health, to take away from this conversation?
CIH: Right now, times feel heavy for a lot of people, in a global sense, in a national sense. There’s a lot of conflict and stress. When I hear some of my non-Native friends or colleagues get into that space of despair, I think: Oh, but look. Look what we’ve done. We’ve persisted. We’ve literally survived genocide.
So if you want examples of joy, if you want to be inspired, if you want evidence that we’re stronger than this, just look to Indigenous communities. We’ve done it. We’re still here, and we’re excited to dance and celebrate with everybody.
To follow and support the work of CIH, please check out the links below: