UNLV seeks to light career spark

By Timothy Pratt

Thursday, June 19, 2008 | 2 a.m.

Carolee Dodge Francis remembers how people in Shawano, Wis., stared at her as a teenager.

A member of the Oneida Tribe, Dodge Francis was bused seven miles off her reservation to high school.

In town, storekeepers eyed her and other Oneida students as if “we were going to steal something,” Dodge Francis recalls.

The director of UNLV’s American Indian Research and Education Center also still hears in her head what teachers told her about the idea of going to college, or doing just about anything: “This is not for you. You’re not going to make it.”

Dodge Francis proved them wrong, becoming the first in her family to earn a university degree. Now she is helping other American Indians do the same.

This month, she brought students from some of the 37 tribal colleges in the United States and Canada to UNLV, where she exposed them to university studies and careers in public health. Experts say the event may be the first university summer program in public health aimed at tribal college students.

“I wanted them to see the realm of possibilities,” Dodge Francis says. The effort is needed because few American Indians enter health care fields.

Dodge Francis hopes American Indian students can become future architects of a hybrid between “strong, traditional views” on health and modern Western medicine.

For her program, she first put out feelers to colleagues at tribal colleges in Montana, Michigan and Wisconsin and found 10 interested students. Then she obtained $150,000 through UNLV’s School of Public Health and lined up speakers from the university and from federal agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Indian Health Service.

The results included ah-ha moments such as when Larry Jacques, a 27-year-old Sioux/Chippewa from Bay Mills Community College in Michigan, realized his abiding interest in community gardens could be used to help solve the primary public health problem on many reservations, diabetes, by growing fresh vegetables and improving diets.

Crystal Lee sat near Jacques in a lab at UNLV’s Bigelow Health Sciences Building the day before the program ended. This spring, Lee became only the second American Indian to earn a master’s degree in public health at UNLV.

The 27-year-old spent as much time as she could with the 10 students visiting UNLV because she wanted to show them that if she did it, they could, too. She walked them through the process of obtaining financial aid for graduate studies at UNLV and pointed out one of the school’s obvious advantages as far as they were concerned: two American Indian professors.

That made a difference when she called UNLV’s graduate coordinator one fall day in 2005. She was referred to Michelle Chino, associate professor of environmental and occupational health and a member of the Laguna Pueblo Tribe.

Lee, a Navajo who grew up on a reservation in the Four Corners area of Arizona, New Mexico, Utah and Colorado, says hearing Chino’s voice on the line piqued her interest. “You just have that connection — even if they’re not from your tribal background, they know where you’re coming from.”

Also, Lee says, “it’s rare that you see a Native American woman professor at a graduate level.”

Lee’s character appears to contain the same grit seen in her professors.

Growing up, she saw medicine men who were also family members heal the sick, though that’s not something she talks about in detail. “We don’t expose our ways,” she says.

Lee and her family also knew the inside of hospitals. When her diabetic grandfather developed cardiovascular problems requiring heart surgery, they had to translate the doctors’ English into his Navajo. The bridge of cultures was not always steady because sometimes “there was no direct word that went with the scientific term.”

Her grandfather died 2 1/2 years ago. But the experience of moving between the traditional and modern worlds while he was sick cemented her desire to study health care.

“That made it more clear that I wanted to work with Native Americans ... and my Navajo tribal community, to fully connect the Native American component and the Western science component,” Lee says.

She hopes that UNLV’s bid for developing a certified public health Ph.D. program is successful so she can continue her studies here. Then she’d like to go to medical school — and back to her people.

Dodge Francis, meanwhile, will apply for grants to continue the summer program in years to come.

The effort, she says, “is like throwing a stone into a calm pond and the circles keep going out.”