New pathway to health care program at Aaniiih Nakota College a big success

Nine Aaniiih and Nakoda high school students in the Fort Belknap area just finished their first year of the Pathway to Nursing, Public Health and STEM program at Aaniiih Nakoda College, a seven-week summer course meant to get local students into health care fields.

The course is funded through the National Institutes of Health in partnership with the college and the tribes and Program Director Bobby Pourier said it looks to have been a very successful first year.

The program consists of seven weeks themed around a different field of health care, including biology, chemistry, neuroscience, nursing, public health and is capped off with an empowerment week where students discuss what they want for their community and themselves.

Pourier said students learned about a huge variety of subjects throughout these weeks, from how addictive drugs can affect the brain to how to do CPR.

During this week students heard from a variety of speakers in various fields of health care, many from Fort Belknap, but others from across the U.S. and the world, including one as far away as New Zealand.

“(The program) was executed by us, but carried by a long roster of people,” Pourier said.

Teresa Brockie, Ph.D., said the program also had research assistants, through the Kennedy Krieger Public Health Leadership Program and Johns Hopkins University, who worked very hard to make it happen and she wants them to be given credit for their work as well.

Indeed, Pourier and Brockie, who oversees the program, said the goal of the course is not just to encourage students to pursue health care fields post high school, but to bring those skills back to the community, which is facing a shortage of workers in almost every area of health care, as well as a number of systemic issues that affect Native Americans.

“There’s so many needs,” saidBrockie, who teaches in the John Hopkins nursing program. “We need doctors, we need nurses, we need dentists, we need physical therapists, we need occupational therapists, it’s the whole package.”

Pourier said the program doesn’t just focus on the hard science of health care, but seeks to address systemic issues that affect Native American communities, cultural, social and economic.

He said while the immediate goal of the program is to build resilience in the students they teach, the larger goal they are working toward is creating an environment where future generations can thrive without having to build the kind of resilience their predecessors had to.

“These kids are already going to be some of the most resilient people already,” he said. “ ... (But) we don’t want resilient kids, we want good environments for them to live in so they don’t have to be.”

He said one of their goals is to see students work to address some of the issues seen in their communities and change the systems around them, systems he said the pandemic exposed as very broken.

“The systems around us are fundamentally flawed, and through their work, they might be able to address some of those things,” Pourier said.

He said the students talk about things like environmental quality and its effects on health, as well as the social determinants of health and health care and the economic realities that affect everyone in the community and affect these issues.

He said these issues that people outside the community aren’t going to have a full grasp of and that’s why the community needs to rely on their own to solve these issues for the most part.

He said, historically speaking, offers of help from outside Native American communities haven’t always worked out well for them, and even when people are offering in good faith they often don’t have an adequate enough understanding of the community and its issues to provide that help.

“No one is going to come to your community and fix it,” he said. “ … No one can save you better than you.”

Pourier said students like these may need to leave their communities for the sake of further education, or may find ways to bring resources back to Fort Belknap, resources that have historically been withheld from communities like theirs.

As well as talking about these issues, he said, students also talked about ways to integrate their culture into aspects of health care that will make being cared for a better experience for Native American patients, addressing spiritual health as well as physical health, and what that would be like.

“What would a health care system that was culturally responsive look like?” he said.

He said the program itself spent a fair amount of time talking about Native American culture and language, with activities related to these subjects taking place during the afternoons while mornings were focused more directly on health care.

He said discussions like this were extremely valuable and he feels like students showed significant growth during these past seven weeks.

Pourier said he measures the success of programs like this by the students’ success, but the growth they showed in just the past two months is a very good sign.

He said students were clearly very engaged in the discussions, to the point where one of them not only understood what neurogenetics was, but said they were interested in the field.

“When I was in high school I didn’t even know what a neurogeneticist was,” he said.

Pourier said the program, especially in the first week, also provided more direct assistance to students regarding planning for college, helping many get started on getting some college credits under their belt during high school.

Brockie said the program also helps prepare students to take part in the National Institutes of Health Summer Internship Program, which she said can be enormously helpful to students in college and help them form a support network.

Pourier said the program saw a mix of different grade levels and all of them did very well.

He said he was particularly excited for the younger students, saying he thinks introducing these ideas and resources to students when they’re younger can be really helpful.

He said seeing the students’ families so impressed and proud of their children’s work was also really gratifying, and a good sign for the program.

One of the students in the program, Elayna Adams, who’d just finished her freshman year, said she’d never really considered a career in the sciences, but this program really opened her eyes to possibilities, and she’s seriously considering chemistry or neuroscience.

“It definitely created new paths, for sure,” Adams said.

Another student in the program was Jermaine Brockie, Teresa Brockie’s nephew who just finished his junior year.

He said it was fascinating to learn about the science of the brain, how it is affected by drug use, and how it can be healed from the effects of addiction.

He said he’s considering a career in nursing or becoming a researcher, but he’s definitely coming back next year for a second course.

Brockie said the program has been funded for a second year and they hope to bring back all nine of this year’s students as well as 10 more first-year students.

As for next year, Pourier said, they are hoping to have more project-based education so students can get more hands-on experience.

He said the themed-weeks idea seemed to work out very well, allowing them to dig deep into subjects without overwhelming students and giving them an opportunity to find what they are really interested in.