The Medical Library Association held its national conference several weeks ago in Honolulu. I served on a panel presenting ideas on how to strive for a healthy workplace. My contribution to the panel covered the workplace wellness initiative products that came out of my year of service as the President of the American Library Association. I was fortunate to have the creative help of an Emerging Leaders group that developed several products that are linked from the ALA-APA Website, including tools such as a “Know Before You Go” document with “Tips for Healthy Conference Travel,” a “Workplace Wellness Inventory,” and a “Wellness Passport.”

Wellness is a critical issue in indigenous communities. The American Indian Experience provides resources that will assist you in understanding the place of wellness in Native populations. One of the first places to start is with the introduction to Catherine Swan Reimer’s “Counseling the Inupiat Eskimo“. She explains that:

“Most Native Americans are aware that PWB (personal well-being) or wellness were implanted in the rich soil, roots, and fruits of their culture. The idea of PWB or wellness that is embedded in the concepts of wellness and human development, have always been important for indigenous people.”

For book length coverage of the impact of western contact on Native peoples see the 30th anniversary edition of Alfred Crosby’s monograph, The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492.

Similarly, Stacy Kowtko’s Nature and the Environment in Pre-Columbian American Life has a thorough overview of “Agriculture: Cultivating a Living Out of the Environment.”

To bring the content up to near present day, read the chapter on “Health, Medicine, and Cures,” in Donald Fixico’s 2006 volume, Daily Life of Native Americans in the Twentieth Century.

Linday Murray Berzok’s book, American Indian Food, provides detailed coverage. Check, especially, chapter 2, “Foodstuffs,” and chapter 6, “Concepts of Diet and Nutrition.” Berzok also covers some of the Native cultural perspectives on food in the chapter on “Food Customs,” including coverage of food taboos.

Check out the survey articles in Frederick E. Hoxie’s Encyclopedia of North American Indians, including entries such as “Agriculture,” “Diseases,” “Food and Cuisine,” and “Health and Healers.” For more on healers see Troy R. Johnson’s Distinguished Native American Spiritual Practitioners and Healers. You can browse the many biographical entries, but don’t forget to check out the two appendices showing the healers by birth date and by tribal nation.

If you are looking for a more literary approach to the topic of wellness, you might read Lynn Domina’s “Traditional Native American Spirituality and Western Medicine: Ceremony, Illness, and Spirituality,” in Understanding Ceremony: A Student Casebook to Issues, Sources, and Historical Documents. Note that in this case ceremony refers to Leslie Marmon Silko’s well known novel.

To focus your search in various ways, don’t forget to browse the “Health, Science & Environment” section of the Title List of the American Indian Experience. A general discussion of Native food appears as the Topic Guide, “American Indian Food.” And, read more about any one or more tribal communities through the clickable map on the Tribal Communities Resource.