Meet the Scientist Using Indigenous Storytelling to Save Lives

"I was trained as a scientist, and we're often told in Western science that we just use the numbers, use the statistics, but those statistics do not tell the whole story, says Echo-Hawk, executive vice president of the Seattle Indian Health Board and director of its data and research division, the Urban Indian Health Institute (UIHI). As Native people, we have always utilized story for passing down oral traditions, whether it was for our medicines or knowing how to chart our way across the oceans or across the plains to follow the buffalo."

"Echo-Hawk says tribes are using their stories to drive powerful, culturally grounded solutions to health crises in their communities, including respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), a respiratory illness that disproportionately affects American Indian and Alaska Native children, particularly infants. For Native families, RSV isn't just another childhood illness; it's a public health crisis. According to a study , American Indian and Alaska Native infants under six months old in Alaska's Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta faced RSV hospitalization rates of 132 per 1,000 each year during the 20192020 RSV season, while those in Chinle, Ariz., located on the Navajo reservation , were hospitalized at a rate of 83 per 1,000."

An Indigenous public health expert merges storytelling with rigorous research to create narratives that inform policy and improve health outcomes in Native U.S. communities. Western scientific training emphasizes numbers and statistics, but numbers alone do not capture lived experience. Native oral traditions have long transmitted knowledge about medicines, navigation, and survival. Tribes use storytelling to develop culturally grounded responses to respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), which disproportionately affects American Indian and Alaska Native infants. Hospitalization rates in some communities reached 132 per 1,000 in Alaska's Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta and 83 per 1,000 in Chinle, Arizona, during the 2019-2020 RSV season. Combining narrative and data supports effective public health policy.

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