Project Objectives

We have embarked on a new direction with the Tribal Connections website. Tribalconnections.org continues to be a valuable database for health related resources for Native Americans and Alaska Natives, and that will not change. The website is an important outreach tool to the American Indian/Alaska Native (AI/AN) communities and for promoting National Library of Medicine (NLM) online resources like MedlinePlus. What we have begun in our new phase is to provide editorial content in the form of news articles and features about health and wellness issues.

The Tribal Connections staff is attempting to do two things with this approach. First, we want to provide reader-friendly information about critical issues or topics in the news related to Native American health. We hope to make available information that will be interesting to both health professionals and to consumer health information seekers. Secondly, we would like to help raise awareness of Native American health issues in the general population and among Native Americans and Alaska Natives themselves by promoting Native American health writing, an area that has generally been overlooked by the major media.

Thanks to funding from the PNRML and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, our content includes columns from Native American health specialists that combine western and Indian approaches to healing and healthy living and that focus on nutrition and diet. In addition, we seek Indian writers who have an interest in writing health news articles for Tribal Connections, and are working in collaboration with the Native American Health Writers Institute, a new project based at the University of New Mexico-Gallup, to help nurture Indian health writers. Tribal Connections is a member of the Native American Journalists Association, and we distribute all our original editorial content to Indian publications across the country to reprint at no cost, since many Indian publications do not have staff health writers. So far, our efforts have been well received, and we are grateful for these responses. Our challenge in the near future is to continue the direction we have started while expanding our scope to become more inclusive, with features and news articles from across Indian Country. We would love to hear from anyone who would like to contribute articles for the website. Tribalconnections.org is a support mechanism for the American Indian/Alaska Native outreach projects within the National Network of Libraries of Medicine.