Dr. Walt Hollow:
A Pioneer on the Frontlines of Native American Medicine

"During the '80s, I just talked to every Indian who came through this medical school and I would get them together at my house at least once a month for a dinner," says Dr. Hollow. "And it was really to socialize and to help find out if any of them were having any academic trouble or struggling in medical school. And what came out of that was the formation of what's now the Medicine Wheel Society. And in the '80s the students, there were so few, there were like five or six that would meet at my house, but by 1990, after we applied for a grant to found the Native American Center for Excellence that [current NACOE Director] Polly Olsen now runs, we were able to start a program in Indian health and attract more Indians into the medical school, and we did have a critical mass. So then we'd have twenty people at our meetings, rather than five or six."

The Native American Center of Excellence was officially founded in 1992, and Dr. Hollow was its first and only director until 2001. Eventually he got the Medicine Wheel Society recognized by the Medical School. The group also began to tackle pressing social issues in the local Indian community. They visited homeless clinics in downtown Seattle, where a large number of Native Americans go for social services and nutrition and minor health problems, and would examine the Indian patients there and refer others to the Seattle Indian Health Board.

Hollow regrets not having had the kind of social support in medical school that Indian students now have, but he is happy to help provide Native American students who followed him something he didn't have for himself.

"I saw and what I felt when I was a medical student here was that I was isolated from my culture and that, you know, I was pretty lonely," he says. "And I recognized that whenever there was another Indian in the Medical School, I would immediately approach them and we would just be trying to nurture one another. And so I recognized that Indians in probably all cultures need some special care and things that allow them to stay in touch with their culture while they're in medical school because the culture of Western medicine, you know, back in the '70s and '80s didn't recognize American Indians or blacks or Hispanics. You know, that's changing and now many schools are changing that."