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

The other program that he helped to develop, the Indian Health Pathway, helps both Indian and non-Indians who wanted to work with American Indians learn about what are Indian health problems, the history of Indian health and Indian health policy. The program has clerkships where students can go out to Indian health sites or to the Seattle Indian Health Board and do family medicine, or they can go to any of the Indian Health Service sites around Seattle and do Family Medicine Clerkships. And because the medical school is affiliated with medical schools in four other regional states – Wyoming, Alaska, Montana, and Idaho – students can work at any IHS in the five-state area.

Since 1990, Dr. Hollow has also taught a class in Indian health called Issues in Indian Health: Past, Present and Future. His class, he says, is a place both Indians and non-Indians "can learn about what Indian culture is, what the history of what happened to Indians as Europeans came from the Old World, you know, over to North America and marched across North American and the U.S. government being established, and then what happened to the Indians' health status. At the time of First Contact, Indians were actually healthier than Europeans, but as a result of the wars, Native Americans being enslaved, the Native Americans being pushed onto Indian reservations, and then under the Daws Act, it was illegal for us to practice traditional Indian culture and medicine. And so, if you were an Indian who was going to remain traditional, you would have to do it secretly."

The Daws Act of 1887, was devastating to Indian cultural traditions, he says, forcing Indians out of their historical traditions and lifeways and into sedentary farming.

"The buffalo in 1890 were almost gone, there was only a thousand buffalo left in North America," recounts Dr. Hollow. "And so if you were a Plains Indian that wanted to hunt buffalo you really couldn't do it anymore because all the buffalo were killed off by the non-Indians who brought trainloads of Americans who lived on the east coast to come out and shoot buffalo for fun and take home a buffalo hide. And they'd leave the carcass of the buffalo out on the plains to basically rot. And there were twenty million buffalo in North America in 1492, and by 1890 there was a thousand. So, the buffalo were just totally decimated, unfortunately, by what happened as Europeans started to come across North America. And that changed the way of life of the Indians who relied on the buffalo for their livelihood.