"Micah Treuer had just come off 30 hours on call at Children's Hospital in Minneapolis, where patient need was great and sleep was in short supply one day recently.

Yet, stoked with caffeine, this soft-spoken, third-year medical student shared his remarkable story.

The son of a Native American mother and a white father, Treuer grew up near the Leech Lake Indian reservation in northern Minnesota, an impoverished rural stretch around Bena and Cass Lake. Graduated from Bemidji High School, he went on to Princeton University. Named a Fulbright Scholar, he planned on graduate work and teaching English literature to college students.

Death intervened.

Now, instead of teaching Shakespeare, Treuer, 32, is learning the practice of medicine on full scholarship — $128,000 over four years — at the University of Minnesota Medical School, thanks to the Minnesota Medical Foundation, one of only 15 in his class of 230 medical students to be so honored. This summer he was also one of 13 in the nation to receive a 2010 Minority Scholars Award of $10,000 from the American Medical Association Foundation.

Talking about his Aunt Barbara's death some five years ago, he grows solemn. "It was just so vivid,'' he said, a man of quiet dignity sharing his life story over a lunchtime bowl of chicken wild rice soup."

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Native-American health care: One medical student's plan to make a difference (MinnPost.Com 8/10)