A nurse with the medical division of the Office of Indian Affairs. Photo from U.S. National Library of Medicine

A professor at the University of California, Riverside, is conducting a unique project that details how tribes worked with nurses and doctors to reduce rates of infectious disease in the first half of the 1900s.

Clifford E. Trafzer, the Rupert Costo Chair in American Indian Affairs, received a $50,400 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to complete a book manuscript about tribal and western medicine. His research is the first comprehensive look at the collaboration that took place in southern California between 1900 and 1955.

“Nurses traveled thousands of miles and entered many indigenous households on each reservation to teach and educate about communicable diseases,” Trafzer said in a press release on UCR Today. “Based on my statistical analysis of death records from 1924 to 1948, Native Americans and Western health-care providers drove down crude death rates caused by every infectious disease. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the Cahuilla, Serrano, Cupeño, Luiseño, Kumeyaay, Chemehuevi, and other tribes of the Mission Indian Agency, as well as tribes on the Pacific Coast and the Colorado River, continued their ancient medical arts.”

According to Trafzer, the effort came about after the Office of Indian Affairs, a predecessor to the Bureau of Indian Affairs, established a medical division in 1924. He said tribal medical practitioners adapted existing practices to help their communities address the threats of disease.

The working title of Trafzer's book is “Changing Medicine: Intersection of Native American and Western Medicine Ways in Southern California, 1900-1955.”

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NEH Funds Research on Collaboration of Indigenous, Western Medicine Ways (UCR Today 1/20)