Mankiller Blog Post

I've never used a blog before, so I hope I'm posting this right.


Wilma Mankiller's autobiography was different than other autobiographies I have read because the book wasn't solely about her life. She alternated between chapters focusing on her life and chapters focusing on the history of the Cherokees as a whole. I got used to the style quickly as soon as I knew what to expect from each chapter.
Two things from the book jumped out at me in particular and made me think. The first is her view on modern Western medicine. This jumped out at me since my parents are doctors and I spent a significant portion of my childhood either in or near hospitals. Though I have seen the medical system criticized from many standpoints (too expensive, too much bureaucracy, idiosyncratic insurance system, etc.), some of which I agree with, I have never heard Wilma Mankiller's criticism before. On pages 232-233, she claimed that the medical system Ӏdehumanizes patientsԀ by disregarding individuals' cultural backgrounds. I knew after reading that I immediately disagreed, but I had to spend a few hours cultivating my thoughts to realize why I disagreed. It is true that the Western medical system considers culture to be superfluous most of the time in giving diagnoses and treatments, but I have always seen modern Western medicine and biology as one of the most powerful opposing forces to racism and discrimination. It's true that when a person goes to a hospital in the United States, they will not be treated differently than anyone else. However, I feel that this treatment actually humanizes patients because it reveals what we all are beneath our cultural, linguistic, and racial differences. Penicillin treated syphilis in the 1960s for both black and white patients. Cirrhosis attacks the human liver in the same way, regardless of whether that human is an Albanian subsistence farmer or an accountant in Buenos Aires. And a highly educated, culture conscious person with heart palpitations is treated the same way a person with a 30 IQ and heart palpitations is treated. The hospital is one of the few places where people can consider how truly similar they are to people of different races, religions, cultures, and socioeconomic backgrounds, and Western medicine shows us what humanity is at its core. I may, however, be influenced by my experience with the medical system.
The purpose of Western medicine is to make people healthy. For doctors who are sometimes assigned anywhere from 20 to 30 patients at any point in time, the only way this can be done is if they are only given information relevant to the case. Biologically, there is no reason why hundreds of years of political and social history are at all relevant to a diagnosis. If doctors needed to know the history of every patient's culture to accurately treat them, there would simply not be enough time for the limited number of doctors in the United States to treat the hundreds of thousands of sick people in the country. This is especially true in intensive care cases, in which all 20 to 30 of a doctor's patients are, in some way or another, about to die.
After much thought, I found that this criticism was based on irrefutable facts, but that the expectations that brought on the criticism were unrealistic.
I also found it interesting that Mankiller did not emphasize education as much as I expected. I have just finished a course on the history of North Carolina, and a huge part of it focused on African Americans prior to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and the 1960s. African Americans strove to provide better education to their children, and when that education was available, they used it to uplift and improve their communities. Considering all the parallels drawn in Mankiller to the Civil Rights Movement, I found this parallel was missing, and I would like to know why.
A few other questions came to me while I was reading: What is the current religious make up of the Cherokee Nation? What is the current political make up of the Cherokee Nation? How are the fields of anthropology and sociology viewed in general by the Cherokee?