Health Insights Across the Life Course of Oglala Lakota Elders: From Wellness to Illness

In my research with 25 Oglala Lakota Elders (22 women and 3 men between the ages of 55 and 98 years of age) living on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota in the United States, I employed an qualitative Indigenous methodology called the Conversational Method. The recorded conversations ranged between 1.5 hours and 9 hours in length. Elders were directly approached and recruited from nine elder meal sites throughout the reservation, through snowball methods with friends and family members of the elders and from cultural community events. The narratives were analyzed using thematic analysis. These American Indian elders faced great adversity over their life course in terms of social conditions and weathering the federal assimilation strategies asserted on their communities throughout the 20th Century. The elders reveal the modes of food production and communal living in their childhood years. They resided on family homesteads where they raised farm animals and grew their own vegetables. This self-sufficiency gave way to federal food programs in their adult years leading to increased experiences of chronic diseases. Modern life on the reservation has moved away from communal living and caused a great deal of strain on health of the elders. Many of the elders lived alone and struggled to acquire adequate healthy foods, which negatively impact their physical health. Additionally, the elders had limited access to formal health care for much of their lives and they traced the early years of being nurtured by their grandmothers with traditional medicine to the shift to western medical care. The elders struggled to navigate western medicine and shared the confusion of living with chronic diseases in a resource poor environment. Tracking these changes across the life course reveals sites for intervention to positively impact the health of Lakota elders.