Menominee Nation's Path to Health Heals Invisible Wounds
Tribe’s Path to Health: Heal Invisible Wounds
Menominee Nation doctors and teachers don’t ask their patients and students, “What’s wrong with you?” They ask, “What’s happened to you?”
Addressing both historic wounds and more recent suffering, members of the Wisconsin tribe are using a trauma-informed care model to do their jobs, seeking to find the root cause of negative behaviors.
“When we took the usual way of approaching behavioral and other issues, we realized what we were doing was wrong,” says Wendell Waukau, superintendent of the Menominee Indian School District since 2005. “Our policies were pushing kids out the door.”
The tribe’s use of a trauma-informed care model to provide social and behavioral health services has dramatically changed life for its members. The approach’s success is among the reasons the Menominee Nation was awarded this year’s RWJF Culture of Health Prize.
In 2008, fewer than 60 percent of the students who started as freshmen graduated from Menominee Indian High School. At the time, the “drop-out crisis” was seen as something confined to the schools. Tribal members now understand that the challenge in education was a public health crisis with roots that extend well into other areas of tribal life. With its new lens on how to build a Culture of Health, the tribe has a clearer picture of its needs and a sharper path forward.
Today students graduate Menominee Indian High School at a rate of nearly 99 percent.
“That tells us our kids are resilient,” Wendell Waukau says. “It tells us they’re healthy.”
At the nearby Tribal Clinic, Administrator Jerry Waukau (Wendell’s older brother) found that some of the clinic’s practices were alienating patients who needed help. People sought appointments when they were in crisis. If they needed to wait several days to schedule an appointment—that might not help, or might even be too late.
“We shifted our approach to be patient-centered and changed to a same-day appointment system. Now you tell me when you want to get in,” Jerry Waukau says.