In 2020, the North Dakota State Board of Higher Education in the United States (U.S.) made history with a vote to approve the world’s first doctoral program in indigenous health. This month, the University of North Dakota (UND) announced that it will be taking its students to Ghana and New Zealand to research indigenous health.
The aim is to explore healing practices and other approaches that are working in indigenous communities around the world. Grace Karikari, assistant professor of indigenous health at UND, is in the middle of developing a Ghana-based course to be offered in the future. “Global Indigenous health is the focus, but we are also thinking about the concept ‘indigenous’ outside the United States,” said Karikari, who is originally from Ghana.
“We will start with having students conduct research abroad, thinking about Indigenous Ghana versus Indigenous America, the social determinants of health, and resiliency models,” she added.
Broadly speaking, Karikari’s hope is to encourage students to think about how improving the health and well-being of people in the U.S. differs from improving health in Ghana—and help students understand how the histories of each place affect well-being today.
“The course addresses equity, of course,” said Karikari, referencing the UND LEADS Strategic Plan, which focuses on leadership, equity, affinity, discovery, and service, “but my primary goal was to use this pedagogical training and mentoring opportunity to explore the potential for collaborative scholarship across institutions and continents.”
Hoping to travel with up to 10 students at a time—possibly from programs across the college—Karikari said that she wants to give students of all backgrounds more opportunities to study abroad.
“That is why we are going into the realm of research abroad,” she said. “We’re looking beyond public health and beyond Indigenous health. We hope the health sciences will be drawn to this as well.”
“We’re doing an immersion—staying on their ancestral grounds in different communities,” explained Julie Smith-Yliniemi of the Māori people in New Zealand. “The idea is to explore healing practices, mental wellness and recovery, and cultural perspectives within health care—things that are working in different Indigenous communities around the world.”
An assistant professor in the UND School of Medicine & Health Sciences Department of Indigenous Health, Smith-Yliniemi is referring to her team’s new Global Indigenous Health Perspectives program.
Cultural links across the oceans
This academic year, Smith-Yliniemi is bringing a group of UND students to New Zealand to study the health and healthcare of that country’s Indigenous people, the Māori, who will host UND’s travel cohort.
Having spent years working on suicide prevention with her own community, the White Earth band of Ojibwe in Minnesota, Smith-Yliniemi met Māori community members and researchers while presenting around the world on incorporating Indigenous healing practices into evidence-based trauma therapy models.
“One of the things I remember about New Zealand was walking into a local convenience store where I just thought, ‘Oh my gosh, this looks and feels like so many convenience stores I have visited in reservation communities in the United States,’” Smith-Yliniemi recalled, adding that when she walked into a Māori community center and saw elders cooking traditional foods and creating medicines from local plants, she felt “home.”
“It was essentially a food desert there too, and these elders were working to heal the impacts of colonization in their communities through the use of their ancestral knowledge and traditional medicines.”
Such an experience allowed the UND faculty member to see how the effects of government food systems on a formerly colonized population thousands of miles from the American Midwest actually mirrored those effects on Indigenous people closer to home.
“Such programs create obesity because people often aren’t getting the nutrients they need,” she said.
Inspired by her own cultural immersion experience in New Zealand, Smith-Yliniemi started developing a study abroad course for the island nation over a year ago. Developing the course with UND’s Study Abroad Office, which manages short- and long-term travel courses that function similar to on-campus UND courses in terms of tuition and fees, Smith-Yliniemi built the course around UND’s March 2025 Spring Break week.
Reconnecting with her Māori friends recently at the World Indigenous Suicide Prevention conference at Niagara Falls, the researcher finalized details with her colleagues abroad for a course focused on Indigenous health in New Zealand.
This, added David Wilson, professor and chair of the Department of Indigenous Health and UND’s associate vice president for Health Research, is what the Global Indigenous Health Perspectives series will allow students to understand in a direct way.
“Our department sees these international opportunities to collaborate as tremendously enriching educational experiences that could result in shared Indigenous knowledge that may help improve the health conditions in Tribal communities in the United States and beyond,” Wilson said.
“Much like the social determinants of health paradigm, it is the combined effects of multiple factors that contribute to an individual’s health status. And it will take shared knowledge from communities around the world for humans to re-establish equilibrium with ourselves and our environment.” Visit the web page for UND’s graduate program in Indigenous Health for more information.
Source: UND
Abeeb Lekan Sodiq is a Managing Editor & Writer at theafricandream.net. He is as well a Graphics Designer and also known as Arakunrin Lekan.
