Providing Culturally Appropriate Education on Type 2 Diabetes to Rural American Indians: Emotions and Racial Consciousness.

Abstract

Healthy and balanced emotions are an important aspect of well-being. Today, diabetes has a high prevalence in American Indian communities. Four Talking Circle facilitators were interviewed in a phenomenological research study to describe their experience of facilitating Talking Circles during a diabetes research intervention, Diabetes Wellness: American Indian Talking Circles. The Diabetes Wellness study provided a twelve week educational curriculum in a Talking Circle format to target prevention and effective maintenance of symptoms of Type 2 diabetes among American Indians adults on two rural Northern Plains reservations. Seven essential themes emerged from the phenomenological study data. This report describes one theme: expression of the emotional aspect of diabetes and three sub-themes that depict American Indian culture: connectedness, collective living, and transformation. Type 2 diabetes is a chronic disease that affects the emotional status of American Indians in rural communities. The notion of racial consciousness is discussed as a potential context from which Talking Circle facilitators can operate and Talking Circle participants respond. This viewpoint may be a useful cultural approach for lay personnel with an (emic) inside perspective like Talking Circle facilitators when working in areas like rural American Indian reservations.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 13 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.