No Dogs, No Natives: How One Woman’s Family Persevered Through Prejudice

Siobhan Wescott keeps a small framed photo in her office that reminds her of home — and of just how far she’s come. It’s a picture of a wide dirt road in a forest near the tiny cabin outside Fairbanks, Alaska, where she grew up. Along the horizon, the road meets a billow of clouds, then fades to a white nothingness. As kids, Siobhan and her brother would sometimes walk that road to catch a ride to school, clambering over snow drifts to get there.

Siobhan, now 55, is an Alaska Native of the Athabascan tribe. She holds both an M.D. and M.P.H., and serves as the director of American Indian Health at University of Nebraska Medical Center, and is one of the few Native people in the U.S. to hold an endowed professorship. “The Athabascans are a group that is inherently nomadic,” says Siobhan, which might account for the many addresses she’s had over the years. “But even nomads find a way to have a home base. Alaska always seemed like home.”

Today, Fairbanks is the second largest city by population in Alaska, a hub for regional transportation, military operations and a thriving tourism industry. But Siobhan’s ancestors survived their harsh homeland by following the migration of animals. “They lived in small bands with simple camps that could be broken down and carried to the next hunting site,” she says.

Similarly, Siobhan’s path to health and policy and teaching wasn’t a straight line. She and her mother, Betty Parent, are living proof that you don’t have to be static to stay in touch with your roots. In fact, your origins can motivate everything you chase in life. What Siobhan has long been chasing is better health for families like hers, and families in other Native communities around the country. “I made my way to medicine because of the impact that illness, and bad policy, had on my family,” she says, her dentalium-shell hair ties—a gift from her mother—catching the silvery threads in her hair. “But, to tell my story,” she says, “I need to start with my mother’s story.”

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Betty as a child.

“No Dogs, No Natives”: A Brutal History

Betty, Siobhan’s mother, doesn’t try to downplay the struggle that lives behind her own incandescent smile. “I had a very hard early life. For my generation in the territory in Alaska…it was very rough,” she says. But before she went on to Harvard and Stanford, became chair of the American Indian Studies department at San Francisco State, hosted a PBS show, and was inducted into the Alaska Women’s Hall of Fame, Betty was born in 1941 in Bethel, Alaska, and lived in Crooked Creek, a remote village with a population of 55. There, at age 4, she lost her entire family.

The early 20th century was a time in Alaska when Natives were treated similarly to Black Americans under Jim Crow. But instead of designating “white” and “colored,” it was common for stores and restaurants to have signs in their windows saying, “No Dogs, No Natives.” And despite having the largest share of the Native American population, at 22%, Alaska Native people had virtually no representation in the territorial government, and Alaska didn’t become a state until 1959. Alaska Native children living in rural communities had to go away to boarding school if they wanted education higher than the eighth grade.

And then there was the sickness. Russian explorers and missionaries brought tuberculosis with them, and even after treatment became available, TB continued to hit Alaska Natives hard. Between 1948 and 1951 in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta, TB ravaged Native children: Seventy-five percent of kids under age 8 tested positive for TB and the disease was the number one cause of death in Southwest Alaska in the 1930s through the early 1950s.

TB hit Betty’s family hard. They had already suffered one tragedy when her father drowned in an accident when Betty was 3 years old. Later, her mother contracted TB. At some point, she went to an Alaska Native hospital to have a baby, which she left at the hospital after signing away her parental rights. That child was then adopted out to a white family. And it was perfectly “legal”: The practice at the time dictated that Alaska Native children who became “orphaned” had to be adopted out to non-Native families, even in cases where there were Native relatives who could have cared for them. This appalling practice happened nationwide, with 35% or more Native children being removed from their families and put in non-Native foster and adoptive homes. In fact, this practice wouldn’t change until 1978, with the passage of the Indian Child Welfare Act.

Betty’s younger sister, Irene, also contracted TB and eventually died in a hospital in Washington. Beginning at age 4, Betty lived with an aunt. “I had to be hidden,” she says. Otherwise, her aunt feared her mother would come for her or that the government would take her. “White families would ‘shop’ for Native babies to adopt at the public health hospital,” Betty says. By her sophomore year of high school, Betty was attending a Catholic boarding school in Seattle. She went on to get a degree from the University of Alaska, a master’s degree from Harvard University and a Ph.D. from Stanford University, the first Alaskan Native woman to do so.

Bad Policy = Bad Outcomes

Siobhan’s own nomadic journey also started when she was 4 years old. That’s when Betty moved them to Cambridge, after she and Siobhan’s father separated. Unfortunately, Siobhan was bullied by some of the other kids at Harvard’s preschool when she told them she was Indian. “They thought it was a game, cowboys and Indians,” she says.

It was traumatic, but it also steeled Siobhan for her own journey. That included getting a degree in government from Dartmouth College, a master’s in public health from the University of California, and an M.D. from Harvard Medical School, where she was the oldest graduate in her class at the age of 40. Each additional degree gave her one more tool to effect change in her community.

Betty and a young Siobhan.

“I wanted to change things so that no family would have to go through what my family went through in the 1940s,” Siobhan says. “Because if you don’t have good medical treatment, and you have policies that tear families apart, you get bad outcomes for a population.”

Unfortunately, the TB rate is still seven times higher for Native people than white people. Native people also face greater health inequities than any other population in the U.S.—and they die younger. In fact, 25% of American Indian/Alaska Native deaths occur before age 45, compared with 7% of whites and 15% of African Americans.

These disparities are common in indigenous populations all over the world, says Donald Warne, M.D., M.P.H., a member of the Oglala Lakota tribe from Pine Ridge, South Dakota, and co-director of the Center for Indigenous Health at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “When policies are written with majority population in mind, we don’t always have access to needed health services for minority populations or marginalized populations, and we certainly don’t have adequate, culturally appropriate healthcare,” Dr. Warne says.

Improving healthcare access and recruiting more Native physicians are two of Siobhan’s focuses today, especially since Native doctors still make up less than 1% of U.S. physicians. Her position as the Dr. Susan and Susette La Flesche Professor of American Indian Health at the University of Nebraska Medical Center is named for two sisters from the Omaha tribe, Susan and Susette La Flesche. Dr. Susan La Flesche was the first Native American physician, graduating from medical school in 1889 and running her own practice in Nebraska. Before coming to UNMC, Siobhan also served as assistant director of the Indians Into Medicine (INMED) program at the University of North Dakota.

As part of her role at UNMC, Siobhan leads a project called NE — HEALING, which stands for Nebraska — Health, Education, Advocacy and Leadership across Indigenous and Native Generations. That involves understanding and serving the Native community in Nebraska, and across the country. One of the first steps in healing is understanding the role identity and labels have played in native communities.

“Even the Simplest Thing Isn’t Simple”

“Racial identity is complicated. Even the simplest thing isn’t simple,” Siobhan says. Take her own background. Her great-grandfather was an indigenous Norwegian Sami, or Laplander, and his family lived off the land. In the late 1800s, he ran away from home at age 14, stowing away on a ship carrying reindeer from Norway to Alaska. “His race was ‘white,’ but that didn’t capture the story of his heritage,” Siobhan says. In addition to being an Alaska Native, she is also Norwegian, Irish, English, Swiss and French.

That rich, multi-ethnic, multiracial identity is more common than not. The number of Americans who identify as American Indian or Alaska Native nearly doubled between 2010 and 2020, jumping from 5.2 million in 2010 to 9.7 million in 2020. This is, in part, due to better-designed race and ethnicity census questions and improved community outreach and engagement regarding the importance of Census participation, according to Dr. Warne.

What hasn’t improved, however, is our terminology for indigenous people in the U.S., which is another one of the issues Siobhan is trying to tackle. “I put together an indigenous-led research team to study terms people have used, and we discovered that the vast majority of the terms for Native people have been imposed by others, not chosen by the communities themselves,” she says.

That imposition on Native communities is at the root of so much bad policy, because when others define who you are, they also tend to decide what’s best for you, Dr. Warne explains. This is one reason why the center at Johns Hopkins changed its name from the Center for American Indian Health to the Center for Indigenous Health; names hold stories about who people are and what has happened to them. For example, Navajo Nation is the legal name, but “Navajo” is a Spanish word imposed on them and “American Indian”—which is the federal government’s racial designation for native people—is based on Christopher Columbus’s 500-year-old mistake, believing that he was in India.

Siobhan would like to see leaders of Native communities guide the conversation about updating and improving the terms governments and institutions use. The general public may understand the term “American Indian,” but it’s neither a chosen nor an accurate one.

Generational Healing

There’s a reason the overall name of her project is called HEALING. As a physician, she’s a healer. But as someone with a strong public health background, Siobhan knows healing also depends on building trust. That’s one of the things she’s trying to do among the Native communities in Nebraska. Inspired by the AIDS quilt, Siobhan is in the early stages of working with the different tribes there to create a quilt memorializing indigenous lives lost from COVID-19. (AI/AN people were 2.5 times more likely than white, non-Hispanic persons to be hospitalized for COVID-19—higher than any other population, according to the C.D.C.).

“As I’m working with the Nebraska tribes to get the COVID quilt underway, I’m also asking them: What are your urgent health needs?” Siobhan says. That’s how healing starts: by asking questions and by listening, and by practicing “collective decision making,” which involves making sure all groups have a seat at the table so they can ask for what they need and be part of devising solutions.

For her part, Betty is unbelievably proud of her daughter’s work, and sees Siobhan’s story as an updated version of her own. “Hers is a different generation because her parents were faculty members, whereas mine didn’t finish high school,” Betty says. Siobhan also has the benefit of practical tools to help her move through the generational trauma she inherited. “Going through medical and public health training helped me frame feelings I had brought about by the trauma and keep it from controlling my life.”

When the stress of life gets to be too much, Wescott pulls out whatever beadwork project she’s working on. “Beads are the pixels of Natives,” she says. It soothes her mind. Perhaps her nomadic heritage is one reason Siobhan hasn’t ever worried too much about getting lost or stuck. “That nomadic pull still calls to me,” she says. “It’s a fundamental part of me, a gift from my ancestors.”

Judi Ketteler has written about youth culture for the The New York Times and Los Angeles magazine, and is the author of the forthcoming book, Would I Lie to You? The Amazing Power of Being Honest in a World That Lies (December 31, 2019; Citadel Press).