ESSENTIAL READING ON INDIGENOUS HEALTH FROM THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA PRESS

For generations, Indigenous communities have understood health as something far larger than the absence of illness—a balance woven through land, language, kinship, and ceremony. Today, a growing body of scholarship is finally catching up to that understanding, and the University of Arizona Press has quietly become one of the most important publishers documenting it. From the wisdom of traditional healers and birth attendants to Nations leading their own public health initiatives, these books tell a story of enduring knowledge, communities that lead, and medicine ways that continue to strengthen Indigenous Peoples today. Whether you are a health professional, a student, or a reader who simply wants to understand wellness through Indigenous eyes, this collection is a powerful place to begin.

The Books

1. Global Indigenous Health: Reconciling the Past, Engaging the Present, Animating the Future

Edited by Robert Henry, Amanda LaVallee, Nancy Van Styvendale, and Robert Alexander Innes

An ambitious international collection bringing together academic and community researchers from Canada, the United States, Sweden, and New Zealand. The volume moves through four interconnected themes — ethics and history, environmental and ecological health, kinship, and health activism grounded in Indigenous knowledge — with communities at the center as the drivers of their own well-being. It also offers practical guidance for non-Indigenous readers who want to support the positive health outcomes Indigenous communities are building.

2. Indigenous Health and Justice

Edited by Karen Jarratt-Snider and Marianne O. Nielsen

The newest health-focused title on this list and the fifth volume in the press’s Indigenous Justice series. Its heart is sovereignty in action: chapters showcase how Nations protected their own people through the COVID-19 years, drawing on traditional foodways, community knowledge, and decisive public health leadership that in many cases outperformed neighbouring jurisdictions. A timely read for policymakers and health-care providers alike.

3. Diabetes among the Pima: Stories of Survival

By Carolyn Smith-Morris

Its subtitle — Stories of Survival — says it all.

Drawing on nearly a decade of fieldwork with the Akimel O’odham (Pima) of the Gila River Indian Community, Smith-Morris centers the voices of community members themselves, including expectant mothers, as the true experts on their own health. The book makes a compelling case that lasting solutions to diabetes must be built on culture, community, and context — exactly the strengths the Akimel O’odham bring to the table.

4. Red Medicine: Traditional Indigenous Rites of Birthing and Healing

By Patrisia Gonzales

Gonzales—a scholar, herbalist, and traditional birth attendant—writes from inside the knowledge she documents. “Red Medicine” names a system of healing that includes birthing practices, dreaming, and purification rites designed to restore personal and social balance. With special attention to Indigenous peoples with ties to Mexico, the book is both rigorous scholarship and a celebration of knowledge carried faithfully across the generations to the present day.

5. Strong Hearts and Healing Hands

By Clifford E. Trafzer

A history of the field nurses who began arriving in Southern California’s Mission Indian Agency in 1928—and, more importantly, of the Native families who worked alongside them. Trafzer shows how this partnership helped drive down deaths from tuberculosis, influenza, and other introduced diseases, even as communities continued their own medicine ways. It is an inspiring story of collaboration, one in which Native people were active partners in protecting their families—blending the best of two medical worlds on their own terms.

6. American Indian Medicine Ways

Edited by Clifford E. Trafzer

From Wovoka, the Ghost Dance prophet, to the contemporary healer Kenneth Coosewoon, this collection tells the stories of medicine people who have mediated between the spiritual and physical worlds. Through discussions of ceremony, prophecy, sweat lodges, and sacred objects, the contributors make one thing plain: Indigenous medicine ways are not artifacts of the past but living practices vital to communities today.

7. Healing Like Our Ancestors

By Edward Anthony Polanco

A vivid recovery of the world of Nahua healing specialists and their sophisticated medical tradition, tiçiyotl. Polanco shows how these practitioners used ceremonial language and sacred plants to assess and restore health—and restores Nahua women to their rightful place as respected healers with broad medical expertise, far beyond the narrow role early chroniclers recorded. A model of scholarship that insists on original languages and Indigenous frameworks.

8. Indigenous Justice and Gender

Edited by Marianne O. Nielsen and Karen Jarratt-Snider

Health runs through every chapter of this strength-based volume on Indigenous women and Two-Spirit people. Centering the concept of “rematriation”—returning power and decision-making to female space, land, and body—contributors take up reproductive health, diabetes, advocacy for missing and murdered Indigenous women, and food sovereignty, spotlighting the women whose leadership is transforming each of these areas.

9. Ethnic Medicine in the Southwest

A foundational earlier work from the press, this collection examines healing traditions practiced across Southwestern communities—where treatment might involve herbs, prayer, or massage, and where respected practitioners work outside formal licensure. Decades on, its central insight still resonates: Western medicine has much to learn from these traditions.

All titles are available from the University of Arizona Press (uapress.arizona.edu).