-
PART ONE INTRODUCTION
- Michigan State University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
PART ONE INTRODUCTION Death Stalks the Yakama reflects my interest in an interdisciplinary approach to Native American history, using documents and methodologies of social history, religious studies, anthropology, sociology, oral history, and oral literature. It is hoped that this approach contributes to scholarly inquiry about native peoples by offering a broader understanding of the statistical data created from the Yakama Death Certificates.1 The book is intended to be a narrowly defined scholarly study that focuses primarily, but not exclusively, on Death Certificates, Death Registers, and Birth Registers. The work is not a demographic or population history of the Yakama, but a study of epidemiological transitions as they relate to death on one reservation for seventy-six years-from 1888 to 1964. There is no pretense that this is the definitive work on epidemiology as it relates to death on the Yakama Reservation, but epidemiological transition is used as the theoretical backdrop and conceptual context for much of what happened to the tribes and bands that made up the Yakama Nation during the early twentieth century. The theoretical framework used in the presentation of the Yakama death data is derived from the work of Abdel R. Omran and Barry Popkin. Omran offers the theory and provides a model 1 2 Death Stalks The Yakama that informs us about Yakama epidemiological transitlOns. He argues that in the United States, there was an historical shift in the nineteenth century from "pandemics of infectious diseases to the degenerative and man-made diseases which are now the chief forms of illness and causes of death."2 He maintains that the initial decline in mortality in the United States was more a function of "improvements in living standards and changes in the nature of some diseases" than it was from "medical progress, widespread sanitation, or organized health services."3 In part this was true for Yakama people whose standard of living improved as a result of wage earning during World War II and as a result of federal and tribal programs emerging out of the Indian New Deal of the 1930s and 1940s. The Yakama benefited significantly during that era from advances in public health, medical advancements, better sanitation, new housing, and sanitation-isolation programs designed to destroy tuberculosis. They also benefited from a natural decline in tuberculosis, a disease that seems to have run its course within the population by the late 1940s or early 1950s. Thus, Omran's theory of epidemiological transitions reveals much about infectious diseases, health, and historical eras. He asserts that the transition from high to low mortality derives from "a combination of medical developments," including the introduction of antibiotics, sanitation, and public medical health care. He also argues that there are fixed periods of time when "Old World" epidemics of smallpox, measles, fevers, influenza, typhoid, tuberculosis, and cholera are "replaced by heart diseases, cancer, stroke, diabetes, gastric ulcer ... together with increased mental illness, accidents, [and] disease due to industrial exposure."4 Omran argues that generally "mortality patterns distinguish three major successive stages of epidemiological transition including the Age of Pestilence and Famine, the Age of Receding Pandemics, and the Age of Degenerative and Man-Made Diseases ."5 Yakama epidemiological history began with the precontact period when there was no solid data recorded. Even before the arrival of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark in 1805, Yakama people began to enter the Age of Pestilence as Euro-American traders introduced infectious diseases to Native Americans living along the coast of the Pacific Northwest.6 Thus, throughout the entire nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, [3.238.254.78] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 09:48 GMT) Introduction 3 the Yakama lived in the Age of Pestilence, facing the scourge of many contagious diseases. During the twentieth century this age continued as tuberculosis, pneumonia, gastrointestinal disorders, influenza, and other diseases preyed on the Yakama population. By the late nineteenth century, smallpox had declined significantly as a killer of American Indians. However, in 1900, a total of 30 native people living on the Yakama Reservation contracted smallpox and two of them died. Still, the disease was short lived on the reservation for no deaths due to smallpox were reported in 1901.7 The Age of Pestilence and the Age of Receding Pandemics merged during the 1920s and 1930s, giving way to the Age of Degenerative and Man-Made Diseases. The watershed in Yakama epidemiological history was World War II, when tuberculosis, gastrointestinal disorders, and influenza declined. During the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s...