I am the girl with the purple shoes.

I am the person not from here.

I am the one from Connecticut.

I am the one from New Mexico.

I am the woman from Yale.

I am the Apache girl.

I am the one who doesn�t look Indian.

I have gotten a few interesting responses to my study. Today while talking to the regional director of the IHS hospital I explained the purpose of my study. She responded by redirecting the conversation repeatedly to issues of addiction and chronic pain. I kept trying to reinforce that my study is about people with cancer pain and that they are typically undermedicated, and she would turn the conversation right back to addiction and chronic pain. Very frustrating.

The other day I was talking with a woman about the study while cleaning the mountain. I told her about the study and how the premise was that the health care practitioners weren�t accurately reading and understanding how the Indian patients were expressing their pain. She talked about how hard it is to understand when Indians are talking because they don�t open their mouths wide enough and they speak in such monotone voices.

I am finding that this place is very different from what I expected. I guess I expected it to be more like New Mexico or Alaska. In those places you see Indians just doing their thing, part of the general community. Instead, here Indians are on the reservations or doing low-skilled labor and not participating in the wider population. People here talk about Indians in reference to alcohol and drug abuse and the other problems that plague the poverty-stricken. I spend half my time completely offended by the stereotypes that are perpetuated in talk and image around the town. This trip is more difficult than I expected.

Even so, the part that I thought was going to be the worse was the best. Today I went out to the tribe and got permission to conduct my study on the reservation. I expected people to view me with distrust and suspicion. Instead people were incredibly helpful- signing my papers and giving me names of people to talk to. I got a snow cone from a little stand on the main drag and the people there were happy and interested in what I was doing. Everyone was interested in contributing something to the study. It was great. Sure, the people are poor and have little access to education and healthcare. They desperately need honest and thoughtful direction to harness the deep sense of community and point it in the right direction. And a little money- they could use a little money.