I'm desperately trying to focus on writing my thesis. Every time I sit down I start to write something, but it isn't what I want to write about. It sort of sucks, that way, actually.

I went to Montana to find out if the Natives with cancer pain were trying to communicate with their health care providers in some way that they were in pain and the providers weren't understanding what they were saying. A sort of cultural disconnection- person with cancer pain is saying i have pain and the person with the power to treat it isn't hearing what person with cancer pain is saying.

What i discovered is that the people with cancer pain weren't saying anything about it to anyone. And the people with the keys to the pain relievers weren't listening anyway, because they felt that the indians were just asking for drugs so they could get high.

I learned so much more on that trip. i learned that people are racist. Really really racist. Even the people who would swear up and down that they weren't prejudging any other group of people- even those supposedly liberated people did things that betrayed their claims. For example, a nurse who I really respected only asked Indians about their addiction history before prescribing medications- she never asked a caucasian their addiction history.

I brought my data back to Connecticut, where nobody even knows what a "real" indian looks like. It's harder to catch people in their hypocritical behavior here. We're detached from the reality here in our ivy tower. We spend a lot of time talking about situations and groups of people in theory. We rarely have to provide substance to our claims. So when I had a strange encounter with one of my professors the other day, you can imagine my suprise.

Last week I met with one of our school's pain specialists. We pored over my data, looking for instances where people used culturally unique phrases to describe their pain. She was really taken by one subject's decription of the pain as "like hot lava." She went on to express her suprise that a group of native americans from the high plains of America would know what lava looked like.

Um, duh.

Then she asked me about the languages used in the interviews. Only one interview was conducted in Crow, and that's because the subject was too stubborn to speak english. She understood it just fine, she just didn't like me much. This pain specialist asked me about their use of language and how we negotiated the language difference.

"Sure, for almost all my subjects english was a second language," I responded. "But all but two of them had at least a high school level education, and fifty percent of the cohort had gone on to get an associates degree at a junior college. They spoke english as well as you or me."

I just don't like how this pain specialist (I like to call her my arch nemesis) insinuated that my subjects weren't intelligent or experienced enough to know what lava looks like, or how to communicate their thoughts in more than just one language. Personally, I was astounded that they all spoke two languages- I struggle sometimes with just one. But they lived a contemporary life in a contemporary world while simultaneously preserving the culture and language of their own eons-old people. But to the pain specialist, they were ignorant people unable to describe their pain appropriately.

The worst thing about it is that she is smart enough to insinuate what she is saying. So I sit there and listen to her, my ears burning but my mouth unable to really tell her off. I can't tell her off because I can't truly pin down what off-color thing she said as being downright racist. But my ears burn and I feel the shame and embarrassment nonetheless.

So my thesis should really be about how the keyholders hear what they want to hear. And in Montana, they hear that Native Americans with cancer pain only want pain medications to sell for money or so they can get high. But I can't write that because it's all anecdotal and unscientific. I didn't set out to learn about more racism. I didn't set out to document all the different ways Indians are oppressed and shamed and tortured. So instead my thesis is about how similar Indians with cancer pain are to caucasians with cancer pain. They have pride, they worry about the rest of the community discovering that they take pain meds, they wonder why they were chosen to have cancer and if they will die before they are ready.

The shame of hearing and receiving ignorance burns my ears and my heart. Those bastards.