Native American & Indigenous Studies

Scholarship about health and medicine by and for Indigenous communities can be difficult to find in standard databases like PubMed that use outdated language to describe Indigenous peoples. The following are open access resources that work to improve the discoverability of scholarship related to Indigenous health and medicine.

When using major science and medicine databases, pay close attention to the search terms these databases use to describe Indigenous peoples and concepts. Often they will use the same types of language that the Library of Congress does, like "Indians, North American." PubMed also uses the phrase "American Indian and Alaska Native," a slightly narrower term meant to only include Indigenous peoples of the contiguous 48 states plus Alaska. Also be careful of alternate spellings when searching Indigenous communities by name.