Transcript: Yvette Roubideaux, M.D.
Navajo medical students participate in ceremonies after dissection to comply with their traditional beliefs.
- [Robideaux:]
- Just extremely important that medical schools understand that for some very important purposes a Native American student may need to go home for a ceremony. One example is when they do anatomy lab with the cadavers, and for some tribes being around a dead body like that is against their culture and tradition, and so in the University of Arizona, the Navajo students would go home and have ceremonies, and the traditional healers would in a sense give them permission to go back, because their goal of becoming a physician was so important that they needed—that the traditional healers in a sense gave them permission to do the important work they needed to do, and so they would come back and they’d feel so much better, and then they’d be able to perform the work they needed to perform. So we would have to allow them to go home for a week or two to have that ceremony and be with their family. Then they’d come back, and then they’d be great.