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With pediatric expansion, Urban Indian Center of Salt Lake clinic breaks record number of patients
(ictnews.org)
This story was originally published by Utah News Dispatch.
Alixel Cabrera
Utah News Dispatch
Historically, the clinic at the Urban Indian Center of Salt Lake, a health and wellness institution for Native Americans living off-reservation, mostly focused on behavioral and diabetes programs. But that has changed and the numbers of patients visiting the facility are booming and surpassing historical highs.
Before unseasonal snow flurries fell on April 16, members of various tribes and from the health care community gathered outside the Murray clinic, walking in and out of a tepee installed for an open house to showcase the clinic expansion, and stopping by different tables promoting wellness resources. Others lined up outside the clinic waiting for their turn to tour the facility.
“Instead of outsourcing services to other partners, which is not a bad thing, we wanted to bring more of that in house and provide that whole person care,” Matt Poss, executive director of the center. “So we provide medical services here. We provide behavioral health, we provide family and community services. A lot of social service programs too.”
The clinic is now a center that, notably, includes primary and pediatric care, diagnostic imaging and an in-house pharmacy, in addition to other patient support services, such as medical referrals, Medicaid application assistance and transportation support.
Currently, the clinic serves about 150 people per month, the most patients the center has seen in its history, Poss said. That’s because of the recent expansion the center has recently undergone. About 10 percent to 20 percent of patients go in for pediatric care, a substantial expansion for the clinic.
Next July, the center will turn 52 years old. It initially was a walk-in resource center for those far away from an Indian Health Service facility, a mission that has been strengthened with the feedback from the community, Poss said.
At some point, Poss said, he’d like to explore updating the facilities as the building ages, making them bigger and better, and placing everything back in just one center, instead of the three locations it now has throughout the Salt Lake Valley.
In addition to health care services, the Urban Indian Center also organizes fitness and community events, and is often doing outreach to provide other health and wellness resources.
Anita Teller, the center’s elders services coordinator, organizes two events every month for the elder community.
“Our meetings are just to engage and it’s a safe place to meet, because a lot of our urban natives, elderly people, need a place to connect, a place of belonging,” Teller said while tending a booth promoting the program. “So that’s what I do, is making sure that I give them whatever I can to get them engaged, bring them out and make new friends, and just congregate and have a good time.”
Next to Teller, Penelope Pinnecoose, family and community services department manager at the center, gave out flyers advertising resources to help people quit tobacco.
She oversees the center’s youth and family programs and is often focused on commercial tobacco prevention and ceremonial and traditional tobacco awareness, including anti-vaping programming in Title VI schools, which provide American Indian education.
“We do have a high demand in our community, especially since commercial tobacco is higher in the American Indian, Alaska Native groups, due to whether it’s stress, whether it’s relating to some chronic conditions also,” she said. “So that’s why we try to educate, especially since our communities really, they may be trying to overcome health conditions, but (may be exacerbating them) if they’re smoking, or if they’re involved with some sort of substance.”
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Grist / Carrie Johnson
This story was originally published in Mongabay and appears here through the Indigenous News Alliance.
On the second day of the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, experts called attention to the ways Indigenous health is deeply tied to nature — and highlighted how health inequalities are compounded by environmental degradation, extractive activities, and climate change.
The forum’s focus on Indigenous health comes as a new study by former Permanent Forum member Geoffrey Roth, who is a Standing Rock Sioux descendant, argues that UN agencies’ fragmented approach — addressing health, environment, and land rights through separate mandates — has “consistently failed Indigenous Peoples.”
The study, presented as the forum opened its 25th session this week, positions environmental degradation, climate change, and biodiversity loss not as external pressures but as “direct manifestations of injury” to Indigenous well-being.
“For Indigenous peoples, health is deeply tied to the health of the land,” said Roth.
“It’s not just about access to clinics or medicine — it’s about clean water, healthy forests, traditional foods, and the ability to maintain cultural practices. When the environment is damaged — whether from mining, deforestation, pollution, or climate change — it directly affects people’s health.”
At the forum — which runs from April 20 to May 1 — many Indigenous leaders have spoken out about how the growing environmental crises increase the urgency to address their impacts on Indigenous health.
“Climate change is also another threat to our health,” said Minnie Grey, former executive director of the Nunavik Regional Board of Health and Social Services in “Canada’s” north.
“We are people of the Arctic: We need the ice, we need the snow, and we need the wildlife that depend on it. Our hunters and people rely on these animals that sustain our food systems and nutrition.”
A second study, also presented at the forum by former Permanent Forum members Hanieh Moghani, Hannah McGlade, and Geoffrey Roth, examines how armed conflicts disproportionately affect Indigenous Peoples, as they are frequently driven by competition over natural resources.
This leads to the displacement of Indigenous Peoples from ancestral lands and territories, the erosion of social and cultural cohesion, resource exploitation, and disruptions to agricultural livelihoods, leading to intergenerational health crises.
“These impacts add to existing inequalities, which is why Indigenous communities are often hit hardest,” he explained. “In that sense, environmental damage isn’t separate from health — it’s a major driver of it.”
By focusing on Indigenous health as separate from territories, waters, food systems, and culture, Roth said global health efforts have failed to address the structural drivers of health problems Indigenous peoples face, such as land dispossession, environmental degradation, cultural disruption, and the erosion of Indigenous governance.
Geoffrey Roth speaks at UNPFII. Carrie Johnson / Grist
The study emphasizes that climate change functions as a severe “risk multiplier” that intensifies pressures across biological, ecological, and social systems, with disproportionate impacts on Indigenous populations.
Extreme weather events, such as droughts and flooding, degrade water quality and availability, which raises the risk of waterborne diseases and undermines hygiene.
Furthermore, the climate crisis is driving severe mental health consequences in Indigenous communities.
Evidence links climate-related disasters and environmental loss to increased rates of depression, substance abuse, and emerging diagnoses like “ecological grief” and “climate anxiety,” particularly among Indigenous Youth who are watching their ancestral ecosystems change.
In Alaska, for example, severe storm events like Typhoon Halong have devastated coastal villages, resulting in the forced climate relocation of thousands of Indigenous people.
These relocations, driven by coastal erosion and thawing permafrost, cut communities off from their traditional food harvesting and weather forecasting systems, compounding their health vulnerabilities.
Biodiversity degradation, for instance, can impact food availability and therefore cause nutritional inequalities, chronic disease, and mental distress. In the Munduruku territory in Brazil, which is one of the lands that has been hardest hit by illegal mining in the country, the Indigenous Munduruku people face many health issues, even after a government-led operation to halt illegal mining in the territory.
Community members have reported a wide range of diseases linked to mercury pollution and ecological destruction caused by mining, including diarrhea, itchiness, flu, fever, childhood paralysis, and brain problems.
“The situation is even more serious for Indigenous peoples in voluntary isolation and initial contact,” said Ginny Alba Medina, an Indigenous leader and lawyer from OPIAC, the national organization for Colombia’s Amazon peoples.
“For them, the right to health begins with absolute respect for the principle of no contact. Any external intrusion can trigger lethal epidemics against which they have no immune defenses. Allowing extractive activities, armed presence, or territorial pressure in their territories poses an immediate threat to their physical and cultural survival.”
Roth added that what’s been missing “is a more connected approach — one that includes land, culture, and self-determination as central to health.” Roth said.
“Moving forward, UN agencies need to reduce fragmentation and work in a more coordinated way. You cannot improve Indigenous health in isolation. It requires aligning efforts across sectors and supporting Indigenous leadership within these systems.”
Just weeks before the forum kicked off at the UN headquarters in “New York,” Indigenous Batwa women and children in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, or DRC, sufferedfresh attacks by a group of armed men believed to belong to the Alliance Fleuve Congo and March 23 movement rebel groups.
These cases, which took place on March 5 in the country’s South Kivu province, are linked to a larger pattern of targeted violence against the Batwa people to gain control over their land and natural resources.
Conflicts in Indigenous territories are inherently an environmental and health crisis. As armed conflicts are frequently driven by competition over natural resources, Indigenous lands become strategic battlegrounds.
Analysts have pointed out that this escalating armed conflict in the DRC has had a significant and often overlooked impact on the environment. They highlight a sharp increase in deforestation since it broke out in late 2021, with an estimated 3,019 acres of tree cover lost in 2023. Between 2019 and 2022, the yearly average forest loss was 1,410 acres.
Advocates at the conference discussed how conflict can restrict Indigenous Peoples’ access to their lands, as they often must flee violence to protect themselves.
But without access to their lands, similar to biodiversity degradation, which is sometimes also generated by conflict, Indigenous communities may struggle to obtain access to nutritional foods, leading to health impacts and the weakening of social and spiritual cohesion, as Roth’s study on Indigenous health pointed out.
“These conflicts have immediate and long-term health impacts,” Roth said.
“Communities are displaced from their lands, access to healthcare is disrupted, and people face lasting trauma and stress. At the same time, the environment is damaged or destroyed — polluted water, deforestation, loss of food systems — which further undermines health.”
This is the situation Ngāti Tīpā peoples of Waikato Tainui Tribal Confederation in Tauranganui Marae, New Zealand, are facing.
“My great-great-grandmother said all the waters surrounding our community were once clean,” said Em-Haley Kūkūtai Walker, who is Ngāti Tīpā and an artist from the community. “We didn’t receive many floods, and our fisheries were healthy. Now, because of sea level rise into our river that is increasing salinity levels, fish are dying and moving elsewhere.”
Indigenous leaders at the forum, such as Wilton Littlechild, a Cree chief and lawyer defending treaty rights, argued that legal recognition for their territories is a foundational prerequisite to protect biodiversity and Indigenous health.
“Indigenous people have these treaties [and there is the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples], which are tools to protect their health,” said Littlechild.
This call was echoed by the World Health Organization in its draft Global Plan of Action, or GPA, on the health of Indigenous people, which called for supporting “Indigenous-led ecosystem stewardship and nature-based approaches that safeguard health.” On February 5, the WHO’s Executive Board decided to delay consideration of the GPA draft to 2027 to allow more time for consultation.
According to advocates, Indigenous health is completely inseparable from land tenure, biodiversity, food sovereignty, and self-determination, and this must be recognized by bodies such as the UN and the WHO.
Leaders warn that global climate and biodiversity goals cannot be met without Indigenous peoples. In a session about tying national obligations under UNDRIP, to health, Ruth Mercredi, an elder and a traditional healer in Yellowknife, said governments need to start prioritizing Indigenous health.
“Today, we are getting sick of the water, of the food, of the air,” said Mercredi. “Whatever we are putting in our bodies. We have to now be mindful of that when we didn’t have to before.”
The post Indigenous health can’t be separated from environmental health, leaders tell UN appeared first on Indiginews.
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