front cover of Under the Rattlesnake
Under the Rattlesnake
Cherokee Health and Resiliency
Edited by Lisa J. Lefler, with a foreword by Susan Leading Fox
University of Alabama Press, 2009
Provides a balanced portrait of Cherokee health issues

For the Cherokee, health is more than the absence of disease; it includes a fully confident sense of a smooth life, peaceful existence, unhurried pace, and easy flow of time. The natural state of the world is to be neutral, balanced, with a similarly gently flowing pattern. States of imbalance, tension, or agitation are indicative of physical, mental, emotional, or spiritual illness and whether caused intentionally through omission or commission, or by outside actions or influences, the result affects and endangers the collective Cherokee.
 
Taking a true anthropological four-field approach, Lefler and her colleagues provide a balanced portrait of Cherokee health issues. Topics covered include: an understanding of the personal and spiritual impact of skeletal research among the Cherokee; the adverse reactions to be expected in well-meaning attempts to practice bioarchaeology; health, diet, and the relationship between diet and disease; linguistic analysis of Cherokee language in historical and contemporary contexts describing the relationship of the people to the cosmos; culturally appropriate holistic approaches to disease prevention and intervention methodologies; and the importance of the sacred feminine and the use of myth and symbolism within this matrilineal culture. All aspects—physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual—figure into the Cherokee concept of good health. By providing insight into the Cherokee perspective on health, wellness, and the end of the life cycle, and by incorporating appropriate protocol and language, this work reveals the necessity of a diversity of approaches in working with all indigenous populations.
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front cover of Unwell Writing Centers
Unwell Writing Centers
Searching for Wellness in Neoliberal Educational Institutions and Beyond
Genie Nicole Giaimo
Utah State University Press, 2022
Unwell Writing Centers focuses on the inroads the wellness industry has made into higher education. Following graduate and undergraduate writing tutors during a particularly stressful period (2016–2019), Genie Nicole Giaimo examines how top-down and bottom-up wellness interventions are received and taken up by workers. Engaging sociocultural research on how workers react to and experience workplace conflict, Giaimo demonstrates the kinds of interventions welcomed by workers as well as those that fall flat, including the “easy” fixes to workplace issues that institutions provide in lieu of meaningful and community-based support.
 
The book is broken into sections based on journeying: searching for wellness, finding wellness, and imagining a “well” future that includes a sustainable model of writing center work. Each chapter begins with a personal narrative about wellness issues in writing centers, including the author’s experiences in and responses to local emergencies. She shares findings from a longitudinal assessment study on non-institutional interventions in writing centers and provides resources for administrators to create more ethical "well" writing centers. The book also includes an appendix of training documents, emergency planning documents, and several wellness-specific interventions developed from anti-racist, anti-neoliberal, and organizational theories.
 
Establishing the need for a field-specific response to the austerity-minded eruption of wellness-focused interventions in higher education, Unwell Writing Centers is a critical text for graduate students and new directors that can easily be applied in workplaces in and outside of higher education.
 
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