Working in a Native American Community and Chronic Disease Prevention

A large part of my work is chronic disease prevention within a Native American community. What I have learned, both professionally and personally, is that many modern conveniences are a major driver of chronic disease. This is not a rejection of technology. It is a recognition of its cost.

Comfort, efficiency, and labor-saving tools often remove the very movements and stresses that kept human bodies resilient for thousands of years. In the process, we often throw the baby out with the bathwater. Traditional ways of knowing and older methods of living were not primitive. They were refined through lived experience, long before technology insulated us from consequence.

Working for a Native American tribe has given me the rare opportunity to see this firsthand. I see the struggle many Native people face as traditional lifeways collide with modern systems that reward convenience but quietly undermine health. I also recognize this struggle in my own family history. My father was a craftsman in the 1960s, deeply committed to making things by hand. He battled large corporations, mass production, and a culture that increasingly valued speed and profit over integrity and craft. Balancing those worlds is not easy.

There are certainly areas where technology is beneficial and even necessary. But labor-saving does not always mean health-saving. Often it means the opposite.

A simple example is wood processing. If you are cutting down massive trees all day, a chainsaw is the right tool. But if you are splitting your own firewood for home use, replacing physical work with a machine removes an important form of functional movement. Swinging an axe is not just about efficiency. It builds strength, coordination, timing, and endurance. When you outsource that work to a motor, you lose more than calories burned.

The same pattern shows up with footwear. Modern shoes are a form of technology. Highly cushioned, rigid, and expensive running shoes often weaken the feet rather than protect them. Minimal shoes or barefoot movement strengthens the foot, improves balance, and reconnects the body to the ground. Weak feet contribute to ankle, knee, hip, and even back problems. This is not theoretical. It is a biomechanical reality.

Back pain offers another clear example. Sitting for long periods weakens the glutes and the posterior chain. When those muscles atrophy, they stop doing their job. The body compensates elsewhere, and pain follows. This is not a mystery. It is the predictable outcome of removing movement from daily life.

All of this ties directly to an idea I once wrote about called the inner accountant. The body is efficient. If you do not use a muscle, it does not maintain it. That efficiency keeps us alive in harsh conditions, but it works against us in a world designed to minimize effort. When movement is optional, the body assumes it is unnecessary.

This is where indigenous ways of knowing matter. They are not nostalgic. They are practical systems that embed movement, effort, and skill into daily life. Tai chi, bushcraft, traditional food preparation, walking, carrying, lifting, and working with the hands all serve the same purpose. They keep the body honest.

The unifying idea is simple. Health is not created in the gym. It is created through daily interaction with the world. When technology removes that interaction, disease fills the gap.

The old ways were not anti-progress. They were pro-resilience. And in a time of chronic disease, they may be exactly what we need to remember.

From a chronic disease prevention perspective, tai chi and bushcraft address the same root problem: the gradual removal of meaningful movement from daily life. Conditions like diabetes, joint degeneration, chronic pain, and balance loss are not simply the result of poor choices; they are the predictable outcome of lives structured around comfort and efficiency. Tai chi restores coordination, balance, joint integrity, and nervous system regulation in a low-impact, accessible way. Bushcraft restores strength, load tolerance, and confidence through real, purposeful work. Together, they rebuild the physical capacities that modern life erodes—without requiring gyms, machines, or high-risk intensity. This is why these practices are not alternatives to public health efforts; they are foundational to them. They quietly reintroduce the kinds of movement, attention, and self-reliance that once prevented chronic disease before it needed to be treated.

Humans Need Something to Do With Their Hands

 

Depression and anxiety are often talked about as personal failures or chemical imbalances that need to be corrected. But I think there’s another layer that rarely gets enough attention. For nearly all of human history, people were occupied for most of their waking hours with physical, tangible work. We grew food. We hunted. We built shelters. We made tools. We repaired what broke. Our survival depended on daily engagement with the physical world.

That reality has changed radically in a very short span of time. In the last fifty years, large portions of the population no longer need to do much with their bodies or their hands to survive. Yet paradoxically, we are more mentally overstimulated and stressed than ever.

I notice this very clearly in my own life. When I am the most anxious or depressed, it is almost always when I am sitting still, mentally spinning. My mind starts running endless scenarios, what-ifs, regrets, and imagined futures. None of it is productive. None of it is grounded. It’s just noise.

The moment I pick up a craft, something changes.

When I start carving wood, cooking, fixing something, or engaging in physical movement, the mental clutter quiets down. My attention narrows. The hands take over. The mind no longer has the bandwidth to spiral. It isn’t forced into silence; it is occupied.

Occupation as Regulation

This isn’t about productivity or hustle. It’s about regulation. Humans evolved to regulate their nervous systems through physical engagement with the world. Making, moving, lifting, shaping, walking, tending. These activities give the mind a place to rest because attention has somewhere to go.

I often think about autoimmune disease as a loose metaphor here. In overly sterile environments, the immune system sometimes loses its appropriate targets and begins attacking the body itself. I am not saying all autoimmune disease works this way, or that everyone with autoimmune illness is idle. But I do think the pervasiveness of sterile, low-engagement environments has consequences for biological systems that evolved in a very different context.

The mind may not be that different.

When it has nothing meaningful to do, it often turns inward and begins attacking itself. Rumination, self-criticism, catastrophic thinking. Not because the person is weak, but because the system is under-used in the way it evolved to function.

A World That Doesn’t Need You, But Still Stresses You

We now live in a strange contradiction. The world does not require much from our bodies, yet it demands constant mental vigilance. Emails. Deadlines. News cycles. Financial anxiety. Abstract stress with no physical outlet.

Unless you have Zen-level mental discipline, this is a brutal setup.

I wish my mind were strong enough to simply will its way through this. I do believe that kind of training is possible, and I work toward it. But I also think it’s important to be honest about what humans actually need. For most of history, we didn’t meditate our way out of stress. We worked it out through physical engagement.

We whittled. We cooked. We built. We repaired. I honestly don’t know if there has ever been a time when humans weren’t doing this, until now.

Keeping Your Head Together

This isn’t about the root cause of depression. It isn’t about dismissing therapy, medication, or deeper psychological work. It’s about something much more basic.

Keeping yourself occupied in a tangible way is a form of mental hygiene.

Using your hands calms the mind. Moving the body organizes attention. Making something creates feedback, satisfaction, and a sense of completion that abstract tasks rarely provide. Sometimes that turns into gifts. Sometimes it turns into skills. Occasionally, it even turns into a career. But that’s not the point.

The point is simpler.

Staying human in a world that increasingly asks you to be disembodied requires intention. Craft and physical activity are not hobbies in that context. They are stabilizers. They are ways of staying sane. They are ways of keeping your head together.

And for a species that evolved by doing, there might not be a better way to stay grounded.

Carving a Spoon and the Importance of Listening

Spoon carving has taught me a lot about balance—specifically, the balance between direction and intent.

When you decide to carve a spoon, certain things are non-negotiable. It needs a cavity. It has to fit comfortably in the mouth. It has to feel good in the hand. It needs to be light enough to use, not clunky or awkward. In that sense, form really does follow function. There are clear outcomes that have to be met.

But within those constraints, there’s another force at work: the wood itself.

Most of the time, I don’t get to choose the “ideal” carving wood. I work with what I have access to. Right now, that’s Siberian elm, a beautiful but stubborn wood that doesn’t shave easily and doesn’t forgive mistakes. It doesn’t like symmetry. It doesn’t like being forced. Because of that, I have to compromise my original vision. I have to let go of perfection. The grain, the knots, the tension in the fibers all start to dictate the direction.

The wood tells you how it wants to be carved, if you’re willing to listen.

That’s one reason I don’t always connect with highly detailed carvings made from very soft, cooperative woods. They can be impressive, even technically masterful, but when the material is so malleable that you can impose anything onto it, something gets lost. My preference is to work in collaboration with the material, not domination over it. I like hearing what the wood has to say.

What’s interesting is how closely this mirrors the way I like working with people—especially kids.

I don’t believe in dictating outcomes or forcing people into a shape that fits my idea of success. I prefer guidance over control. Structure with flexibility. Listening over imposing. This feels especially important to me as a non-Native person working with Native American children, given the history of boarding schools and the horrific attempts to erase culture by making children “malleable.” That history matters. It demands a different approach.

There are still goals. There are still outcomes. But they come second to agency. The kids guide the process more than we often allow in institutional settings. Just like the wood, they aren’t raw material to be shaped; they’re active participants in becoming.

Spoon carving reinforces that lesson every time I pick up a knife.

I love carving spoons because they’re functional. They aren’t abstract objects. They have a purpose and a set of criteria they must meet. And yet, within those limits, there’s infinite variation. A handmade eating spoon carries character. You feel it while carving: the feedback between your hands, the blade, and the grain. Every small decision matters.

That’s very different from a mass-produced spoon. Whether it’s metal or wood, machine-made utensils are dictated, repeatable, and anonymous. They work, but they don’t speak.

As we move deeper into an era of AI, CNC machines, and automated design, that distinction matters to me. Spoon carving is a moment-to-moment conversation. It requires attention, humility, and responsiveness. You adjust constantly. You listen. You make thousands of tiny decisions based on feel, resistance, and feedback.

At least for now, that kind of listening still belongs to human hands.

And maybe that’s the deeper wisdom of spoon carving, not just making something useful, but practicing how to pay attention, how to compromise without giving up purpose, and how to work with the world instead of trying to overwrite it.