Many modern day Native Americans in the U.S. have multiple roots, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous.
That lived experience often leaves them looking for a way to strengthen or even rebuild a connection with that Indigenous lineage in an authentic way, part of what Kyle Lakatos, MD, MPP, MSc, calls a “reconnection journey.”
The recent UC San Francisco graduate is one of those people himself, both half Jewish and a descendant of the Pawnee and Cheyenne nations.
“We have people who come from all different walks of life in the Bay Area,” he said. “In the Indigenous community, there are people who have come here by choice, by force, people who live on reservations or people who have no connections to their ancestral roots. My family was disconnected from my grandfather. I never met him. That’s where my Native American heritage is.”