Klukwan resident Shawna Hotch honored with award at American Public Health Association conference

Klukwan resident Shawna Hotch was recently honored with an award for “best masters-level abstract” for her research presented at the American Public Health Association’s annual conference. Hotch completed a masters degree in public health this year and currently serves as the tribal COVID liaison for the Chilkat Indian Village of Klukwan. KHNS’ Corinne Smith reports.

Shawna Hotch won the award from the nation’s leading public health organization last month for her research on readability of federal relief acts related to COVID-19 for tribal nations. 

“It just shows to me that there are people listening on the national stage about what I had to say, that it impacted them. And that just is really great news to me that Native issues are being prioritized,” Hotch said. 

The research project was born from her own experience working as part of Klukwan’s COVID response team. Part of that was coordinating federal relief funding and assistance.   

“As the Tribal COVID liaison, I help our tribal council and our community of Klukwan navigate through the federal relief acts. So we had the CARES Act funding, and then now we have the ARPA, or American Rescue Plan funding,” she said. “And at the same time, I was in my master’s of public health policy systems and environment and public health class.”

Hotch was in her first year of a master’s in public health program at North Dakota  Klukwan and immediately got involved in the COVID-19 pandemic response effort, coordinating her work and her public health classwork.

She says she was talking to her aunt who works for the region’s tribal health organization which was struggling with how to get information out to communities. 

“And she was talking about how a lot of our PSAs were kind of sometimes hard to read, because they were very specific and really technical. And that made me think like, well, how can I make it easier to read.”

She realized it was difficult to translate, because the federal guidelines around COVID-19 and spending relief funds were difficult to understand.

“So there was a disconnect between what the federal policy said and how to make it easier for our residents to understand,” she said. “And so I decided to review all of the guiding documents that the tribe had received from the Department of Treasury on how to use CARES Act funding for tribes. And I looked at their Flesch-Kincaid readability statistics. So that’s the grade level and reading ease.”

There’s a standardized readability test that measures difficulty in understanding a text, from zero to 100, with 100 being the easiest to read. A standard score on the Flesch-Kincaid test is between 60 to 70 or about an eighth grade reading level. 

“The seven guiding documents that tribes received was a 16.1. That means on average, you’d have to have at least a bachelor’s degree to understand it.”

Hotch’s research points to the ways education, literacy levels, and cultural differences can contribute to reduced capacities for tribal governments to navigate complex federal systems, and respond to the COVID pandemic. 

“So I have friends across the nation that are working on these CARES Act and ARPA funds,” Hotch said. “And there was a lot of hesitancy to even begin to touch these funds because a lot of tribes were scared they were gonna have to pay it back or use it incorrectly.”

She says there was a huge demand for technical assistance for CARES Act funds, and tribal governments were referred to hire a lawyer to understand the language, including Klukwan. That adds time, and it’s expensive, costing funds that could go toward critical community needs.

There are many ways to define literacy. About one in five US adults have low literacy skills, according to a 2019 study by the National Center for Education Statistics. 

“Disproportionate rates of low literacy are seen or observed in people who didn’t complete high school, or who speak another language, or who are living in poverty. And right now, that’s a lot of people,” she said. “Native people fit perfectly into that category. And that’s not something we want to fit into. But it definitely impacted our COVID response.”

Native communities across the country have been disproportionately impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. Persisting racism, historical traumas and disparities in housing, health, and employment have added to how the pandemic has played out in native communities. 

“Native people were three and a half times more likely to be infected with COVID than whites. Native people are four times more likely to be hospitalized than whites, and Native Americans have a higher rate of mortality among younger ages than whites. And whites are just the comparison group that most public health statistics use as a reference group.”

Hotch says it’s important for the federal government to address readability as a matter of health equity, and good public policy. She says the federal government has failed to uphold a law passed a decade ago – the Plain Language Act – which requires agencies to use clear communication that the public can understand and use. 

“The government in general, even if it’s not for Native populations, needs to write policy but understood by all because if it affects all of us,” Hotch said. “So even though my research pertains to just native policy, I think this could be applied to any kind of policy. We need to make sure that everybody can understand it, especially if it impacts the services and benefits that the population gets.”

Hotch says her future research will look at the current American Rescue Plan guidance text, and compare readability between the Trump and Biden administrations.

And in the meantime, she’s continuing work on a master’s degree in rural community development, and her work continues on the frontlines of public health in Klukwan.

 

(Correction: This article has been updated to better describe the demand for technical assistance for CARES ACT funds, and tribal governments, not just Klukwan, were advised to hire a lawyer to interpret and understand the language.)