In the middle of tensions about HHS cuts, Kennedy meets with the trunk leader

The moment the health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was supposed to enter the stage, the governor of the Indian community Gila River was still on the podium and articulated his discomfort in relation to the recent movements of the Trump management.

“Let me repeat: We have spent a large part of this year to clarify why tribes have a political status that is not dei,” said governor Stephen Roe Lewis to a room of 1,200 people who clapped and cheered.

When it comes to cuts that have been applied for according to the so -called Department of Government Efficiency, “we need a scalpel and no chainsaw approach to make these changes,” he said.

The Gila River Wild Horse Pass Resort and Casino in Chandler, Arizona, owned by two tribes and operated, was the latest stop at Mr. Kennedy’s Make American Healthy tour through three southwestern countries. Mr. Kennedy was at the tribal self-administration conference, an event that celebrates 50 years of tribal sovereignty as part of the law on self-determination and educational aid.

The law adopted by the 1975 Congress was a relocation from the control of the federal government so that local communities were able to carry out their own programs based on their unique cultural needs.

For a long time, Mr. Kennedy has expressed a special zeal to improve tribal health and quoted the long history of his family, his childhood tour into the Indian reservations and parts of his own environmental career.

But the encounter came at an uncomfortable moment. The agency of Mr. Kennedy has released high -ranking consultants for tribal issues at the Federal Administration for Children and Families, ending employees of the initiative for healthy tribes of Centers for Disease and Prevention of Prevention and closed five regional offices that served the large swaths of the indigenous population.

Mr. Kennedy’s most recent decision to assign high -ranking civil servants to the remote Indian health services seemed much more than a kind of political exile than a serious attempt to support local groups.

When Mr. Kennedy was greeted on stage – pink and yellow lights that whirled through the auditorium – he made sure to shake hands with every trunk leader at the table. He opened the discussion by announcing that parts of the Indian health service would be freed from several recently carried out orders.

The sound was collegial because the officials discussed strategies to improve the health of tribal communities, often with consensus. Mr. Kennedy described his concerns about the high obesity rates between local groups. “If we really change public health in the reservations and end this crisis, we have to address the crisis, their food systems,” he told the tribal official. His words were met with applause.

Nevertheless, there were moments of separation. Mr. Kennedy turned into stories about his childhood and quoted Powwows on Martha’s vineyard, in which his father brought him to try “some of the best oysters”.

And then there was an announcement that Mr. Kennedy had planned to test indigenous groups of “robot medical sisters” -AI votes that could serve as a replacement for human health care by calling patients as a way to circumvent the challenges in the provision of health care.

“We will try to arrange such systems in the Indian country – we want to produce Indian country pilot programs for this type of systems,” he said, triggering Boos from the crowd.

“Well,” he added, “there are some places that have no access to doctors. These are remote places, for example in Alaska.”

The work of Mr. Kennedy on behalf of the indigenous communities dates from the 1990s when he represented various groups in negotiations on the ceasing of construction projects, oil development and industrial protocol in several countries. Today he was also one of the first editors of the largest American newspaper in North America, Indian Country.

At his hearing for confirmation, Mr. Kennedy referred to a multi -fashioned frustration in health care for tribal groups. He said that his father, Robert F. Kennedy, and Uncle, President John F. Kennedy, “was deeply critical of the function of the Indian health service from 1968 to 1980 and nothing has changed. Nothing has gotten better,” he said.

In an exchange with Senator Lisa Murkowski, Republican of Alaska, Schwor Kennedy, to install a local guide at the department of deputy secretary in the department and to fight unique cultural and logistical challenges in order to supply stems such as telemedical strains with high health care.

But Ms. Murkowski stuck a number of health problems in which the American indigenous people fell far behind other ethnic groups, including depression, substance use, high blood pressure and stroke. She also rattled infectious diseases that the groups have proven to be susceptible to – hepatitis A, hepatitis B, meningitis, whooping cough and measles – and asked Mr. Kennedy to use his influence to build up trust in vaccines.

He did not address this request directly.

On Tuesday, Mr. Kennedy also visited the Native Health, a state -qualified health center that serves the American indigenous people in the Phoenix area over four basic care clinics and a food chamber of food to help patients with diabetes prepare indigenous recipes.

The secretaries’ employees said his tour would make more tribal groups, including a visit on Wednesday in a charter school in New Mexico, which mainly make local students and a hike with leaders of the Navajo nation.

Mr. Kennedy ended the day with a press conference in the Arizona State Capitol, where he defended the reaction of his agency to the ongoing measles outbreak in West Texas by describing him as the “model for the rest of the world”.

When a reporter approached the microphone and asked about the MMR vaccine, the reporter was booed by parents and other participants, some of which demanded that the journalist were removed from the room.