Tara Maudrie

• PhD in Social and Behavioral Interventions
• Incoming (Fall 2025) Assistant Professor at University of Michigan

Objective: Explore the relationship between diabetes-related psychosocial outcomes and food stress in American Indian communities. Design: Convergence model of a mixed methods triangulation study. Setting: Five American Indian reservation communities in the Midwest. Participants: One-hundred ninety-two participants were randomly selected fro...

Previous research in American Indian and Alaska Native (AI/AN) communities has documented high prevalence of food insecurity. Yet many AI/AN scholars and communities have expressed concerns that the dominant societal conceptions of food security are not reflective of the teachings, priorities, and values of AI/AN communities. Food security initiati...

Mainstream approaches to nutrition typically focus on diet consumption, overlooking multi-dimensional aspects of nutrition that are important to American Indian/Alaska Native (AI/AN) communities. To address health challenges faced by AI/AN communities, strengths-based measures of nutrition grounded in community worldviews are needed. In collaborati...

Introduction American Indian and Alaska Native (AIAN) communities continue to flourish and innovate in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic. Storytelling is an important tradition for AIAN communities that can function as an intervention modality. To support the needs of AIAN children and caregivers, we (a collaborative workgroup of Indigenous health...

Intergenerational connectedness broadly encompasses relations among humans, lands, and all living and spiritual beings, and functions as an important part of Indigenous well-being. Many public health campaigns and interventions aim to promote connectedness to support holistic wellness and reduce health inequities. Currently, however, there are no m...

Life expectancy among American Indians and Alaska Natives (AI/ANs) has declined from 72 years in 2019 to 68 years in 2021. This current life expectancy for AI/ANs is equivalent to the overall life expectancy in the United States population in the 1940s. The significant and persistent nature of AI/AN health inequities, and the lack of clarity around...

Food insecurity and access to healthy nutritious foods are ongoing issues for urban Indigenous communities across the United States. This manuscript describes a qualitative evaluation of a produce box program implemented by the Native American Community Clinic in Minneapolis and provides recommendations for sustainability of the program in the futu...

Objective: American Indian/Alaska Native (AI/AN) communities experience critical health inequities in the United States. In American mental health research, these inequities are defined by disorders classified in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). Therefore, it is vital to the pursuit of health equity to understand how...

Introduction The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated mental health concerns and stress among American Indians and Alaska Natives (AI/ANs) in the United States, as well as among frontline workers responding to the pandemic. Psychological First Aid (PFA) is a promising intervention to support mental wellbeing and coping skills during and after traumatic ev...

Background and Objectives:There has been a prevailing but erroneous belief in the medical community that there is a biological vulnerability in the American Indian/Alaskan Native (AI/AN) community to substance use disorders (SUDs), with alcohol use disorder (AUD) being the most prevalent. This scoping review aimed to examine what possible psychosoc...

Settler colonialism disrupted traditional Indigenous foodways and practices and created high rates of diet-related disease among Indigenous peoples. Food sovereignty, the rights of Indigenous peoples to determine their own food systems, is a culturally centered movement rooted in traditional Indigenous knowledge. This approach directly intervenes u...

The Center for Indigenous Innovation and Health Equity (CIIHE) at Oklahoma State University Center for Health Sciences (OSU-CHS) is a community–academic partnership with Indigenous peoples from Alaska, Hawai’i, and Oklahoma. The CIIHE supports communities to strengthen traditional food practices and food sovereignty and evaluate the impact of those...

Access to healthy and appealing food is essential for individuals to be able to live a healthy and quality life. For decades, food security has been a priority issue for public health professionals. Food sovereignty expands upon the concept of food insecurity (i.e., having access to nutritious and culturally relevant food) by incorporating people’s...

Background Inequities in access, availability, and affordability of nutritious foods produced by settler colonialism contribute to high rates of food insecurity among American Indian and Alaska Native (AI/AN) households. Efforts to understand the influences of food security programming among AI/AN individuals in the United States are constrained by...

Background In recent years public health research has shifted to more strengths or asset-based approaches to health research but there is little understanding of what this concept means to Indigenous researchers. Therefore our purpose was to define an Indigenous strengths-based approach to health and well-being research. Methods Using Group Concep...

Urban American Indian/Alaska Native peoples experience disproportionate levels of food insecurity when compared to the general US population. Through a collaborative research partnership between Native American Lifelines of Baltimore, an Urban Indian Health Program, and a Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health student-led research team, fo...

The coronavirus disease 19 (COVID-19) pandemic is broadly affecting the mental health and well-being of people around the world, and disproportionately affecting some groups with already pre-existing health inequities. Two groups at greater risk of physical and/or mental health detriments from COVID-19 and more profoundly impacted by the pandemic i...

Globally, Indigenous communities, leaders, mental health providers, and scholars have called for strengths-based approaches to mental health that align with Indigenous and holistic concepts of health and wellness. We applied the Indigenist Ecological Systems Model to strengths-based case examples of Indigenous youth mental health and wellness work...

Background: Obesity and chronic disease rates continue to be disproportionally high among Native Americans (NAs) compared with the US general population. Policy, systems, and environmental (PSE) changes can address the root causes of these health inequalities by supporting access to healthy food and physical activity resources. Objective: We aim...

Objective To increase vegetable and fruit intake, reduce body mass index (BMI), and improve parental blood pressure among American Indian families. Design Randomized, wait-list controlled trial testing a multi-level (environmental, community, family, and individual) multi-component intervention with data collection at baseline and 6 months post-in...

Food insecurity, defined as insufficient access to nutritious foods, is a social determinant of health that may underpin health disparities in the U.S. American Indian and Alaska Native (AI/AN) individuals experience many health inequities that may be related to food insecurity, but no systematic analyses of the existing evidence have been publishe...

This study utilized baseline data collected in 2017 from the OPREVENT2 trial, which included 540 Native Americans in six Midwest and Southwest reservation communities. The objective was to identify correlates of fruit, vegetable, and dietary fiber adequacy among participants 18–75 years old who self-identified as the main food purchaser or preparer...

Food insecurity, defined as a lack of stable access to sufficient and nutritious food, is a global public health priority due to its relationships with diminished mental and physical human health. Indigenous communities experience disproportionality high rates of food insecurity as a byproduct of settler-colonial activities, which included forced r...

Indigenous food sovereignty (IFS) represents a community led movement with potential to reduce health inequities, but no scoping review of the impact of taking an IFS approach on intervention research has been conducted. This review sought to (1) describe intervention studies that employ IFS principles and (2) describe the impact of studies using I...

Indigenous food sovereignty (IFS) represents a community led movement with potential to reduce health inequities, but no scoping review of the impact of taking an IFS approach on intervention research has been conducted. This review sought to (1) describe intervention studies that employ IFS principles and (2) describe the impact of studies using I...

Objectives To assess impact of a multi-level, multi-component (MLMC) intervention on dietary intake in Native American adults. Methods A MLMC obesity intervention ([blinded for review]) was implemented among Native American adults in six rural tribal communities in the US Southwest and Midwest. [Blinded for review] included institutional level com...

The traditions, strengths, and resilience of communities have carried Indigenous peoples for generations. However, collective traumatic memories of past infectious diseases and the current impact of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic in many Indigenous communities point to the need for Indigenous strengths-based public health resource...

The COVID-19 pandemic has raised national consciousness about health inequities that disproportionately impact American Indian/Alaska Native (AI/AN) communities, yet urban AI/AN communities continue to remain a blind spot for health leaders and policymakers. While all United States cities have been the traditional homelands of AI/AN peoples since t...

The COVID-19 pandemic has had disproportionately severe impacts on Indigenous peoples in the United States compared to non-Indigenous populations. In addition to the threat of viral infection, COVID-19 poses increased risk for psychosocial stress that may widen already existing physical, mental, and behavioral health inequities experienced by Indig...

Objectives: Research shows that social media (SM) is a promising platform for promoting healthy nutrition and physical activity (PA) behaviors, especially for sharing goals, successes, and challenges with others to foster community support. However, there is inadequate evidence exploring its use in Native American (NA) adults, who are 60% more like...

Objectives Research shows that social media (SM) is a promising platform for promoting healthy nutrition and physical activity (PA) behaviors, especially for sharing goals, successes, and challenges with others to foster community support. However, there is inadequate evidence exploring its use in Native American (NA) adults, who are 60% more likel...