NATIVE NEWS ONLINE – It was the first year of the new millennium, and Abigail Echo Hawk was 19 years old, pregnant, and terrified. The then-teen—a citizen of the Pawnee Nation of Oklahoma—followed her sister to Seattle, from where they grew up in Alaska, for medical care. She had her first appointment at one of the largest birthing hospitals in the city, what is now Swedish Medical Hospital. A medical assistant, scanning Echo Hawk’s chart, asked if she was Native American. “I said yes, and she automatically started treating me differently,” Echo Hawk remembers, two decades later.”
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