UArizona INCATS Scholar Becomes One of the First Nursing Students Honored by the Stoklos Foundation

“It is really a great honor...There are not a lot of Native providers that specialize in psychiatric health," ~ Kimberly Yazzie, 2020 DNP-PMHNP Cohort; INCATS Scholar

“It is really a great honor,” Yazzie, a Phoenix resident who represents the Navajo, Hopi and Isleta Pueblo tribes, says. “I didn’t realize people were watching me enough to recommend me for an award.” As a member of a small group of Native students who are in UArizona Nursing’s DNP program, Yazzie believes her focus on mental health was one of the reasons she was nominated. “There are not a lot of native providers that specialize in psychiatric health,” she points out.

Growing up in Isleta, located about 15 miles south of Albuquerque, N.M., Yazzie had a unique exposure to a mix of rural and urban traditions. “I’m able to communicate with both sides and understand both the western and Native views,” Yazzie says. “I’m hoping that I can help combine them to help youth and young adults with their mental health.” After graduation this spring, she plans to further her goals by pursuing a career with Indian Health Services (IHS) at the Phoenix Indian Medical Center, ideally in the realm of telehealth. The backing of the M. Stoklos Education Foundation will help secure her licensure and ensure that the first steps of her professional career will be smooth.

That’s all part of the plan for Michael Stoklos, whose Foundation’s mission is to ensure students exit the educational pipeline into their careers as seamlessly as possible. Stoklos, who briefly attended the University of Arizona in 1972 as a University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee transfer student, began as a Wildlife Biology Etymology student but quickly found his calling as a professional photographer. Although he has called Tucson home since then, his storied career led him from passionately documenting the American west and its native citizens to serving as a transcontinental photojournalist that led him throughout Central America as a freelancer for such periodicals as Time.

The son of a doctor and a nurse, he had long held a deep appreciation for medical practitioners – both western and Native – but when a Diné healer from the western part of the Navajo Reservation contacted him in the early 90s, the beginnings of his philanthropic philosophy were set in motion. “He wanted somebody to document his life and he wanted to get the word out about medicine,” Stoklos says. “I was picked to be the documenter.”

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The work led to a wide range of native ceremonies, which Stoklos still attends to this day. “I had my western mind shredded,” he says. “I have an appreciation now of both science and medicine, both the traditional and the western. I’ve been privileged because I have a bit of the science and medical knowledge from my family and my own interests and I’m able to see it from that point of view.”

When Stoklos joined forces with his aunt, Mary Stoklos, in the late ‘90s to set up the M. Stoklos Foundation, the pair decided their efforts would benefit Native American medical students as a way of honoring both his father and the old medicine men who had been so instrumental in lighting his passion for alternative healing practices. In his 22-year involvement with the Foundation, he’s proud to have seen a pool of outstanding doctors graduate and begin impressive careers. “They’re doing amazing things in this country,” he says, pointing to students landing at such academic institutions as Stanford and Harvard. “Now we’re hoping to start the same thing on the nursing side.”

Relating how his mother was a ward nurse in 1940s Brooklyn when she met his father as a young doctor in the New York hospital system, he says, “I certainly know how important nurses are to anything being done in the hospitals.” When his mother passed in May 2021, he was moved by the wave of testimonials that flooded in from students she had cared for as a high school nurse. “I had hundreds of emails about how she had gotten them all through their various issues,” he says. As his awareness of the current nursing field grew, so did his desire to help Native students entering the profession. “When we learned more about nurse practitioners being so important out in the field, we decided that was the area that we will help out along with other nurses,” he says.

Stoklos is impressed by the amount of traditional medicine that is being practiced in Arizona. “It’s still active, it’s still alive,” he says, going on to reinforce his passion for holistic and alternative medicine. “It’s incorrect to call it alternative because when you’re with traditionalists they call their modern medicine, which is only some 200 years old. Native healers have been practicing for thousands of years and that seems to work. I’m proud that we still have that strength and heritage here, and our Foundation just wants to encourage it.”