Mackenzie Jones  0:00  
  Thank you for joining us for this episode of talking health in the 406, where we are one community under the big sky. I'm your host, Mackenzie Jones advocate of disability inclusion, accessibility and health. For this episode, we're going to hear from Orville and Debbie Desjarlais. They are a brother and sister duo that combined their skills in journalism and design and their passion for health and native culture to create the nationwide magazine, Native Wellness Life. Let's listen to their story.

 So I read that you didn't start working together as a duo until 2018. How did that come about? Later in life,

Orville Desjarlais  0:49  
oh, we're both doing our own things. I was. I was in the Air Force when I joined when I was like 23 years old. And then went into magazines and went to newspapers first and magazines and got into the publishing field. And I just did my own thing there. I missed a lot of culture and a lot of Native American ceremonies, and actually congratulations and everything else. But while I was doing that, it was on her own doing her own thing. What were you doing, during that time that we were both formulating our skill sets? Yeah.

Debbie Desjarlais  1:24  
When I got my graphic design degree, I was working in the Twin Cities with 3M company working in the non native world. And then I moved over to working with Native Americans and loved it. And I was doing a little bit of marketing and business development. And with that, I was able to move to Montana and wanted to figure something else out for myself. And that's kind of where my brother and I started talking and said, hey, you know, let's, let's figure out how we can work together. And at the time, I was doing a bunch of newsletters for different organizations, different tribal organizations around here. And so we're like, hey, let's start a magazine, a health related magazine. And so that's kind of how we got started by by then. My brother was retired. And, and him being a writer and me being a graphic designer, seemed like a good fit. But we had no clue. We had no clue how we'd work together. No, we

Orville Desjarlais  2:27  
did not. But we worked well together as children. We did a lot of stuff as kids, we

Debbie Desjarlais  2:33  
did him being the imagination of everything. And I mean, he was kind of the head leader of us growing up. So now you know, with him and I work in together. He's the idea, man, he has a big picture, big picture. And lots of ideas. And I'm kind of the not only designed but I can execute like nobody's business. So us too together. It's just, it's just been, it's been wonderful. It's been great working with my brother, it's cool being in a business with him, because then it makes it real. And then we can bounce ideas off of each other and formulate what direction we want to go. And we're always pivoting and moving and changing. And it just makes it really fun.

Orville Desjarlais  3:19  
Our two skill sets seem to complement each other mine written in hers visual, and we just worked well together, we're on the same wavelength, all the time. And it's just a lot of fun. For us. It's our passion, what we're doing is not only the business, which is the hardest part, but the joy we get out of it from doing what we do individually. It's really rewarding. I just love what I do. So does Deb and you can tell by just looking at our product, looking at our magazines, the smells that we kind of kind of love what we do?

Mackenzie Jones  3:51  
Thank you for sharing that. Can you tell me a little bit more about the specific roles that you each take when creating each issue of the magazine?

Orville Desjarlais  4:01  
That's kind of interesting, because we look at it. From a different point of view, we have to plan each month and each a monthly magazine is rarely very hard. It's a grind. And you're always meeting deadlines in the publishing industry. And for a monthly magazine, you're starting one, you're printing one, you're already gotten another one goin'. And you're looking down the road. Another story idea. So we start out with a strategy of the themes that we want for each magazine. The themes is what we just talked about all the time. What's our theme going to be for this month? And then what's the possible cover? What kind of stories do we need in that, and that just takes a lot of strategy, a lot of planning, and we plan that out. And then we have a process that we put in place that we've been working on for five years. We turned five years this year. And during that time, we've learned a lot. The best part was learning our process, learning our timelines, and meeting our deadlines. It's become a lot easier after five years of doing that, but The process is the idea stage and other strategy meetings, and then writing it. And then I'll give the written document to Deb, she looks at it and does all her research for designing it. And then it goes into the layout stage that she does. She's our only graphic person there. And she does a lot of work. And it's really hard work to, you want to explain somebody who has challenges and graphic stuff, because there's a lot there.

Debbie Desjarlais  5:29  
There is. So my brother is in Texas, I'm in Billings, Montana. So everything's online, or talking on the phone or Zoom calls. And so when he gives me the what we're going to write that month, it's in a Word document, there's no pictures, there's nothing. And so it's gotten easier in the last five years, because now I have a bank of things with different issues that I've designed front to back 16 to 20 pages. But um, but when I get it from him, it's just the word doc. And so that's where the imagination comes in. And a lot of his stories are there. They're real life stories of things that have happened in our lives or people he's interviewed. And when my brother writes, he writes from the heart. And so I'll say probably, but every couple months, he 'll have me crying, he'll send me that Word doc. And it's just touching. And it's written to help our people, but also it's, it's emotional. And so when you get those, you can't just throw those words on a page and then be done with it. I mean, I have to do my research to to be up to the level where my brother's at. And he brings me up to a level that I didn't know I could even achieve. So it's just like, okay, so I'll, I'll design to the level of what I get. And it's so much fun, because then when I'm done with it, it's nothing I even knew I could do. And then I send it back to him. And he's like, whoa, but I'm like, Well, you're the one who wrote the emotional story, you know? So yeah, so we push each other to I think a higher level each time. And it's and that's that's the beauty of it. And then it goes to then we have a proof proofreader. Now we have a couple that go through it, and then it comes back to we make changes and then we send it to our, our printer. That's pretty much our process.

Mackenzie Jones  7:27  
How is your team made up? Are they all native people? Do you have a specific interest when you are inviting people to support this magazine?

Orville Desjarlais  7:39  
That's a pretty good question. Because the magazine has a different perspective, the different perspective is cultural heritage. And we that's what we like to promote. And that's what grabs the eyeballs for people to look at the cover, and they want to pick it up and take it home. And that's what we're trying to do. We're trying to get into people's homes, but there's multi generations living there, and can enjoy the information and education that we're offering in there. What we've learned is that cultural heritage is not something you can learn, you can have a PhD in Native studies. But if you're not Native American, you just don't have that information as you vitally need, the perspective that you need to do the kind of writing that we like, from a Native American perspective coming from a Native American person. It's just something that you can't, I don't think it's something that you can internalize and live by, unless you actually are one. So that goes into everything that we do. This magazine has a Native perspective, everything we're doing, we're going into advertising and marketing, we're going to talk about that later. But that perspective that we have, is what Native Americans have in their heads. So that's why I identify with our magazine so much, or make it seem so identifiable that when they buy the magazine subscription for one year, our reach up rate for re subscriptions is like 95%, unheard of in the magazine, and in fact unheard of almost in any to have somebody order a product and 95% re upgrade is just amazing. So whenever we're doing seems to be working. So I guess the more indigenous writers that we have, the better it is for us. And it's not racial. It's just a fact of like, if we were going to be doing this health wellness magazine in Puerto Rico, we wouldn't be the one for it. Right? Because Puerto Rican culture is so much different. They look at things so much differently. And

Debbie Desjarlais  9:34  
within the last couple years, we've been able to add contract writers across the nation, and majority of them are women in their, like 30s to 60s, I'd say that are helping us. And so that's been really fun. It's for me to be able to read what they write and to design to it. So it's just We're just adding more into our mix of different things we do. But yeah, so that's been, that's kind of how we've changed. So and we have I'd say like, what, eight to 10 contract writers right now, we're

Orville Desjarlais  10:13  
about eight to 10 contract writers. So I was looking for more, if anybody's interested contact us. We're looking for diversity. There's 574 tribes. So, you know, I'm not gonna say what do you find 574 different writers. But that's a different perspective that each one of them bring that adds value to our magazine. And learning about other tribes is just amazing. Like I said, I was away from the native culture for a long time being in the military. Coming back, it helped me reintroduce myself to my own culture and heritage, which has been just very, very rewarding. But if you think about it, even if you're, even if you just know your own culture, from your own tribe, there's 573 other tribes to learn about. And I like to say there's, that's 574 different ways of doing things, right. They all do some a little bit different, a little bit unique. And it's really interested in learning about that kind of stuff. And that's kind of perspectives. We like coming from our writers, and everybody else who works for our

Debbie Desjarlais  11:09  
magazine on we do have a writer that's down in Navajo country. So, so that's kind of cool. Just down south, we like Yeah, we like different perspectives, for sure.

Mackenzie Jones  11:20  
So I've heard you mentioned culture and heritage, a lot. And I have what I'm feeling is that that is really, really important to you rediscovering your Native Heritage, as well as for the purpose of this magazine. So this is a health and wellness magazine, I think, at the surface, but there's so much more to that. Can you explain a little bit more why culture and heritage is so important to the health and wellness of native people?

Debbie Desjarlais  11:51  
What we found out, and what my brother has taught me also, because I'd never designed a magazine before until I did this. And so it's just been a dream come true, right there, but was adding color, a ton of color. So when they first started the magazine, in my mind, I thought, okay, it's a Native American health and wellness. So I'm thinking like old pictures. I don't know kind of more browns, and browns and blacks and grays in there. And as my brother and I were talking, he was like, go for color. Everyone loves color, everyone will pick something up if there's color. So then that changed my thinking right from the beginning. And we just started just flooding them with color. But also with that throwing in any kind of culture. So our people love seeing like anyone in regalia. Anything where we can tie back our culture, because our people are hungry for it, just hungry for and they've never seen it in a magazine before. So we're breaking ground on all of that. And it's been so much fun. We do this page that's called name the regalia. And it's little kids wearing the regalia and explaining what part of the regalia they're wearing. In their words, not only is it educating me, but it's also educating other people. And plus, we're showing off our little Native kids and regalia, and it's just a cute, cute page. And it's not every month, but whenever I can I throw it in there. But that just kind of shows you right there. It's like we're teaching people about culture, or, you know, giving the bright colors. And no matter what, in my magazine on either the cover or somewhere in there. If there was a native person in there, you're gonna see some kind of native design on it. Something that ties us back to our culture. And then my brother could talk about the other parts.

Orville Desjarlais  13:48  
Yeah, well, one of the tricks that she'll use about more of a trick, just just as part of how she operates is that they're talking about a certain tribe. Like I said, there's 574 of them. Each one of them has their own distinct culture and heritage. She'll research that tribe. So look at the colors they're used and look at the patterns they use, look at the stuff they have on there, what they're really wearing in their regalia, what they do, right, She researches all that and then increase a native design just from her mind. And she'll use that in a design. And the people of that tribe, they know what she's doing. They that's what grabs your eyeballs, right? So they know she's touching on their culture, their specific tribal culture, when they're looking at some of this stuff, because they identify with it. That's that's a lot of research and a lot of work to do what we do. And when you're saying about the depth of health and wellness, it is extremely deep. I keep telling people, we're trying to tell people to eat well and exercise. But that's the two hardest things to do. So two hardest things anybody can do as human being right. Just try to get I try to eat right and exercise. It sounds easy, but it's really, really hard. So one of the guiding things that we use in everything that we do is called the medicine wheel. Are you familiar with the Medicine Wheel McKenzie?

Mackenzie Jones  15:02  
I've heard about it. But I would love to hear a deeper description of what it is. Okay, so we

Orville Desjarlais  15:09  
started this out, and then it naturally just fell into place using the medicine wheel as the core of everything that we do. The Medicine wheel is just basically here, let me show you kind of like that. It's a circle with four different colors. And the colors are going to be different from from from different regions, but white, yellow, red and black are the colors that they normally use. And it's like being the mind, you have must exercise Oh, this is kind of like a form of exercise, right? A form of therapy a form of, of doing, right. So you have to, you know, the mind, for our for our purposes, is education, schools, tribal colleges, and our just for kids section that she's talking. Anything that educates our people, and spirit, the spirit portion of their medicine wheel could deal with food sovereignty, culture, holistic medicine, mental health, a lot of the food that we get like the buffalo that's sacred. That's a spiritual food. So that's why we can include that into the spirit side of the medicine wheel, the emotional side, we're talking about drug and alcohol addiction. We're talking about suicide prevention, historic trauma, post traumatic stress, PTSD, that's all the emotional side of the medicine wheel. And then the body side, that's the greatest one that we focus on in our magazine. That'd be diabetes prevention, cancer awareness, injury prevention, fitness, good health and wellness in Indian Country nutrition, tobacco cessation, food is medicine and public health. That's, that's a wide array of, of subjects matters that we can talk about. And that's the depth that you were talking about. eating right, and exercise is right up at the beginning. But when you start adding all this other stuff, it does get complicated. So one of the reasons why we started the magazine to tell you the truth is because health disparity, but a lot of people in our family circle, have diabetes and have complications with it. My grandma there had to take a shot every day for it. So it's one of the things that we wanted to reduce. And then you looked at the health disparities. Unfortunately, when you look at any health disparity, it seems like Native Americans are at the top of that list in a bad way. Right. So here's some of the stuff that we've researched and found out when we started the magazine, and they'll support right into another story that we want to check. Right. So one in four Native Americans, the AIAM population, American Indian Alaskan Native population, one in four has high blood pressure, one in six are elderly, one in six are diabetic, one in six have asthma, and one in eight suffer heart disease. And some other disparities. This is all from the CDC. Another one is 60% more likely to commit suicide, twice as likely to smoke twice as likely to die during childbirth 50% more likely than others to have a substance abuse disorder. Three times more likely to die from diabetes, five times more likely to die from TB, and we die five years sooner than anybody else. So we're looking at that that's kind of what we're trying to reduce is the goal of our magazine. And the way to do that is is through prevention. The time to do diabetes prevention is before your pre diabetic is starting when before you have a heart operation or your foot cut off from diabetes, it starts a lot sooner than that. And it's always you should always be reminding people of that. So that's what we do. In our magazine. We tell people about diseases and disease prevention is just wellness checks, blood pressure checks, colonoscopies, reminders every year. We do that every year, remind people what they should be doing to monitor their own health what I read all the disparities, how can we learn from that? We had the pandemic hit. The thing about that was always disparities that I just told you about were fresh in the minds of Debbie and me. And she's the one that brought up she's the one who had an COVID Scare first. She hit it early and Dale the early was tracking it. And as she brought it up to my attention, I think was January and February and looked into it and after a realize that the pandemic was stalking people with these disparities, that means we had a monster hunting our people, right? They're looking for people with diabetes. This disease is looking for people with heart issues, looking for people with asthma looking for people with heart disease, actively seeking them out and actually killing them. So we were super scared when we when the realization hit us early in the year and this was before anybody else was worrying about it. So when it did hit, we just freaked out. We had only been in existence for one year. We didn't have we you know When you start a business, you don't have a lot. But we didn't let that stop us. So we just said, we need to do a special edition. The power of prevention in this case is something that I think you can use for any disease out there, right? Information at the start of COVID was the only the only thing that we had, there were no shots to work, there was nothing you could do other than prevention. And the only prevention we had was information. And who were the dealers of information. That's Deb, I, we got a magazine. So use that as a way to get the word out in a wash your hands do this do that. Let's just try to save where people from a lot of them dying. And but unfortunately, it did, it did happen.

Debbie Desjarlais  20:45  
But so let me just jump in here. I sort of DPHHS saved the day, save the day. So we were in the middle of doing a frybread issue, which we're super excited about. And then COVID was coming. And so in the middle of the issue, we're like, you know what, let's just let's just stop, drop and roll. Let's get rid of that issue. Let's do a COVID front back on our magazine to teach our people. And then once we did that, I got a hold of Karen Cantrell, who was the director of American Indian health with DPHHS and said, Hey, got an idea for you. We have this magazine, you know, and we have it on these reservations, just little, little areas around the around Montana. And I said, you know, we would love to take this magazine, blow it out, my, my goal would be for every Native person in the state of Montana to get our magazine. So it kind of tells them to wash their hands, tell them, you know, different little things to do during the whole COVID. Part. So she she agreed, and we were able to send that magazine out at three different times. And how many did we reach after the after the three different times and we sent them to every reservation tribal health, you name it, but 70,000? And yeah, I think it was about 70,000. We did a spring, summer in the Fall issue called the COVID. Report. And they no one had to, we got funding from the governor from DPHHS for each one of them. But what was what? And from the tribes, different kinds of funding that we're finding for that. But what's cool is even to this day, we'll have people come up to us and go, I remember the magazine, I got in at the post office with a teepee on the front and said COVID. I said, Yeah. And so they're like, Yeah, that was a cool magazine. So we did reach everyone that we thought we would. But that was like the really, really cool part of being able to help our people.

Mackenzie Jones  22:45  
Thank you so much for sharing that. One more piece of data that I hold, and then it leads to a question. The most common causes of premature death among Native people in Montana are largely related to risk behaviors that can be changed. commercial tobacco use alcohol use substance use disorder, or diet, little or no physical activity and lack of preventative health care, such as vaccines, cancer screening, or treating high blood pressure, as many of those things you've said. Changing these risky behaviors requires not only a change in personal behavior, but really correcting the current social environment, and acknowledging the historical trauma that leads to it. Can you talk a little bit more about how the magazine Native Welless Life combats that trauma and elevates healing practices to support better health?

Debbie Desjarlais  23:39  
So what our magazine does is that goes to our clients once a month, and once a month, they read this positive spin on a lot of negative information. Nobody wants to read negative information, no one wants to read stats, they want to read a good story. Well, in that story, at the end, middle to the end, my brothers telling them hey, why don't you do this? Or why don't you get your blood checked? Or why don't you you know, whatever the story, it always goes back to taking care of yourself, taking care of your family, trying to do the right things for your body. So what we call it is a drip drip drip effect. So each month they get the magazine, there's something positive that they want to read about. And then they share that magazine with everyone in the family. You have the grandma on the family because there's 10 to 20 people in some people's households. And they they share it with them and little kids have a page and so everybody's reading it. Everyone's keeping the magazine the whole month, and they're actually saving them. But that information is in there and they're reading it at some point in that month. And so we've heard people say, Yeah, I read I started with this article, then later on I read this article and so yeah, so it's getting to them in a positive way. In a pretty usually a heartwarming story.

Orville Desjarlais  25:02  
Right? And what she what she's saying is very true. It's very positive, the historic trauma part is sad, oh, racism is still alive and well isn't as bad. And we know our people are getting that every day. So when they read in our magazine, it's kind of a vacation for them from that. It's, you know, try to put a positive spin on everything, even if it's diabetes, right? Because there's positive things you could do. There's positive stories out there, people who beat diabetes, there's things that people do every day, that helps them without with their blood sugar. And we try every which way to keep that positive and keep it going. And like she says, the drip drip of wellness, we meet so many different, there's so many different sections in our magazine that you might, a reader might find one thing in there that they found of interest, and they're gonna go, oh, maybe I'll just reduce my coffee and in take this time. That's what I got out of this magazine this time, right? Well, the next month, you might go, oh, maybe I'll try to take a walk 15 minutes. That's another thing they got out of another magazine. Oh, by the end. And as you know, behavioral changes are the hardest, hardest, most hardest to make. And if we can just get them interested in one change what positive change per edition, by the end of the year, you will have made 12 positive changes in your life, to improve yourself. So that's just one way I look at it. Because I know we I know there's at least there's one, we've worked really hard on the whole edition. But if he can just take one piece of advice out of then I'm happy. Me too.

Mackenzie Jones  26:36  
So you've mentioned the different sections in your magazine. And I noticed there's consistency. Throughout you have a diabetes section, native news, you have a feature story. There's always a kids kids section, and then a cooking healthy section. Yeah, that one stood out to me. So I wanted to hear a little bit more about the types of recipes you choose the ingredients. If there is historical traditions in the methods of cooking that you choose for those recipes. Tell us more

Orville Desjarlais  27:11  
Deb that, well, let me just jump in real quick, because depth is going to take this over, we get feedback all the time. And that's the number one feature they like in our magazine is the recipes, if we had 15 to 15 pages, the recipes and if I didn't write it right now single word that would sell up, they would love I could she could do this thing on her home, right? Because that's how much they love this thing. But what I'm just what I'm proud of is the fact that she set the tone at the very, very first recipe. And she has kept that up five years later. It's amazing how, how she started this thought through and still pretty much the same. Go ahead and explain what you're thinking and what you're doing on that first one.

Debbie Desjarlais  27:56  
Yeah, so and I'm super excited about it. I've cooked I've learned through my grandma and my mom, how to cook just about everything. I don't have any favorite, I like cooking everything. But when we started this, I was like, Alright, I'm gonna throw out our cultural recipes first. And so that's what I started doing. And now it's kind of evolved to healthy recipes, but also someone that's on the commodity program, the F D PIR program, if they're on that they could use their commodities in our recipes. So because and that's how I think because we were brought up we were a little commodity kids. And part of it was you know, you have dry milk, you didn't have real milk. So we had dry milks, we always had dry milk on hand. So when I make bread, you know there's there's dry milk in it, and he kind of soups use dry milk. So just little things like that. I've added into that into it. But then also looking at commodity program. They have ground buffalo. Now they have salmon. They have a lot of traditional ingredients, there's probably about six or 10 of them. And I try to use those quite a bit in my recipes. And they're all recipes that I tried that I've been using. But I come up with them all by myself. And I used to take my own pictures, but now we can afford a photographer thank goodness love my photographer. She can she comes over to the house and takes pictures. Eventually we're going to be adding video of me cooking but we're not quite there yet. But yeah, it's been it's just a labor of love doing the doing the recipe page. So expect

Orville Desjarlais  29:40  
some cookbooks in the near future. She's got enough five years worth of recipes that we can come up with a great cookbook and it's actually in the works.

Mackenzie Jones  29:48  
And can you tell me what FD PIR stands for?

Orville Desjarlais  29:53  
Food Food Distribution Program on Indian Reservations. And a lot of people in any sense you just call it the commondity program, the FTP our programs try to get rid of that. But that's just what people call it and you can't change it.

Debbie Desjarlais  30:06  
You know, another cool thing about that program, we started working with them about three years ago. And now we're at the point where the whole region, there's eight states in it, they get our magazine. So you're talking about eight states, they get our magazine, they have their boxes of food for their elders, or whoever's on the commodity program for that group. And they take our magazine and throw it in the box. And then people, when they come pick up their commodities, they have our magazine with it. So that's on in the state of Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Kansas, Nebraska, Wyoming. There's one more but yeah, so we're super proud of that. That's, that's been cool. And in fact, we've, we've worked with some other food programs, too. And those seem to work really well. There's a elder program in Wisconsin that they've just run out of funding, but we had them for a year. And it was all the reservations in Wisconsin, their elder program, they give out a box of food to an all the elders and through our magazine in it. And the one that we went and watched was with the Oneida tribe, and the the elders, there's like 400 cars parked outside. And for one hour, they pull up, they get their box of food, they get our magazine, and then they pull out. But in their boxes of food, they have like hydroponic lettuce. They have fresh apples, they have all these apple orchards. They have buffalo they have but yeah, it's a really cool program. But our magazine seems to go really well with all these food programs. Because they get right to the people. And they get to our audience, our audience being elders, and actually anybody. So yeah,

Orville Desjarlais  31:56  
that worked out well, for the food programs like Feeding America, the number one nonprofit in America partnered up with us. And we were able to send magazines out in Oklahoma to one of our 300 or 400 boxes there. Deb goes out to Yeah, goes off into tribes. There was like two there were the tribe where the people live, and deliver that out there and then had one in Arizona too in they do. Yeah,

Debbie Desjarlais  32:22  
that was the Navajo and the Hopi.

Orville Desjarlais  32:24  
Yeah, that's to all over the place.

Debbie Desjarlais  32:27  
Yeah, the tribe that's in the Grand Canyon, they have a helicopter that goes and they would helicopter our magazines, down to this reservation in the Grand Canyon, or like, could we ride with our magazines?

Mackenzie Jones  32:40  
We would love it in for the not commodities program, FTP IR is that available to everyone or to specific people have certain requirements they have to meet in order to have access to that program. Oh,

Orville Desjarlais  32:54  
that is all for the FTP IR that is strictly tribal, you have to be part of the tribe in order to partake in that. However, the equivical program to that would be SNAP. They're both very, very similar. Was those specifically for tribes.

Mackenzie Jones  33:11  
Thank you for sharing that.

Orville Desjarlais  33:13  
We'd love to get more involved in staff. Because again, it's another program, there's a lot of Native Americans invoved in that , we'd love to be able to put a magazine and offset boxes to the best possible that would be, that'd be a dream come true. That would be a

Mackenzie Jones  33:27  
great opportunity for everyone to get access to your magazine, the information you're sharing, and like you said, the positive outlook on native culture and families and bringing back that culture. So you say you've been working on this for five years, you have 60 issues out? How many magazines do you distribute every month? And what's the rate of growth that you've seen?

Orville Desjarlais  33:50  
This varies. Of course, we started out really small and slowly picked up. Right now we're figuring about we're printing about I think it's around 10,010 to 16,000. It varies. One time we're printing a whole bunch, but it varies. Some of the grants run out and then we have less, and then grants increase and we get more.

Debbie Desjarlais  34:19  
So what my brother's saying is our readership so each each household, there's about, we figure six, six to 10 people in a household that are reading our magazine. So our readership is basically about 60,000. Yeah, it's about nationwide.

Orville Desjarlais  34:36  
That's incredible. And it's about it's about 30,000 in Montana, alone. Yeah. We only have 70,000 Native Americans in Montana, right around there. 80,000, something like that. So it's not bad. Our outreach Montana's Of course, that's where we're from, and that's where we started and that's where we got the most help. All right. outreach in Montana's shifts, amazing. We've had some grants that have paid for our magazine to go into public areas in Montana, restaurants, stores, grocery stores, and places like that, as well as all the health care centers and clinics and stuff like that we're already carrying them. So some places are getting, you can pick up today as even six or seven different places. And these are small communities. So we're kind of proud of that. We built a platform in Montana that can actually get word out to Native Americans out there who wants to, and we didn't bring up the fact that the reason wjhy our magazine works so well made the scene works so well, is because it's a trustworthy communication tool, meaning it's going to come out every month of the month, every every time for the whole year for the next for eternity, right internet, not so much up in the Wolf Point area, or some of these other rural, very rural areas that live in where phone calls get dropped. You don't have internet service that time or sketchy internet service. And it can't be relied upon in some of these very, very rural areas. But the magazines can be dependent on so they'll pick it up all the time and read the FTP IR program for the food commodity. These are the people who need just the basics of they just need food, you're looking at food and shelter, right? Look at Maslow's need hierarchy of needs, right. And when you're just focused on food and shelter, and surviving and building, you don't have a lot of money left over for cellphone service or internet service, which can be kind of costly in some of these rural areas. Because it's costly to get it out there. Right. It's costly to set up in the middle of nowhere and have very few people, you know, surfing your internet stuff. So the strength of our magazine comes from that. Now once the once the internet service is open to everybody that's going to change our business model is going to change how we communicate. But right now, that seems to be working for us, especially the people in DPHHS who our programs, like the WIC program, or the ship program, who's already advertising with us, they see the value of using our magazine to reach out to whom they want to reach, right. So one of the things we realized really early on, if it's the it's the elders, our native elders are just they just absolutely adore our magazine, they love getting it. We have with our greatest fan base probably comes from elders. And they just love us, we actually actually give away autographs at the last conference, we were at cutest thing ever. I've never given an autograph in my life. So crazy, but very much honored that, you know, we're reaching this segment of society that has a lot of in our, in our in our social circles. Elders are very valuable. So when we're talking about passing on information and teaching tribes what to do, healthy and well lives, they're the ones that actually will help us with that. So for instance, you were talking about tobacco, we just did a vaping campaign. And the campaign. Again, it's a teaching tool that we want to teach everybody. Don't forget about Native Americans, right? Our chances of smoking are much greater, twice as likely to smoke than anybody else. And that includes our teens and everybody else. So when we did the when we did the Vaping campaign, automatically think off, we're gonna target the kids, right? That's what we do. He targets with kids and call it good. Well, what's the last time you had a teenage boy, you were able to talk to him, they will disarm him market to them and have a listen. Right? It's the hardest demographic in the world Native American boy to stop him from vaping you know what, when you do the studies that 15% of teens don't watch and watch TV. So what do you do? Or how do you reach these guys? So we actually did a poster with with a, with a guy in regalia. And then we had another youth. She was 15 years old. Her name's Bailey, she just an awesome person. And we they were doing some peer to peer stuff with us. The important part of that was we put these commercials on YouTube got about 250,000 hits, were with KTVQ TV station. Anyway, they were saying what they were surprised about with the with with our stats was that a lot of them were young boys. A lot of young boys were watching those videos. I think they were watching the young man who was who's the dancer they were talking about anti vaping messaging, but they said that's the first time they've ever seen teen boys actually spend more time to get more hits on YouTube than than anybody else than anybody else visiting that. So we are unknowingly chapters and stuff now it's kind of cool.

Debbie Desjarlais  39:48  
Another thing is, so our magazine after you know after working it for five years, we built these relationships with different with different groups and one of them being with Rocky Mountain Tribal Leaders and things have just evolved with a lot of the campaigns that we've been just putting in our magazine, it's like, hey, you know, let's, let's move into the advertising agencies. So we've also become Kea advertising. So and that's what my brother's talking about is the vaping campaigns. We received that last year from Rocky Mountain tribal leaders, and used our magazine as a way to communicate to the elders. So we knew they were getting the magazines, we got them. And then we had the the youth in the commercials on in the ads in our magazine, and then on YouTube. And so we were like trying to hit every age, we could in different ways. And then we also use QR codes, which you don't see many of them around in the native communities. And so it was teaching people how to use QR codes. And then once they got on there, like, wow, I didn't know it was a live video. So we had three different videos, three different models that were talking on the videos from the posters, and so we did a whole campaign on it. So it was just just really fun. So that's kind of what we've, we're evolving into also besides the magazine. So it's just one other part of our business now. Right.

Orville Desjarlais  41:16  
One of the things we did early on was join up with KTVQ as the CBS station, and they actually shot the video. And also, they actually maintained it on Indian Country website, which we also help them. We actually talked them into the starting Indian Country website. And now it's turned into six different Indian Country websites throughout Montana. Each state can have its own Indian country, but if they want to Great Falls is the one that's most visited. But yeah, they put it on their on their Indian country website, but more importantly, that they air the commercial as a PSA, and as the show and 180 times through five different TV stations in Montana for two months. And during the Superbowl Paramont plus, in Montana picked up the commercial inherited during the Superbowl halftime. Where 300,000 people viewed that video.

Mackenzie Jones  42:12  
On behalf of myself and the crew behind the scenes. Thank you for listening to the Talking Helath in the 406 podcast, where we are one community under the big sky. I'm your host, Mackenzie Jones. Our guests on today's podcasts were Debbie and Orville Desjarlais with the Native Welless Life magazine.  If you'd like more information on what you heard today, visit our website at TalkingHealthInThe406.mt.gov. That's Talkinghealthinthe406.mt.gov. And if you haven't already, please remember to rate review and subscribe.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai