Service to others is a foundational part of the Holderness experience. For many of our alumni—those who went on to become doctors, nurses, therapists, and other caregivers—Pro Deo et Genere Humano remains a daily practice. One of several outstanding alumni who have made caring for others a cornerstone of their lives after Holderness is Hannah Slattery '14.

Challenging the System

Hannah Slattery '14

As a Holderness student, Hannah Slattery ’14 had a bit of a rebellious streak. “I was a little bit rebellious, and I liked to challenge the system a bit,” Hannah says. “I still do, but in a good way—in a constructive way.”

Today, she’s channeling that energy into improving Native American healthcare equity at the individual, family, and community levels.

Last spring, Hannah, a descendant of the Bear River First Nation Mi’kmaq of Nova Scotia and a member of the Tufts University School of Medicine-Maine Track, began her residency at Family Medicine at Maine Medical Center. As a Family Medicine resident, Hannah provides care for the overall health and well-being of entire families through every stage of life. “That’s really why I want to go into family medicine,” Hannah says. “You’re treating the individual, the family, the community, and really the tribal nation.”

In doing so, Hannah is caring for a population with vast health disparities.

As a group, Indigenous people in the United States are 3.2 times more likely to have diabetes, 4.6 times more likely to develop a chronic liver disease, and 2.5 times more likely to suffer an unintentional injury, such as a car crash. Alcohol-induced mortality is a staggering 6.6 times higher for indigenous people, while suicide is 1.7 times more prevalent.

Those health disparities are worsened by the fact that the Indian Health Service (IHS), which provides healthcare to American Indians and Alaska Natives, struggles to fill staffing vacancies.

As a medical student, Hannah set out to change the public policy that undergirds that system. As a Member-at-Large East of the Association of Native American Medical Students, she recently traveled to Washington, D.C. to lobby lawmakers to establish mandatory funding for Graduate Medical Education training through the IHS—a move that would make it easier to recruit and train new healthcare providers. She’s also a member of the American Medical Association’s Committee on American Indian Affairs and serves on the Board of Directors of Native American Lifelines, an Urban-Indian Health Center in Boston.

Hannah Slattery ’14 and other members of the Association of Native American Medical Students in Washington, D.C.

In Maine, where she practices, Hannah has been a vocal advocate for tribal sovereignty.

Of the 547 federally-recognized tribes in the United States, all have tribal sovereignty—except for the five that live in Maine: the Houlton Band of Maliseet Indians, Mi’kmaq Nation, Penobscot Nation, and the Passamaquoddy Tribe at both Sipayik and Indian Township.

The unique status of those tribes (they’re treated as municipalities of the state rather than sovereign nations) is a result of the 1980 Maine Indian Land Claims Settlement Act, which provided compensation for tribal land claims in exchange for vastly limited application of federal Indian laws in Maine. As a result, tribes in Maine have largely missed out on the 151 federal laws passed since 1980 that benefit tribal nations’ economic development, healthcare, housing, environmental protections, and untold other aspects of tribal welfare.

The issue of tribal sovereignty became personal for Hannah in 2022, when a group of Sipayik eighth-grade students she was mentoring through the Tufts-Passamaquoddy Partnership protested against the tribe’s poor water quality. Hannah testified before the Maine State Legislature in support of a bill that would have allowed the Passamaquoddy tribe—rather than the state of Maine—to regulate its own water system. The bill passed.

To Hannah, tribal sovereignty—a tribe’s ability to govern itself—is inseparable from tribal health. If a tribe doesn’t have sovereign control over its water, its economic development, its housing, or other basics of its daily life, then it has limited control over the health of its members.

“2022 was so surreal to me—that one of the communities I care most about is still undergoing water potability issues. I thought we lived in a different time,” Hannah says, disbelief in her voice. “To me, tribal sovereignty is entirely inseparable from community wellbeing.”

Originally published in Holderness School Today, Fall 2025.