OK, BIGGEST HIGHLIGHT WAS OBVIOUSLY THE HUMAN ANATOMICAL DISSECTION! I learned a lot about the visual and textural differences between healthy hearts and lungs and abnormal ones. Real hearts i mean healthy hearts are roughly about the size of my fist and we examined and carried some hearts and we saw sone abnormal hearts where they were like twice the size of the normal ones. Some of these hearts were so large due to the buildup of calcium within the heart valves and the heart tries to unclog the calcium by pumping blood harder and what that does is the heart partially builds more muscle and also some of the blood gets congested and stuck in the right atrium, the chamber in your heart in which blood gets pumped away, your heart expands and it eventually fails. We also saw a heart with a substitute aortic semilunar valve, the flap of tissue responsible for not letting blood reverse its flow on the way out. Its so blood only flows one way. Another highlight was having a conversation with social justice professors who have been questioned about their identities as tri-racial people who happened to be black, white and native by their own professors in school. They asked people what are their fears of being in college and i brought up the fact that most professors are kind of like one way people so when you tell them your native, they will question your authenticity and cultural affiliations as a native person because they were taught that all natives went extinct when really they are more of us than they picture. So i asked them about how i can speak for myself or on behalf of my people when they assume we gone or that i am not what i said i am and they helped me a lot in terms of what i will say and identifying in what way they will target me like antagonizing me or belittling me because of stereotypes they may have grown with. but yea, i thank everyone for making my day possible, especially my little brother!
nativeyouth2college.org 