Cultural care is structural, not decorative.
Indigenous Healthcare Advancements was not built on top of a set of cultural aesthetics. It was built inside a set of specific teaching relationships, with specific people, grounded in specific Indigenous traditions. This page describes how that grounding shapes the work.
Culture is the work, not an adjacent project.
A tribal clinic that runs clinical operations separately from cultural operations is not a tribal clinic. It is a Western clinic in a tribal community. That distinction matters for patient trust, staff retention, community accountability, and long-run sustainability.
IHA's answer is to build cultural care into the structure of the work. Cultural accountability is not a committee that meets quarterly. It is a set of relationships, standards, and operating practices that decide how clinics are designed, staffed, governed, and evaluated.
Richard Moves Camp.
Richard Moves Camp is a Lakota medicine man. He works with IHA in an advisory engagement and grounds the cultural dimension of IHA's clinical, technology, and consulting work. The ICHAS cultural care accreditation framework is developed under his direction.
IHA does not claim to represent Indigenous views as if they were singular. IHA's work is shaped by specific teaching relationships with specific people, of which Richard's is the most central. Where other tribal programs work with other teachers and traditions, IHA defers to those relationships rather than imposing its own framework.
Where the grounding threads through the work.
Traditional health as a clinical service line
Both the Los Angeles clinic and the Northern California clinic include traditional health as a first-class service line alongside medical, dental, and behavioral health. The space, staffing, and scope of traditional health are set by tribal and cultural leadership at each site, not by IHA.
ICHAS accreditation framework
ICHAS is a cultural care accreditation framework developed with Richard. It sits alongside AAAHC and IHS GPRA as a measurement tool for cultural competence, traditional medicine integration, and community accountability. Consulting engagements use it as a structured review instrument.
Tribal employment as the default
At the Northern California clinic, all non-physician staff are hired as direct tribal employees from day one. That structure is not a convenience. It is a cultural and sovereignty commitment: the workforce answers to the tribe, reports through tribal governance, and carries tribal benefits.
Governance before operations
Before any clinic IHA operates opens its doors, the cultural and governance frameworks that will outlive IHA's involvement are in place. This is part of why the 638 self-determination transition for the Northern California clinic can happen so quickly: the tribal side of the structure was built first, not bolted on.
What working inside this framework looks like.
Non-Indigenous staff, partners, and clients who work with IHA should expect a few consistent principles. Cultural direction comes from specific people in specific relationships, not from generic frameworks. Questions about traditional medicine, ceremony, or cultural practice route to the tribal cultural leadership at the relevant site, not to IHA headquarters. Attribution matters: where IHA publishes work grounded in Indigenous teachings, those teachings are named and attributed.
This is not a barrier to entry for non-Indigenous clinicians or operators. It is a structure that makes long-term collaboration possible. Staff who want to practice inside tribal communities will find the clarity useful. Partners who want IHA to operate like a generic health system will find it a poor fit.
The ICHAS framework page describes the cultural care accreditation work in more operational detail.