Indians, ethnicity as a resource and aging: You can go home again

Ethnicity can be a facilitating resource throughout the life course for those who recognize and exploit its potential to be so. Ethncity is multidimensional, its elements experienced at differing levels of intensity across the life span. Life history trajectories of American Indians who lived in urban centers most of their adult lives and, upon retirement, returned to their tribal homelands underscore the positive contributions ethnic group membership makes to well-being in old age. Ethnographic research methods including: long-term, personal relationships with the participants, immersion in both their urban and rural cultural milieux, life history elicitation and observation of the participant's social and decision-making processes over time allow for an exploration of these theoretical assertions. Processual analysis of an exemplar life trajectory broadly representative of the sample group is presented here to illustrate the analytical process and its power to identify those ethnically-inflected statuses and roles which sustain well-being into old age and generate theoretical frameworks that account for cultural continuity, situationality, intensity and dimensionality in the interaction of ethnicity and aging and the structure of a social process - ethnic community reincorporation.