Aaron Bia hoped that his path through medicine would eventually take him back home.
And when the day finally came, the good news spread quickly through the Navajo Nation in Canyon De Chelly, Arizona: “There’s a Navajo doctor coming back.”
For a remote tribal community with both a unique set of health care challenges and a proud history of traditional medicine and healing, the opportunity to be treated by a Native doctor is at once incredibly important and strikingly rare.
“I get to be that provider who looks like and represents our community,” says Aaron, who completed his residency in family medicine at the University of Utah. “Providers who grew up in communities know what they’re going into. They know what the community truly needs.”
Canyon de Chelly, which sits near the northeast corner of Arizona, is part of the Navajo Nation, a tribal land mass that stretches across Utah, New Mexico, and Colorado. Home to 400,000 members, the nearest major city, Albuquerque, is a three-and-a-half-hour drive away. Patients often have to wait weeks or months for specialists to visit the reservation, or drive hours for appointments and treatment.
Sometimes, that’s not always possible. During a family medicine rotation in his hometown, Aaron called the family of a patient he was discharging from the hospital. The patient had to stay in the hospital a few days more until the family could afford gas to make the long drive.
When a well-child visit to the nearest pediatrician requires a 90-minute drive, it’s often preferable to rely on traditional healing instead. Growing up, Aaron watched with awe as his grandfather, a traditional Native healer, would slowly but methodically uncover the root cause of a patient’s medical problem. The elder might have a lengthy conversation with a family before determining a boy’s rash was caused by an encounter with a local insect—and then prescribe an herbal remedy for relief.
“This was our health care system before modern medicine came to our tribal homelands,” Aaron says. “It’s tried and true. It’s something we’ve been practicing for centuries.”
Health care itself takes on new, personalized meaning in the Navajo language. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Aaron says, Native doctors dubbed the virus “The Big Cough” and tweaked the “six feet apart” guideline to “two sheep apart” to better communicate it to the rural tribal community.
As a child, Aaron dreamed of uniting his grandfather’s traditional, individualized approach to health with today’s modern medical advances. “I wasn’t too sure if medical school was my future,” he says. “In my community, there were no providers who looked like me.”
He was inspired by the family medicine practice of a non-Native doctor who had served his reservation and the surrounding community for decades. “He’s been there for generations—for grandparents, adults, and kids,” Aaron says. “Providers in the community get to know their patients really well. They get invited to patients’ family events, cultural ceremonies. They get embedded in our culture.”
Aaron was drawn to the Family Medicine Residency at the Spencer Fox Eccles School of Medicine at the University of Utah because of the emphasis on tribal and rural health. As a guest instructor in the Tribal, Rural, and Urban Underserved Medical Education (TRUE) program throughout his residency, he helped guide students as they learned about the unique challenges of caring for patients in rural Utah, including how to handle long waits for emergency responders, spotty cell and internet service, and chronic conditions exacerbated by social determinants of health.
“That was such a great validating experience for me,” Aaron says. “I knew I was in the right place.”
He was also keen to share details on traditional Navajo wellness practices, helping students understand how to better listen to and communicate with their Native patients. And he always made time to encourage other Native students to pursue medicine.
“We still need a lot of Native students coming into college and graduate school,” he says. “There’s a lot of untapped potential out here.”
Aaron, who was involved in pathway programs in medical school, served with the TRUE program for all four years of his residency, and also made time to encourage other Native students to pursue medicine. He talked to students at Salt Lake Community College and parents of Native students in Utah County. Aaron also helped Jenna Murray start the university’s first chapter of the Association of Native American Medical Students.
Through his residency, under the supervision of an attending physician, Aaron served as a family medicine provider at a continuity clinic in West Valley City, where the patient population is largely composed of urban-dwelling Native people. Patients there were “very surprised” to meet a Native provider, Aaron says.
Now, back at home near Canyon de Chelly caring for his community as a staff physician at the Indian Health Service's Chinle Comprehensive Health Facility in Arizona, Aaron has many opportunities to connect with patients and encourage promising young students to pursue their dreams. His youngest sister, Kiara, just graduated from high school and will follow in Aaron's footsteps as a pre-med undergraduate at Arizona State University.
It’s all about “hózhó,” or “balance in life,” Aaron says. “Now, my patients are my teachers. I learn something new every single time. I can offer them my medical school training recommendations, but I’ll leave the option for if they want to pursue traditional medicine.”
By Christina Hernandez Sherwood; Photos by Mylo Fowler
![Aaron Bia says that some of his best learning experiences come from unlikely mentors. “When I was going through my anatomy class, I realized the [cadavers] were essentially my teachers,” he says. “Now my patients are my teachers. I learn something new every single time.”](/sites/g/files/zrelqx386/files/media/images/2025/last_aaron_bia_gallery-mylofowler_041225-30.jpg)
