Powwow to Recruit Marrow Donors

Historically, American Indians had multiple uses for the word powwow. Medicine men were known as powwows and dancing tournaments were called powwows.

Combining the definitions provides a fitting description for the thinking behind the daylong International Aboriginal’s MotionPowwow scheduled for today in Constitution Park from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.

The event, organized to recruit healthy American Indians to donate their bone marrow to sick patients, promises hours of music and dancing around a lifesaving theme.

Admission is free.

Potential donors include roughly 5,000 American Indians living in Ventura County, according to the 1990 U.S. census, and thousands of residents who consider themselves Latino but are of part-American Indian descent.

Of those who require bone marrow transplants--usually, leukemia or lymphoma patients--ethnic minorities typically have a harder time than whites when it comes to finding a donor with the appropriate mix of protein molecules that must be compatible for an effective transplant.

This is especially true of American Indians and native Alaskans, who have the lowest success rate of all ethnicities in finding a donor match--roughly 50%, according to the National Marrow Donor Program.

Marrow, which produces red and white blood cells and is crucial to fighting infection, is contained in the center of bones.

Of the more than 8,500 marrow transplants facilitated through the program over the past decade, only 44 were American Indians or native Alaskans. And of more than 3.7 million donors in the national registry, only 50,000 are American Indian or native Alaskan.

For more information, call 984-2519, or contact the National Marrow Donor Program by phone at (800) MARROW2 or on the Internet at https://www.marrow.org.