Exploring Cumulative Environmental Factors on Health Outcomes with Tribal Nations in the Great Lakes Region
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Exploring Cumulative Environmental Factors on Health Outcomes with Tribal Nations in the Great Lakes Region
Kathleen Torso1 and Danelle Lobdell2
1United States Environmental Protection Agency, Duluth, MN, USA
2 United States Environmental Protection Agency, North Carolina, NC, USA
ABSTRACT:
Tribal Nations within the United States (U.S.) have been and continue to be adversely burdened by cumulative environmental injustices. Scholars and Indigenous leaders have highlighted the need to further examine cumulative environmental injustices, stemming from impacts to the air, water, land, sociodemographic, built, and other culturally specifical factors, on health outcomes for Indigenous Peoples, including Tribal Nations. The Ojibwe Bands of the Great Lakes Region, U.S. maintain an ever-growing concern over the impact of cumulative environmental factors on their community. Within this region, cumulative environmental factors are often associated with historical and present-day resource extractive industries including mining, logging, and oil. The potential for open-pit iron mining, expansion of crude oil pipelines, and growing agricultural activities continue to threaten the environmental quality of Ojibwe land and water. Ojibwe Bands rely on the environment for harvesting, gathering, and hunting traditional foods as well as surface water and groundwater as primary drinking water sources. Beyond that, Bands also depend on their environment for cultural ecosystem services, or the non-material benefits of spirituality and cultural connection, gained through their interaction with nature. Climate change has the potential to exacerbate the effects of these extractive activities, furthering the Bands’ concern over these cumulative environmental impacts on natural resources and community-level health outcomes.
In response to this collective call, EPA scientists are partnering with an Ojibwe Band of the Great Lakes Region to explore potential associations between cumulative environmental factors on community-level health outcomes. Through shared roles and responsibilities, partners will assess these potential associations through an exploratory sequential mixed-method design, guided by a decolonizing transdisciplinary perspective which seeks to braid Indigenous and Western knowledge systems. This type of mixed-method design begins with the collection of qualitative data, which builds to quantitative data, and lastly the interpretation of both data sets. This study will execute this design by collecting qualitative data via Talking Circles (i.e., culturally relevant equivalent to focus group) and oral history interviews, which will be paired with secondary quantitative and qualitative data sourced from a digital repository associated with this project. Both data sets will be interpreted through community-integrated GIS and other culturally relevant methods to visualize potential alignments between both data sets. Visual alignments will be further analyzed through statistical methods, such as a principal components analysis. The geographic scope of the pilot study will span the partnered Band’s reservation and ceded territories.
The results of this study will act as a building block to strengthen the existing capacity of the Band in addressing this challenge by providing information, training, and tools to support public health planning and decision making. Therefore, all research activities will recognize the Tribal Sovereignty and self-determination of the partnered Band to foster culturally informed environmental management strategies and health interventions from a seventh-generation perspective. This presentation will describe the study design, how the design addresses the cumulative impact objective of the partnered Band, and the collaborative process this EPA team has undergone to foster an equitable research partnership.