"Smoking food represents something significant and steeped in time and practice," says Stuart Harris. "A lot of things, when burned, produce smoke. However, when the fire and smoke is started with matches and newspaper verses primitive ember and bark dust, in my experience, they are different and seem to produce different smoke. Essentially, the fire gives meaning to the quality of the smoke produced." (Photo courtesy of Anna Harding)

“My first memories are of smoked buckskin and eating smoked meat,” Harris says. “I also remember as a very young child sitting on the floor of one of our cultural centers near my mother and her friends and sisters where the smell of smoke was as real and regular as the smell of coffee in the morning.”

Though smoking food has long been part of Native American culture and, as for Harris, can recall memories of family and community, scientists are questioning the safety of this centuries-old practice. A team of researchers led by Oregon State University scientist Anna Harding is collaborating with the CTUIR to determine whether smoking food may expose tribe members to dangerous levels of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs).

Pollutant Exposure

PAHs are created by combustion of organic materials and can cause cancer and respiratory diseases in humans. The combustion of oil, coal and gasoline can create high levels of PAHs in industrialized areas, but rural populations can also be exposed to PAHs through wood fires, which are traditionally used to prepare grilled and smoked foods.

“It is important to engage in collaborative research with tribal communities, because the tribes may have disproportionate environmental exposures relative to other populations in the U.S.,” Harding says. “Tribal communities often do not have the resources necessary to conduct the research that is necessary needed to identify exposures that may adversely impact health.”

Anna Harding examines the public health consequences of environmental processes. (Photo courtesy of Anna Harding)

Harding specializes in public health and is co-director of OSU’s School of Biological and Population Health Sciences in the College of Public Health and Human Sciences. She has worked with members of the CTUIR Department of Science and Engineering since 2002 to assess subsistence and environmental exposure among tribal members.

 Partners in Science

Her work with the tribe, Harding says, is a partnership. Researchers focus on health issues that tribal members want to explore. The goal is to provide the tribe with knowledge that can help them determine how to limit health risks without encroaching upon important cultural traditions.

“We are interested in helping the tribes develop their own scientific capacity to investigate the problems that are most important to them,” Harding says.

Harding suggested studying PAH exposure to the CTUIR, and when the tribe expressed interest in the project, she and her research team submitted a proposal to obtain funding, which resulted in a grant from the National Institute of Environmental Health Science’s Superfund Research Program in 2009. The collaborative research with the CTUIR community is one of a number of funded projects and research cores within the Superfund Research Program at OSU.

Stuart Harris participated in the study of pollutant exposure and wore an air sampler while smoking food. (Photo courtesy of Anna Harding)

Though Native Americans have been practicing traditional methods of smoking food for thousands of years, Harding says the health effects of many native traditions, including smoking food, have never been analyzed. Studying the PAH exposure associated with smoking food, Harding hopes, will help the CTUIR evaluate their PAH exposures and design risk reduction strategies, if needed, that are protective of public health.

Health Benefits

Residents of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, near Pendleton, Oregon, smoke their meat in tipis and smoke sheds where food is slowly cooked over a hearth stoked with chunks of wood. Members of the tribe may be exposed to high levels of PAHs through inhalation while they are smoking foods, Harding says, and by eating smoked foods.

Harris, who is the director of the CTUIR’s Department of Science and Engineering, says he believes the results of the study will help the CTUIR continue traditions while making the best decisions for tribe members’ health.

“The process of preparing food for storage through the winter remains the same in this ancient tribe as well as throughout the world in similar indigenous communities,” Harris says. “Knowing about the details about the exposure of PAHs can serve only to help guide us to make more informed decisions related to this common and time-tested practice.”

To determine the level of PAH exposure caused by preparing and eating smoked food, researchers evaluated air on the reservation as well as inside the food smoking structures. They collected air samples from inside the smoking structures and urine samples from individuals who had spent time smoking food in the tipi or smoke shed, and also took samples of smoked food.

The samples collected throughout the study are being analyzed in labs at OSU. To evaluate the PAH content, researchers extract particles from the samples with liquid solvents and use the processes of gas chromatography and mass spectrometry to separate and identify the different chemicals in the particles, isolating the PAHs.

While the samples are being analyzed, members of the research team will continue to work with the tribe to assess other environmental exposures, Harding says. Collaborating with the tribe, she adds, has allowed the researchers to learn about Native American culture while studying the community’s health.

“We’ve all learned from working with the tribe,” Harding says. “They have their own traditional environmental knowledge and we have learned a great deal about how their environment and their health are connected. It’s been eye opening for me to better understand tribal traditions.”

Neebinnaukzhik Southall wants to use graphic design to further the cultural reclamation under way in Native American communities. (Photo: Frank Miller)

Today, the senior in OSU’s Graphic Design Program and the University Honors College goes by Neebin and is combining her passion for line, texture, color and pattern with an exploration of her own story and heritage. “Graphic design is about bringing beauty to little things, elevating them in some way,” she says. “I see a cultural reclamation going on, and I feel like graphic design can be a part of that.”

Despite the emerging pride that she sensed in Native communities, Southall was concerned with what she found in her studies. In preparing for her senior project, she saw that Native Americans were poorly represented in professional associations and other parts of the graphic design world. “It’s a voice that seems lacking. I wondered why. When I started my research, I didn’t know any big designers who are Native Americans,” she says.

Through her exploration, she discovered the work of Victor Pascual (Navajo and Mayan), Mark Rutledge (Ojibway) and the Buffalo Nickel Creative, cofounded by Ryan Red Corn (Osage). She also found work by white designers that presented Native cultures in a sensitive and powerful way.

Powerful Meanings

Inspired by these examples, she has set out to combine contemporary design with traditional motifs in her own work. For her senior project — Then and Now: Asserting Anishinabek Identity Through Indigenized Apparel — she is creating designs for clothing (T-shirts and hoodies) that echo traditional symbols from her mother’s people, the Chippewas of Rama First Nation in Ontario, Canada. Anishinabek is the collective name for Native people of the region, and the thunderbird and underwater panther carry powerful meanings for them. These symbols appear in Native beadwork and quillwork. Her immediate goal is to respectfully integrate such images with modern forms that appeal to a young generation.

“Neebin approaches every project with a fire and intensity,” says Andrea Marks, associate professor in the Department of Art’s graphic design program and Southall’s mentor. “She’s very proud of her heritage and she has brought that with her from the beginning. It’s been interesting to see how she threads that into her projects.

“I can see the passion she has for her culture and wanting to give something back and empower young people. She is very secure in who she is,” Marks adds.

Inspired by Experience

In addition to Chippewa on her mother’s side, Southall traces her ancestry to Iroquois and European cultures from her father. Being of mixed ethnicities has been both a struggle and a gift, she says, since she has felt a need to clarify her personal identity and to bring people together despite their differences. And she recognizes that design inspiration for Native people has come from other cultures (European religious art, Persian rugs) as well as indigenous experience.

Southall hopes to bring her spirit and design skills to the Chippewa of Rama First Nation tribal center or to another organization that promotes Native American culture, such as the Smithsonian Institution or a Native American educational foundation.

“I have a heart,” she says, “for moving forward in a positive way and strengthening people.”

Euro-American traders and settlers brought Russian, French, Spanish and English to the region we call Oregon, but native people spoke at least 18, possibly more than 25 distinct languages. By 1859, English was becoming dominant, foreshadowing the almost complete loss of native languages and the development of Chinook Jargon (or “Chinuk Wawa”) as a common creole language. Ten of these languages are being revitalized today.

Below, in excerpts from Teaching Oregon Native Languages, OSU anthropologist Joan Gross offers a glimpse of this linguistic heritage. She and co-authors advocate for support of native language instruction “to promote the value of multilingualism in our society and the deep respect for cultural diversity that it brings.”

What became the state of Oregon, an area stretching south from the Columbia Gorge to the Siskiyous, and east from the Pacific over the Coastal Range and Cascades to the High Desert, was a land of many languages, each one encoding information about the land and how to survive on it. The various languages of Oregon belong to language families as different from each other as English is from Arabic: Athabaskan, Salishan, Shastan, Uto-Aztecan, and a number of families that have been roughly grouped into the Penutian phylum (Chinookan, Kalapuyan-Takelman, Sahaptian, Lutuamian, Molallan, Cayusan, Yakonan, Siuslawan, Coosan). Each of these families consisted of several languages, and each language of several spoken dialects. Even within what might be called the same dialect, each village probably had its own subdialect, differing from neighboring villages in the way certain sounds were pronounced and a few vocabulary words…

In addition to the high value placed on learning multiple Native languages, there was still a need for a means of communication in short-term encounters between speakers of different languages. This need was filled by the creation of a trade language that came to be known as Chinook Jargon. By the time Lewis and Clark made their voyage down the Columbia, there is some evidence of a mixed language being spoken, but it most certainly stabilized into a pidgin language during the fur-trading period.

Both natives and Euro-Americans in the Northwest saw the advantage of this easily learned language. Pidgins have a simplified grammatical structure and are much easier to learn than historically rooted languages that have developed all sorts of unsystematic complexities over the years. Languages that bridge communication gaps between speakers of different languages are know as lingua francas. Chinook Jargon quickly became the lingua franca of the Northwest.

The first European nuns who arrived in the Willamette Valley in 1844 to teach the children growing up in this multicultural area used Chinook Jargon with their students. Several Chinook Jargon words drifted into Northwest frontier English. Words like “tyee” (chief), “skookum” (strong), “tillicum” (friend), “wawa” (talk), and “alki” (soon) were used to metaphorically claim identity with the region. An Oregon congressman in the 1880s talked about how General Sheridan and the translator, Nesmith, conversed in Chinook Jargon back in Washington, D.C. (Once, one of their telegrams was intercepted by the Secretary of War who, seeing the incomprehensible words, suspected a plot was afoot.)

Teaching Oregon Native Languages, by Joan Gross, Erin Haynes, David Lewis, Deanna Kingston and Juan Trujillo, published by Oregon State University Press in 2007, can be ordered online.

Note: OSU Press will expand its work in indigenous studies through a $1 million grant to four university presses from the Mellon Foundation. See a January 9, 2009 story in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Baskets of Concern

Food is only the most obvious way contaminants enter the human body. Poisons also come in through the pores of the skin and the lobes of the lungs.

Read more…

Picture this: You come home from work to find a rusty, 55-gallon drum of radioactive sludge leaking on your living room rug.

That’s what the native people of the Columbia River Basin face on a monumental scale. Tribes that have lived for centuries on the sweeping plateaus of northeastern Oregon and southeastern Washington are struggling to restore a landscape and a way of life damaged by dams, industrial pollution and nuclear waste from a World War II plutonium factory. And the Columbia Basin tribes are not alone. Degradation and contamination of ancestral lands threaten American Indian cultures across the United States. The Navajo Nation in Black Mesa, Arizona, is battling coal mining. The Oglala Sioux in Pine Ridge, South Dakota, are fighting uranium extraction. Mohawks in Akwesasne, New York, are protesting PCBs in groundwater. The list goes on and on.

“The lives of indigenous people are embedded in, even emergent from, the environment,” observes Barbara Harper, an associate professor affiliated with OSU’s Department of Public Health and manager of environmental health for the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation (CTUIR). “It is their living room, their grocery store, their pharmacy.”

To help tribes weigh the risks to health and culture from contaminants, OSU researchers and tribal scientists have developed a unique tool, the Traditional Tribal Subsistence Exposure Scenario and Risk Assessment Guidance Manual. The guidebook, funded by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), explains how to trace pollutant pathways into natural resources (soil, water and air) and then into the human body (lungs, skin and mouth). And, drawing on historical and archaeological evidence, it recreates traditional lifestyles in scenarios of four Western tribal groups, including the Confederated Cayuse, Walla Walla and Umatilla of the Columbia watershed.

By using the manual to overlay contamination pathways with traditional practices, native communities can quantify the risks of living off the land as their forebears did.

“There are many unique exposure pathways that are not accounted for in scenarios for the general public, but may be significant to people with certain traditional specialties such as basket making, flint knapping, or using natural medicines, smoke, smudges, paints and dyes,” the guidebook states. The report does not focus on existing illness or other health conditions potentially related to traditional or contemporary lifestyle practices.

Tainting Ancient Ways

The Cayuse, Walla Walla and Umatilla people have lived on the sagebrush steppe beside the Columbia for 11,000 years. In the old days, salmon swam and leapt at the center of their existence. The red-fleshed Chinook was the religious and cultural nexus sustaining spirit as well as body. Like all the original inhabitants of the continent, they were inseparable from the landscape in which they fished, hunted, gathered and studied the complex ways of nature. Millennia of ecological investigation formed the basis of their seasonal traditions and bound them together in a timeless, Earth-driven rhythm.

Today, the Columbia River salmon are depleted. The ones that remain contain mercury and a host of other pollutants from mining, agriculture and other sources according to United States EPA studies. Some of the lands and waters of the plateau tribes became further compromised in 1943 when, as part of the Manhattan Project, the U.S. government sited its Hanford plutonium facility on 586 square miles along the river between the Saddle Mountains and Rattlesnake Hills. Today, the Hanford Nuclear Reservation is one of the nation’s most contaminated Superfund sites — places that must be cleaned up under the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act of 1980. The law provides broad federal authority to respond directly to hazardous substances that may endanger public health or the environment.

The Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Environmental Management treats and disposes Hanford’s 50 million gallons of ”highly radioactive, highly hazardous” liquid waste stored in 177 aging underground tanks, according to the DOE Web site. Also dumped on the site are 2,300 tons of spent nuclear fuel, 12 tons of plutonium and 25 million cubic feet of solid waste. Leaching into the river are groundwater plumes containing chemicals such as chromium, uranium, strontium-90, tritium and technetium-99.

“Parts of the Hanford site are so badly contaminated with radioactive waste that full environmental restoration is im-possible,” according to the Nuclear Safety Division of the Oregon Department of Energy. “Contamination has reached groundwater and the nearby Columbia River.”

Under Superfund law, the tribes have special status as “sensitive populations,” those who are disproportionately exposed. Poisoning the land violates tribal treaty rights, notes Stuart Harris, a tribal member, OSU graduate (Geology, ’91) and coauthor of the manual. The tribes retained their rights to fish and hunt, gather roots and medicinal plants, pick berries and graze horses and cattle on their ancestral lands when they signed the Treaty of 1855. A landmark ruling in 1974, the Boldt decision, affirmed the Indians’ guarantee to traditional salmon harvests.

“The salmon return year after year to the remnants of their homes, as they promised our people in the beginning.”
Stuart Harris, Director, Department of Science and Engineering, Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation

But exercising those rights “depends on the health of the natural resources,” argues Harris, a scientist for the CTUIR who analyzes contamination risks. Those rights run infinitely deeper than treaty language granting access to particular riparian or terrestrial parcels, Harris says. In fact, they go even beyond Indians’ rights to physical health. What’s at stake is the very culture that the Columbia Basin peoples inherited from ancestors who stood on the plateaus surveying the bounteous waters of the continent’s second-largest river, even as the last ice age was retreating.

“The environment constitutes a cultural homeland where the people and their genetics coevolved with the ecology over thousands of years,” says Harris. “Impacts to the environment directly impact the health of my people and put my culture at risk.”

Heritable Rights

In the old days, a river dweller consumed about 500 pounds of salmon a year. If someone ate that much fish in today’s toxic environment, Harper bluntly predicts, “they’d be sick or dead.” Contamination levels in foods, water and soils have been well documented. And exposure risks for average American suburbanites have been calculated by scientists with the EPA and others. What no one had previously established, however, was the exposure risk for Native Americans who live, or wish to live, a traditional, land-based lifestyle.

“Risk-assessment scientists typically aren’t trained to look at risks holistically, to investigate entire lifestyles,” says OSU Professor of Public Health Anna Harding. “Public health experts, on the other hand, are trained to look at risks very broadly — not focusing only on medical impacts but considering community well-being as well.”

That’s why Harper, Harris, Harding and former OSU nutrition scientist Therese Waterhaus sought EPA support to develop a risk assessment tool tailored to Indian Country.

“It is a matter of environmental justice,” argues Harding who served on an EPA scientific advisory board from 2002 to 2007.

Harding recalls with clarity a crystallizing moment in her career. The year was 1992. The movement for environmental justice (insiders call it EJ) “was just getting up a head of steam,” she says. As a researcher in environmental health, she was invited to attend the nation’s first federally sponsored EJ summit in Washington, D.C. Leaders from tribes and other ethnic communities across the U.S. were there, too, at the invitation of the government. The summit opened with a panel of federal agency reps seated on a raised platform, talking about their accomplishments in EJ. One by one, community members rose from their seats and began lining up at microphones positioned around the auditorium. “They said, ‘We’re not going to just sit here and listen,’” Harding recounts. “‘We need to be the ones telling you what the issues are and what the research agenda needs to be.’”

The organizers quickly adjourned the session, revamped the agenda and reconvened the summit in a collaborative spirit. “It was probably the most interesting and groundbreaking meeting I’ve ever been to,” Harding says.

Returning to the land is an aspiration for many tribes, explain Harper and her colleagues, who have become national leaders in developing ecologically-based traditional lifeways scenarios for assessing risks to tribal members. “Even though tribal lands have been lost and resources degraded,” they write, “the objective of many tribes is to regain land, restore resources, and encourage more members to practice healthier (more traditional) lifestyles and eat healthier (more native and local whole) food.”

The desired goal, they say, “is to restore the ecology so that the original pattern of resource use is both possible (after resources are restored) and safe (after contamination is removed).”

Switching from eating salmon to, say, Bumblebee tuna or Big Macs may seem like a reasonable choice to non-native observers. But such choices are not simply alternatives on a menu. That’s because salmon is not, for the Columbia River tribes, merely a culinary option. It is a cultural imperative. Salmon is not just something to have for dinner. It is the nucleus around which revolve social networks, kinship patterns, seasonal customs, religious beliefs and educational practices. Orbiting around this hub are all the other activities that define the culture, such as weaving baskets or sweating in steam-filled lodges.

“You can’t just substitute something else for salmon,” says Harding. “Whatever you use as a substitute won’t have the same cultural and traditional uses or meanings.”