Please email Clarita if you would like to be a speaker in 2010. The objectives will be posted in January 2010 but if you want to get a general idea please contact me. Thank you!

2009 Native Environmental Justice Summer Research Program

Ideas for next year: 2010

OBJECTIVES

Indigenous communities have been building strategies to protect and improve our water quality by defending community, individual and tribal sovereignty for generations. In many cases our motivations have been tied to protecting valuable resources, our sacred spaces, cultural practices, our identity as Indigenous peoples and our communities’ health. In large part, our motivations have been to improve our communities and families by empowering ourselves with the strength and strategies to fight for our culture, and our people. These strategies are important pieces of knowledge to understand and to share between generations as a means to productively continue forward as Nations.

Our Elders, communities, Tribal governments and organizations hold indigenous knowledge. In this research project, we will work with an array of scholars, activists, leaders and communities to understand how some Indigenous peoples perceive and address Tribal water quality and Makah Whaling traditions. This information is valuable to communicate because Indian Country has been in battle with the United States government for centuries to retain our natural resources, yet many of our people do not understand the issues pertaining to our natural resources, nor do non-indigenous peoples. Continuity of such knowledge is necessary in order to continue protecting the land, our culture and health. Also vital to our future is our ability to communicate with one another and to communicate our stories to others. This project will pay particular attention to the communication aspect of these environmental justice issues.

The research frameworks that are commonly used in the academy may or may not work for indigenous communities, so in this research program we will be challenged to think beyond the academy for research tools that best fit within Native American culture.

We will address our objectives with the following aims:

Bring together indigenous students who are interested in learning about Makah whaling issues and Tribal water quality as a means for building interest in environmental justice.
Experts in the fields of environmental justice, Tribal water quality, Makah whaling and Indigenous research methodologies will give 1-2 hour lectures from June 22-24th.
On June 25th students will travel to Neah Bay to visit with Tribal representatives where we’ll stay in cabins for two nights.
A large part the program will be allocated to reading journal articles, database researching, creating photo journals and/or conducting interviews.
The overall research objective will seek to clearly define Makah whaling and Tribal water quality under the umbrella of environmental justice and critically challenge ourselves to better communicate these issues to our communities.

The outcome will be:

To learn about the complex nature of these indigenous issues with the goal of better communicating them to indigenous and non-indigenous communities.
All students will present their work in a 15-minute presentation in Seattle on July 2nd. These student presentations will be open to the community.
The work conducted in this research will be archived, offered to tribal communities and will be used in the future by the director and committee of this project.
We will continue this project over several more years. Ideally the outcome of our research will result in publications, which will be conducted in a respectful way. The students will be strongly encouraged to list each participant’s name on any papers in thanks. Further nothing will be published without first gaining the approval from participants.

The student’s learning objectives include:

By the end of this 2-week program, students will be expected to have an overall understanding of Indigenous research, environmental justice, whaling and Tribal water quality.
Students will conduct fieldwork within Native American communities and will be encouraged to critically reflect upon their experiences in the program.
The structure of this program offers students the opportunity to meet Indigenous scholars, activist, and leaders in many fields. Students will also have the opportunity to talk with graduate students about higher education if that is applicable to their needs.
This is a great opportunity to be part of a team with commons goals and ambitions. Students will be encouraged to add this experience to their CV’s.
Accepted students will be awarded a stipend of $900.