National Public Health Week: Environmental Health

April 04, 2018

I grew up in Sioux Falls, SD so the environment to me was always fairly controlled. I had good weather, city parks, and, luckily, South Dakota has good air quality when compared to other states. I grew up as a “city kid” who “knew” the effects that agriculture had on SD and the environment, but it wasn’t until I started working at the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) in Brookings, SD that I really understood the impact.

Although it doesn’t make the news nearly as often as CO₂ emissions or pollution in the ocean, agriculture can have negative effects on the environment as well. Some of those effects include soil erosion, pesticides and their ability to drift and damage beneficial insects, and water contamination from fertilizers. However, we need agriculture to sustain our state and our bodies so instead of just accepting general agriculture practices as “that’s just the way it is” we need to embrace sustainable agriculture and improve it for our future and our children’s future.

Fortunately, sustainable agriculture practices are being researched and put to use in our own backyard. Local work being done in South Dakota includes:

iGrow – An SDSU Extension service that works on agricultural ‘best practices’ outreach to producers based on research conducted by South Dakota State University.
Blue Dasher Farm – A small research farm in eastern SD that promotes research, education, and demonstration of regenerative agriculture practices.
USDA-NCARL-ARS – A USDA research facility that focuses on sustainable agriculture.

Some of the sustainable practices include diversifying crops (crop rotation and cover crops), conservation tillage, and taking advantage of beneficial insects to control pests. Implementing sustainable agriculture can, short-term, help cut down on pesticide use but also, long-term, impact climate change (which is for another blog post!). Recognizing agriculture and its multifaceted reach on personal and global environmental health will hopefully bring to light some of positive work being done and the work that still needs to be accomplished in agriculture and its role in environmental and public health.

Aly

By:

Aly Becker, MPH

Sanford Resarch

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Indigenous Evaluation

March 21, 2018

Dr. Joan LaFrance of Mekinak Consulting in Seattle, WA, spoke about Indigenous evaluation. Joan was a trooper. Her flight was delayed due to weather and she didn’t get into town until the wee hours of the morning and still made it to deliver an endearing talk and share her vast knowledge of working as an evaluator in Indian Country. She became an evaluator because of her first evaluation experience. At first, she had a negative reaction because she didn't want to have an external evaluator coming in and judging her program. Despite this, she did realize the value in the data that came out of the evaluation and decided she wanted to get her doctorate degree, become an evaluator, and take that back to Indian Country.

I loved everything that Joan said and, like the rest of the attendees, absorbed all of her words. When you get data and do evaluation, knowledge is created, and Indigenous knowledge includes a few different kinds of knowledge: traditional knowledge (i.e. creation stories); empirical knowledge (i.e. farming); and revealed knowledge (i.e. knowledge that comes through dreams or ceremonies). Knowledge exists to help us walk on “moral path” when we gather data we want to give it purpose and data should never be gathered for data-sake.

Some great insight from Joan about evaluation is that you should never classify things too quickly when you are doing evaluation in Indigenous communities. At times, evaluators in Indigenous Communities be seen as not respecting values of the people they’re evaluating. Joan stressed that everything we do has value and it must be interpreted and evaluated appropriately because data has power and it must be used in a good way. She encouraged tribes to explore their epistemology or ways of knowing that they want to guide their research and evaluation endeavors.

Joan gave a great overview on the differences between Western and tribal ways of developing programs. Through data, we can understand ourselves. In Western thinking and doing, theories or programs are tested and if they work in enough places, they try to say that they are generalizable and can be implemented anywhere. This is not the approach to data for tribal communities because of how unique each tribe is. Tribal communities want to understand themselves in their own way, context, and situations. In addition to this issue of generalizability of programs that are evaluated, data gathering and interpretation must be inclusive. There can’t be one or two people looking at data and figuring out what it means, which is typical of Western ways of data analysis; there must be many people involved in this effort. Lastly, Joan talked about the importance of not reducing people to a statistic and instead include multiple measures so that there is a full picture of the people being evaluated.

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Turtle Mountain Youth Council

March 21, 2018

The day has already had so many inspiring speakers and did not disappoint with the presentation delivered by the Turtle Mountain Youth Council. About ten members from the Youth Council gave an absolutely impressive overview of their goals and plans for their group and the community. In 2017, the Turtle Mountain tribal council enacted a resolution to establish the youth council, and they wasted no time in getting started and hosted a Youth Summit in 2017 as well.

This group of kids have it together. They are organized. They have different roles where they are able to use their strengths; they even have a public relations representative! A couple of them spoke about their goals to incorporate culture into their plan for youth development. They are concerned about cultural revitalization and how they can fix substance use problems that many other youths talk about. They work closely with other tribal programs and TNRG to develop their plans. To achieve cultural revitalization, they will develop a Cultural Coalition, conduct a language and culture needs assessment (with the help of TNRG) and from this assessment they will use the results to come up with a plan to increase the language and culture resources.

They are very aware of the problems that their generation and their community faces, balking at the idea that they are only interested in being on their phones and watching TV. They want to be involved in improving their community, revitalizing their culture, and developing the TMBCI workforce. They’re also planning another Youth Summit later this year!

These kids (I shouldn’t call them kids) are so grounded and focused and I am in disbelief at their passion. And they’re not stopping at changing the community, their goal is to change the world, and I believe that they are going to do it. Sometimes, it can be discouraging to watch the news and see where our leaders are taking us but it’s in moments like these that my anxiety is eased. The youth of the world are going to save us, don’t worry.

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The Journey of a Champion Fancy Shawl Dancer

March 21, 2018

Bobbi Lynn Frederick provided the attendees with a wonderful presentation while we enjoyed lunch. She spoke passionately about her journey as a fancy shawl dancer and artist.

Ms. Frederick is a Haskell Indian Nations University alumnus and works at the Turtle Mountain Community College, teaching a course in beadwork. She has been a fancy shawl dancer, which is a style of dancing, since she was very young. She also credited the drum groups that she’s heard and how they’ve inspired her dancing. Bobbi gave some great history about pow wows that I was not aware of; for example, the structure of pow wows was influenced by rodeos and has evolved to include a grand entry where all the flags and dancers enter at once. If you haven’t seen a pow wow grand entry before, it is a beautiful amalgam of dancers, young and old. Additionally, pow wows have competitions for various age groups and style of dance, and Bobbi gave a great overview of how pow wows and the dancing has evolved over time to become the pow wow many of us are familiar with today. She has participated in many different kinds of competitions, including endurance contests, which she described as “dancing marathons,” with songs played back-to-back until there is one dancer left. One interesting point she made about pow wow competitions was how different they are than other types of competition because they all see each other as family, encouraging and supporting each other with no ill-feelings toward one another’s success.

She has traveled far and wide to participate in pow wows, do special performances, and has joined a dance troupe (Dakota Ojibwe Dance Troupe). I really enjoyed Bobbi’s perspective on why she dances and the work she takes to incorporate culture into her work and one of her reasons for doing what she does is because it is the best way she knows to preserve the culture. Bobbi became emotional when talking about the important work that many in the community are taking to promote health. Something that I really resonated with was when she spoke candidly about being scared of offending someone or getting something wrong in the work she’s doing. I think many of us are afraid of that when we go about our work but Bobbi pointed out that all of us are just doing the best that we can in trying to improve the lives of our people. Bobbi is a very humble young woman filling a space in her community that is vitally needed and her passion was inspiring to all in attendance.

If you are not at the conference, you will be missing Bobbi’s special dance presentation that she is doing for the lucky attendees of the conference later this evening!

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Data in Tribal Finances

March 21, 2018

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Jennifer Parisien, MS, Director of Resource Development, Native American Finance Officers Association, spoke about financial data and she did it in a way that WASN'T BORING! At the heart of it, data is about the life of the people, if we know more about the people we can make more data-informed decisions. The program that Jennifer works for aims to help tribes grow their economies and strengthen tribal finances, and financial data can help with decisions for tribal-state relations and policy-making. Tribal members have purchasing power and will go off the reservation many times for goods or services not available in their communities. Data on this purchasing power can be used in state-tribal relations to show the impact that spending done by tribal members have on economies.

The examples Jennifer spoke about illustrated that tribes put more money back into the community than non-tribal members, which should get the attention of every policymaker ever. Knowing data such as this can help show how important tribes can be to communities, which can ultimately inform policy. Jennifer used data via real-time surveys with audience members to show the importance of obtaining local data. If tribal governments know what their community values and prioritizes, it can help with determining the yearly budget, this method is called priority based budgeting. Hearing Jennifer talk about this type of budgeting was very encouraging and eye-opening because it has so many benefits; with priority based budgeting, tribal governments can do important things well, spend within means, provide transparency, and demand accountability.

Ms. Parisien stressed that at the end of the day, the money belongs to the people, and good governance should be a data priority; it’s important to invest in tribal employees and programs and keep them in the loop about what is going on within the tribal government. That being said, data is only as good as it’s understood by the people the data is relevant to, so when thinking of using data, it’s vital to think about how the information is being communicated. This means when data is reported to tribal members, it must be done in a simple, effective way so that they can fully understand what is being reported.

Jennifer gave some great examples of how data can be used externally in policy making and advocacy. Tribal data has, in fact, informed federal policy and the implementation of laws (HR 228). Unfortunately, though, policy makers are making laws that impact tribes in negative ways because they don’t understand tribal communities and governments. She also did an amazing job at explaining Tribal governments and how different they are from state and local governments. State and local governments get revenue from sales tax and property tax but Tribal governments are unable to collect property taxes. Additionally, sales taxes imply that there is an underlying economy, which is not true for every tribal community. Tribes rely on funding from other sources, like for-profit enterprises and federal funding, and often have more hurdles to jump over than state and local governments. Tribal government accounting can be incredibly complicated and there are now “how-to” manuals on how to manage tribal government finances. The complicated nature of tribal governments may be a reason that tribes are unable to effectively communicate financial data back to their community.

I'm wholly impressed with Jennifer's work and passion for finances and I may or may not be starting a Jennifer Parisien fan club.

By Michaela Seiber, MPH

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