Graduate research serving Apsáalooke communities

Author(s): John Doyle, Christine Martin, Sara L. Young, Myra J. Lefthand, Emery Three Irons, Margaret J. Eggers

Abstract

The Crow Reservation in southcentral Montana comprises 2.6 million acres of the center of the Apsáalooke (Crow) Nation’s original homeland, and more than half of the tribe’s fourteen thousand plus members still live there. The Crow Environmental Health Steering Committee (CEHSC) is a group of tribal members and researchers with a commitment to working collaboratively with our community. We have been working together since 2005 to address our communities’ concerns about water contamination and its relationship to our health. In 2005 our founding members participated in a weeklong reservation-wide assessment of local environmental issues affecting our communities’ health with the guidance of volunteers from the Indian Country Environmental Health Assessment Program. We found that there were far more issues than we had initially considered and concluded that contaminated surface and groundwater was the most serious issue affecting our people’s health. This consensus and our shared commitment have sustained our collaboration; we have since researched microbial, metals, and nitrate contamination of our rivers, springs, and especially home wells (Cummins et al. 2010; Knows His Gun McCormick et al. 2012; Doyle, Redsteer, and Eggers 2013; Hamner et al. 2014; Eggers et al. 2015; McOliver et al. 2015; Doyle and Eggers 2017; Doyle et al. 2018; Eggers et al. 2018; Hamner et al. 2018; Richards et al. 2018; Martin et al. 2020). Montana State University, Bozeman, contributes critical technical expertise, but as the CEHSC we lead the research in accordance with our communities’ priorities and values. We are working now to mitigate identified issues, for instance, by educating our communities and by working to improve rural families’ access to safe water for consumption.

Citation

Doyle, J., Martin, C., Young, S. L., Lefthand, M. J., Irons, E. T., & Eggers, M. J. (2022). Graduate Research Serving Apsáalooke Communities. In S. Atalay & A. McCleary(Eds.), The Community-Based PhD: Complexities and Triumphs of Conducting CBPR (pp. 203–211). University of Arizona Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv29z1hhc.19