 I'm going to introduce herself, but I want to say I think it'd be great if you could all give Marianna and because even I'm kind of her sidekick in this event. She's done the lion's share of the work pulling this all together. So I think it'd be appropriate. Good afternoon everybody. I'll just go ahead and do what was requested of me about the best ways that I know how. I will go ahead and sing an honor song. You may sit, you may stand. Whereas my people with the way that we believe we sit down, as if that way you are more connected to earth. But if your belief is that you should stand, you could go ahead and do so because all ways are good ways. So I want to go ahead and sing an honor song on behalf of Marianna. What's going on here? I'll do two verses. We'll make and tell us more about their work and themselves. And we have, well my connection is through Laurie Eggers. We went to talking and she's also presented on her research at an event. I run every June at the Tribal College of Greens. It's about John Doyle. I'm going to cheat. Emory Three Irons and Joe Ray. Sarah Young, who I've known for decades. It's wonderful to see you again. And Christine Martin, an MSU student, and I've had the wonderful good fortune to get it interact with. Because I'm a librarian to her early age on area. And are you two are the Bighorn College students? Okay. I was thinking there was someone on the research team. So you guys can tell us all about yourself. So thank you so much for joining us. And I really look forward to this. Do I miss anybody? Great. Thank you. Oh look, it started. Welcome. And we're grateful that so many of you have come to listen to what we have to say. And there's so many things and I know it's University Day and people could be often about doing other things. And so we're grateful that people have taken the time to stop by and listen to us talk to you about what we do. And I'm a member of the Crow Tribe. I grew up on the Crow Reservation. And although I worked at Montana State University for 22 years, I retired about a year ago. I also got my graduate degree from here at MSU. So it's kind of my second home. But my real home is the Crow Reservation. So we're glad to be able to share with you a little bit. And we hope that something we say will be something useful for you if you're interested in doing research in tribal communities or other diverse communities with Indigenous populations or just with communities that want to have a voice in research related to them. So the Crow Environmental House Steering Committee is a group of individuals on our reservation and our friends. They started about 13 years ago. And it began as concerns in our community about water and its relationship to our house and our community. And there were people in our community such as John. And one of our real important founding members of our Crow Environmental House Steering Committee, Myra Lefthand, who isn't here, was going to join us, but wasn't able to because of family loss. And so they were colleagues with Mari, and they expressed their concern about, you know, why do we have so much cancer? And at that time that was one of the concerns. John was concerned about how the fish that he was catching in the river had sores on them, and they were just like, what's going on with our water? And Mari was teaching at the Little Bitcoin College. And so out of that real community-driven concerns about health and about the water, a group developed and became eventually the Crow Environmental House Steering Committee and started exploring how we might do research. And at that time I was working for Montana State University and involved with a lot of student programs as a Director of American Indian Research Opportunities and working with Montana Embry at that time also. And we were looking for opportunities for our Native American students to be able to do research. But we were doing research and we had money to pay them to do research in our labs here at Montana State University. But our students wanted to do research about things in our own communities. They wanted the research they were doing to be relevant to them, to their lives, to their families, and to their communities. So it was a very good match for me to want to be involved with the Crow Environmental House Steering Committee. And we've had a number of members that have kind of come and gone, but there's been a group of us that have stayed the whole term. We don't term out politicians because our care for our reservation doesn't go away. And so this group has done so many different projects from so many different funding sources and sometimes just done things without funding sources just because we care about our community, our health, and our water. And each one of us have something to speak about and I'm just kind of the introducer. And for those of you that don't know anything about the Crow Reservation, we always think everybody knows because we're a very ethnocentric tribe and we think that we're the center of the university. So we think everybody knows about us, but we know there's a few of you that don't. This is a picture of our river that goes right by our campground, kind of separates the campground from our community. And there's a picture of little children swimming and we don't have swimming pools, city swimming pools and what have you. And so our children go swimming in our rivers and at one time our families gathered water out to our rivers and so on. So our reservation is the largest reservation in Montana, land-based wise and we're part of what's called the large land-based tribes in the United States. It's certainly not as big as the Navajo Reservation but it's a very large reservation. It was at one time 32 million there were acres before seeding. So it's in the south, central southeastern part of Montana and we neighbor the Northern Cheyenne Reservation. We have about 14,000 members of our tribe and only about 7,900, probably about 8,000 now of our enrolled tribal members actually live on the reservation and then there's some of us that are off reservation like myself now living in Billings, Montana. That was always kind of another part of the reservation and so about half of us, a little more than half live on the reservation and the others are scattered all over the country and some maybe outside the country. When our reservation started settling when our boundaries were set and we weren't moving about freely our homes and encampments and what have you were built along rivers and streams and I'm sure much of civilization is built along rivers and streams because we all know that we have to have water and for many years of the reservation people did not have and I grew up without indoor plumbing and I remember when we first got water so that we had water in our kitchen sink and that was a big thing and eventually when I was about 13 years old we got indoor plumbing and we thought we were really uptown. It was a big deal and that started about in the 1960s and it actually came about because we had gotten money from a settlement and so our families had money to put in indoor plumbing. Let's see, did I go back? Okay, so here's a picture of some of our current active members and of course John not only is a member of the committee and was one of the founders of the committee but also is one of the project leaders for one of the many projects that we've had and then Myra left hand as I mentioned myself and I love it that Maury puts one picture of me that's about 12 years old and I still wish I was quite that young but not quite. It's Roberta. Yeah, Roberta, I think that's one of Roberta when she was younger too and Roberta has a degree in natural resources I think. Bachelor's in Environmental Science and a Master's in Native American Studies. Yeah, and she graduated from MSU with her Master's and then Dionne, pretty on top who works at Indian Health Service and also graduated from Montana State University I believe in microbiology or one of the biologists. And Emory, three of us who's here with us was working on his Master's and also is a Udall, or was a Udall fellow and adds a lot to our committee and our work and Dale Whiteman who also graduated from here at Montana State University Christine Martin who finished a Bachelor's here and then a Master's in Community Health and of course Maury who works here at MSU and Ann Camper who's a long, long time faculty here at MSU. So you can see the relationship this committee has to Montana State University. Some people might say we're biased. We aren't. It's just that's where good people come from. So anyway, our committee a lot of times when people are doing community-based participatory research one of the things they always establish is a community advisory board, a CAB. And a CAB can mean a lot of things and I said I really wanted to start out by talking about Crow Environmental House Steering Committee which is really much more than a CAB a lot of times people want to do CVPR and they say well we're going to have community input and they meet with them twice a year have lunch in about an hour of meeting and it involves the researcher telling the community advisory board what they're doing and the community advisory board saying that's good and that is not what the Community Environmental House Steering Committee is at all. We meet about three hours at least once a month sometimes more we email back and forth with one another on a very regular basis and we have conference calls it's a wonder we have jobs outside of the community house or Crow Environmental House in fact maybe it's why I'm retired because my kids always say are they paying you? No, no, no this is passion and that's really what I wanted to say to people when you have a group that you're going to work with in a community and it's about research that affects that community it's so important to have people that have passion about what your project is about and that that project reflects what that community wants to have studied because if it's something that's only the researcher's passion and the community doesn't have a stake in it when your project is over there's publications and some grant money that's been spent but it's done and we hope that our project will have many generations of impact on our community that we will have found ways to make our water healthier to make our communities know the importance of having safe drinking water and what ties if any this water and the damage to the water might have on our health so it's really about a lot of that and I think that's what's the great success of this project is having that kind of involvement so those of you that are in the research business think about that when you're going to go into a community and find those people and have the community help you find people that really have an interest in that topic and so that's kind of what it is and so what do we do when we talk and all of this these are just some pictures out in front of our little bit corn college in Emory when he was gathering water samples and John when he was talking to a program that we're affiliated with and are part of their advisory board the Guardians of Living Water that Vanessa Watt-Symons here on campus is doing she's a faculty member here and John is talking to some of her fourth and fifth graders about water quality and sampling water and so on and then down below I'm actually as a steering committee member helping them gather data and writing down the information as Mari and the others are calling out data to me and I'm trying to keep up with them and writing stuff down and we were over on a field trip to prior and the last one over in the other corner is two of the other distinguished committee members who aren't living at home anymore John of course and when Bear Don't Walk who was a tribal member who was a lawyer was a lawyer for our tribe and then Larry Kainas who was an activist on our reservation and I think he made John become an activist or vice versa and they were partners in crime and they were at the National Congress of American Indians talking about the research that we're doing we've also been involved in actually helping write the journal articles and Mari remembers when she first I said we should do that and she said how would we do that how would we all write it together and I said I'll figure it out and we started meeting on weekends and going to a hotel and meeting for half a day on Friday and all day Saturday going over every sentence every paragraph and saying no we don't want our community to hear the words like that they'll be mad at us and let's say it differently let's say it in a way that when we're home and somebody has read it they don't say why did you say that and so that was really an exercise of love I guess you might say but we actually and that article got published and I can't remember what journal it was in Mari Family and Community Health but that's another activity that you really want to involve the community in is publishing and telling your story about your research in such a way that when the community reads it they find it acceptable as well so that's really what I wanted to share with you about our steering committee and how it differs from a cab and so with that I'm going to turn it over to Christine and Joy so I'm Christine Martin I work closely with John Doyle and Mari Eggers and the other steering committee members I'm alumni from and Montana State University I work closely with Vanessa Simons she was my mentor as well as Suzanne Christopher and so and many other faculty on this here and so I work at the Little Big Crime College right now and my title is the Climate Adaptation Program Coordinator and so I'm the one that coordinates the meetings and we send emails back and forth with each other and just keep us in contact and meeting and organized I guess and so my background is mostly in qualitative study research design and so with that I'm able to interview people and get those interviews, transcribe them analyze them and then with that we can kind of get a better understanding of what people are thinking in the community and stuff like that and so I work closely with Joy LaFrance who is a recent graduate and so she's interning with our water quality program at the Little Big Crime College so I'll let her tell a little bit about yourself yeah so hi everyone my name is Joy LaFrance I am a Crow Tribal member I am in my post-back year so taking my year between undergraduate and graduate school I graduated from Dartmouth College with a double major in Earth Sciences and Native American Studies and I'm going to start graduate school in the fall I haven't decided yet but I do have options and like Christina is saying I have been interning with the Crow Environmental Health Steering Community since June, last June and we've just been working on this climate adaptation plan so as we can go back and forth so we just wanted to get a better understanding of how people understood climate change and what they noticed throughout their lifetime with the weather patterns and so we gathered information from Crow Tribal members and their knowledge of climate change and ecological knowledge changes and then we gathered western science data on historical and projected climate changes and then we just wanted to understand how these knowledge sources complemented each other as well as how these have complemented each other and then addressed the environmental health issues that were in our community and so we hear a lot about what is TEK so traditional ecological knowledge we feel like we can't really define but we can define what it means to us so in a nutshell I guess we feel our belief that there is an energy and power and that we all are part of that energy and that we are born into this way of knowing as well as we all have spiritual growth and we got all of this through oral history from our elders and our family members and so our method was to take TEK which how we did that was use the qualitative research design and we used in depth interviews and then we did the content analysis with our steering committee members as well as and then from that we collected themes and so I've introduced a couple of those but we're mostly going to go over the questions that we asked and what came out of those and then we compared that to western data and then so Jory can kind of explain more what western data is yeah so the western aspect of this is we're getting a lot of this climate data from history and this historical database as well as using that historical data to project what's going to happen in the future based on certain circumstances and so the importance of comparing both of these is we're trying to one we live in a world that bases everything on western science and so we're trying to use these as a way of complimenting each other and I guess TEK is a more or less new theme in western science but indigenous knowledge has always been with us since time immemorial and so the importance of comparing these to just goes to show the validity of TEK and that our knowledge is very valid and it has been existing and so that's the reason why we're comparing these two so with the interviews we interviewed 26 travel members and we asked them questions about climate change throughout their lifetime and then from that we got together and we did a content analysis and me and Jory transcribed the interviews and then we all got together and pulled themes out of it and then so going over the questions we asked the participant if they noticed a change in winter snowfall throughout their lifetime and a majority of them did and so a lot of them noticed that they were higher drifts more snowfall compared to the last 20 years where it has they don't remember any snowdrifts at all or any snow sticking through the winter months and so this quote just demonstrates how in the 70s they noticed very high drifts and then nowadays that they don't see those drifts that high and that they used to be up to 3 to 6 inches compared to now where it's only 6 inches so going from that we can see the a graph that we had generated from the national climate data and you can obviously see that there's a decline in snowfall and that is shown by data that has been collected for more than 100 years now and so that is one example and we'll go forward okay so again we asked participants if they noticed a change in winter temperature throughout their lifetime and a lot of them have so going from like the 50s 60s on up and then comparing that to the last 20 years so they noticed that there is milder temperatures through the winter months and that the the snowfall doesn't last as long and that there's no big storms so there's less snowfall and milder temperatures we asked participants if they noticed a change in the spring break spring ice breakup and they noticed that they have to compare from when they were younger that they remember people going to the river and using dynamite to break up the ice and that it was a cultural thing and that they did it every year and that compared to the last 20 years that they don't remember us doing that or that if the river even freezes over we asked participants if they noticed a change in the winter weather patterns and they had so they noticed that and the winters come they remember it used to come after Halloween and from there all the way up into March there would be snow so compared to last 20 years they noticed that there isn't any snowfall all the way up into almost December sometimes and then that it doesn't last well into March that it's early February where it's starting to get warm so over 50 years we have seen an increase in average annual temperatures and that's important when we're talking about when the snow falls when it melts, when we have spring runoff you know when we have super hot summer temperatures so everything is all related and everything is all connected so when one thing is you know out of like it's normal or what you would normally see it's going to affect something down the line and that's going to affect something so it's all connected and that's the way we're looking at this and so with the winter temperatures the weather patterns being all mixed up we've seen an increase in the average annual temperature and keep in mind that these are historical data and some of these will have projections under certain circumstances so that's one thing to consider participants were asked if they noticed longer summer heat temperatures or if they were longer summers throughout their lifetime and they noticed that there is a change in how the season pattern goes along so it used to be to where it would start in June and then by August or early September it would start changing but they noticed that it begins really kind of in March or April and then last into October so they noticed that there is hotter summers and that there is temperatures above 90 degrees almost into the 100 degrees weather more often nowadays so we can see the data here that shows that and supports the argument that we have increasing temperatures and you know in Montana as you all know we have very distinct seasons and so we know what to expect but we are starting to see more and more days of 90 degree weather which is unusual for us we are used to a couple of days here and there but we are starting to see that increase which affects droughts or precipitation and so on and so forth and so these hotter weather temperatures are also keeping people inside more and so that is kind of affecting how they see patterns in seasons changing or indicators of season changing or the decrease or increase of plants or animals so we noticed in the younger generation that they didn't really see a change or they didn't really understand the question yeah this is just adding on to that our summers are getting hotter some of them talked about our summers being longer one of the examples they talked about was getting out at Crow Fair and having to go into your car and turn your AC on or having to go home and turn your AC on because it's so hot and that's not what they're used to and so this is just going and showing us and supporting the argument that we are obviously getting hotter summers over time this one as well and this one is actually the historical one projected that I was talking about and so you have you can see on there yeah the lower emissions in blue meaning that if we are under so if you're under a certain threshold as far as like CO2 emissions you're going to get that blue projection and it's still increasing from where we are now whereas you have higher emissions in red and that's at an obviously higher increase in an incline than the blue and so you can see you know they're comparing the lower emissions and higher emissions of where we can go in the future and so this is just showing that we're having that increased annual temperature we ask participants if they see less rainfall or if they notice a difference in rainfall throughout their lifetime and most participants have so they were talking about how the seasons used to be more on and that this rain would come at a time and then during the summer months it would come off and on and that when the thunder came in the spring that's when they knew it arrived and it was always kind of around the same time and then compared to the last 20 years they noticed that they haven't seen much rain and that during the summer months there's maybe one or two days where it rains and then they don't see any rain after that and so I think that makes it for the hotter temperature as well and they feel like it's impacting their very picky impacting wildlife impacting their rivers the amount of water in their rivers and so the next slide will kind of demonstrate the western science yeah so this is a lot of information so I guess overall what these graphs are trying to show us is that we are having a decline in our annual precipitation and according to the Montana climate assessment we are decreasing our annual precipitation by an inch a year and so that might not seem like a lot but Montana is actually in a drought and especially eastern Montana and going into our reservation we are in a drought so we have to be very cognizant of how much water we use and how much precipitation we're getting and so this decline in precipitation is going to affect us in the future and that's one thing that we're trying to address and also figure out we asked participants about the flood of 78, the flood of 2007 and the flood of 2011 and we asked them what kind of impacts it had on their lifestyle as well as their health and if they felt like that impact of the community as well as if they felt like it was more severe than what they remember from the past and most participants believe that the flood kind of changed their lifestyles and some talked about how a lot of houses were along the river and they got damaged and once the water is receded they still had to go and move back into their houses so they felt like that might have had an impact on their health as well as how the flood might have changed the rivers along their houses to where maybe the river don't flow by their house anymore they felt like they were more severe from the past or more frequent. When we're looking at a river from a holistic perspective rivers go through cycles so they have flood cycles and we saw that in 2007 and 2011 we had these huge floods that devastated our community and so the importance of getting this information and predicting future floods is important for us so we can prepare for these kinds of events so obviously it's going to happen river is flood so we need to be better prepared as a community and for us to know this kind of information is important when we're talking and conversing with our community and trying to prepare for things like this and so actually the 2007 and 2011 were huge spikes of water inflex and basically destroyed large grass and co-adenys in 2011 we asked participants about wildfires and if they notice a difference about the amount of wildfires that they see and so most participants talked about how they didn't really see wildfires or if they went to wildfires they were like either out of state or not in the area and that it wasn't as common compared to now where they've seen more fires in the co-agency area and around the ridges that they can remember fires are recall numerous fires that they have seen throughout the years and so we just thought that was important because it's showing like the drought or maybe we could better link it to help them understand what's going on with the water so this is a map of the drought in Montana this actually was pulled from the website on September 26 and so clearly you can see that the majority of Montana is in a drought and that's important for us to know when we're talking about our water resources as a tribe and our community personally how much water we use and it also affects fires like Christina was talking about we've seen an increase in fires as far as how many we've had and how long they last and how bad they are and so this map kind of shows how dry our land may be or how much water we're missing here in the puzzle so we asked participants if they've seen a loss in animals bird species was one that came up a lot even if they've seen a loss in prairie chickens or the sage grass and the majority of them a lot of them haven't seen the sage grass in quite a while compared to previous years they talked about them being on the endangered list some people talked about birds that they have seen when they were younger compared to now where those birds haven't been seen or heard from they've also distinct the birds by listening to their call and how they notice that there's less calls or just different calls cause that they haven't heard in a long time we asked them about plants and they talked about how they thought there was a loss of plants the mint that they collect or the berries that they collect cactals they noticed that they were smaller or they were harder to find cottonwood trees they noticed that they were smaller or that they haven't seen any new growth and they again maybe thought that was from the drought or that noticed that the river isn't full enough to plant those cottonwood trees they noticed a lot of amphibians and so when we asked them this question they talked mostly about not hearing frogs or seeing frogs compared to when they were children they talked about not seeing insects less insects less bees an increase in mosquitoes and spiders but then they also talked about how some years there was a spike in some animals or some insects compared to other years they kind of changed throughout the summer months we asked them if they noticed a loss in the berries culturally important plants and the berries came up a lot they felt like they were hard to find maybe they weren't there because last rainfall or they were competing with the animals as well as other families are people picking the berries and then they thought maybe they haven't seen the berries along the side of the road as commonly as they used to and they kind of put that against agriculture and then spraying for them and stuff and maybe that's why they're not growing and so one of the a big theme that came out of the interviews was loss so we felt like there was a loss in ceremonial practices just like the plants and animals decreasing the participants contributed that to like the newer age being inside more the increase in technology uses maybe the increase in temperatures keeping people inside so we feel like there was a decrease in how the ceremonial practices use and so again we were going to talk about how what we pulled out of this so we feel like the TEK provides qualitative observations and from this we've seen that there was a loss or a decline in spring ice breakup midwinter thaws are impacting the timing of the plants or trees when they bud a reduction in grass are the cattail height a loss in frogs or amphibians insects, animals and then compared to the western knowledge we got from the police so obviously you've seen throughout the presentation that the majority of the western science and TEK coincided so they supported one another and that's what we would like to see but there are going to be some differences and one of the one of the biggest differences that we saw was the length of knowledge and data that we have so as far as western science I mean you wouldn't have someone collecting these samples like 200 years ago or something like that and so we're able to get this data only to a certain extent whereas our traditional ecological knowledge our indigenous knowledge has been passed down through generations and generations so this knowledge has been with us for as long as we can remember and that's one of the biggest differences that we need to understand but they also do coincide with one another and this is just one of the projections that I was talking about we are going to see I mean this is just kind of a conclusion the data that we were talking about and we're going to have increasing summer temperatures decreasing precipitation and our drought is going to get worse if we don't act and do something about it now and obviously that's easier said than done so yeah this one and then just to sum it up that so there was a Montana climate assessment in the shaded area blue they assessed and so our area is like the number 5 where it's not really shaded but when we did our assessment it just complimented the Montana climate assessment and coincided with what they said about those regions and so just in conclusion the crows have always lived in Montana and so we are experiencing more climate change and so basically we respect water and water is very important to us and so we use the water and the river for a lot of cultural practices and so from that we are from the climate change we are put at risk are higher risk and it's kind of going to be hard for us to adapt to those changes or maybe fix what they're impacting on our lifestyle or how so that was it for me that she's kind of switched up my slides I had a different picture I wanted to show but this is a picture of the little bit more river and actually I am currently a grad student here at MSU in a land resource and environmental science department my advisor is Scott Powell and I am getting close to being done I am getting close to the analysis phase actually running my analysis but I am still organizing my data and that's kind of where I am at and with my research I want to share with you I want to impact like four groups with my research and one is like people outside the reservation you know they might be able to help us later when they hear about this quality problems and two is our urban generation and actually this is my son Avery and I asked him to come with me because he actually lives in the buildings with his mom and he's on a spring break and he didn't want to come but wanted him to come because he once told me that he wanted to get a PhD he's always trying to one up for me I was in turn we're competing and our younger generation they start thinking that way we're moving down a good road and like I said that is another group that I would like to have impact on what this project is our younger generation on a reservation I would like them to start pursuing these buildings we need a lot of scientists and math students and engineering especially engineering and I hope myself and Christine and Joy the younger generation Sarah John and Marie and their older generation and John always tells me it's over he's just messing around but I'm like yeah it's John he's always going to be there I know he's right it's going to be our turn and hopefully my son and another group like I said I would like them to know about this is our tribal leaders that's because they're in charge of money and we get funding from various sources and this is a problem and there's no easy fix stuff this is a difficult fix and because I know that because I've been out with John we did a lot of field work this past summer and the tribal members always ask us how do you guys fix it and we're like we don't know and it's always like the million-dollar question is how are we going to do this how are we going to fix this and so I hope this research is able to impact them and they're able to make sound decisions using this information and the last one is just letting our tribal members know of this research because I feel like they have a right to know what's going on with nature how it's changing how it's impacting their health and their homes and they have a right to know and so this is my this is my research investing in California and I'll get to it later but we actually did a lot of field work in June May and June we collected like 100 samples and I have some of the results in there and first of all what is called for me it's a bacteria and it comes from animal feces or human feces and if you ingest it you know there's some acute illnesses like diarrhea you know no one likes diarrhea and the long term is still not too much not too much known yet and it's still looking at research now but the acute stuff there's a lot of stomach aches and there's a lot of people that still drink their well water in the spring when I first when me and John would go out there was this family a family of three you know mother and father was there and the mother and the child they were all drinking but the mother and the child were getting sick they would always get the right diarrhea and the father he must have had a stronger immune system he wasn't getting sick but those two were and they qualified to get a water cooler so we gave them a water cooler and that's just a quick fix those water gallons, those dispensers those five gallon dispensers we gave them that in there a lot of people appreciate those and that's just a quick fix and this tray is actually a photo of coliform when it's all positive that one was total positive every square my area of interest for this study is along the little bighorn river which is highlighted and we collected 100 samples in this valley in main gym with the help of Christine, John, and Joy and a couple interns from the little bighorn college and like I said this is one of the coolers that we give out and the picture is actually of a well home well and the goal of this research is I want to examine relationships between coliform contamination and some physical characteristics I have listed and we will see in a few minutes and some well stewardship factors and I hope this, like I said earlier I hope this guy is able to guide our tribal leaders to make sound decisions for our home people at home well but like I said there's no easy easy fix to this problem and this is my well well stewardship factors a lot of this I collected on site all of this I actually collected it on site and we predicted that there's no well cap so as long as you have a well cap you'll reduce coliform contamination and my other one was if there's life stock on the property I thought there would be higher coliform contamination but I have a diagram later I'll show you that kind of wasn't the case which was surprising and this is the physical characteristics and actually my data is I'm still trying to figure out the production formation and the aquifer type and I still got to derive the land cover type and the distance to river and that's kind of why I'm at and I'm using our map software and that's what hopefully when I finish that I'll run my analysis like I said this is we did the fieldwork in May and June and if you look at this picture this was like half like 50 and you can see some of the ones that are positive you know they're dark yellow and me and John see now we're like dang it there's a lot of people that need help with that and there's just no more quick fix and the rest of these pictures these are two interns along with Christine helping and the interns actually helped a lot because we would get like five samples a day every day in March and June or May and June get like five samples a day and it was just like clockwork after a while everybody would get off right stuff down and it's quick I think the quickest we were back in Crow by was like 10 o'clock John's always eager to he's always rushing me let's go we gotta go head out by like 7.30 in the morning sometimes you know he was good he kept us on our toes and this is the result of the home miles the red is coliform and the green is non-coliform and like you can see there's kind of a pattern here there's some clusters here here and here and this is like in the wild area larch grass renal creek close to renal creek ventine and black lodge area and hopefully when I do run an analysis that paints a better picture why is it why is it clustered like that and to me right now just taking a quick guess assumption is like the geology plays a big part I believe to me it seems like and this is just showing what was on the map there was 30 33 present 67 absent of coliform and like I said earlier what was surprising was I thought with livestock present on a property there would be more contamination but this wasn't the case this is higher when there was no livestock so there's some other factors I play there and hopefully the analysis is able to paint a better picture this is just some of my acknowledgments some of my funding you know my lab mates here on campus any questions are we taking questions? okay thank you and Emory didn't say introduce himself he is both a Sloan scholar graduate student here and he also has Montana's first ever graduate minority graduate fellowship from national institute of environmental health sciences from NIH and last time I talked to the program officer she says that NIH currently has four such fellows across the country and Emory's one of them so anyway we're very proud of his work so we've been working on a lot of different aspects of water quality you've heard everything from climate change to microbial contamination to some of the projects Sarah just briefly referred to including educational projects with kids this was kind of our initial assessment looking at all the different potential sources of contamination and how people could be exposed to those contaminants some through river water some through well water some through traditional uses of springs including quite a few people who are getting home drinking water from springs and all the squares that are colored in are aspects that we have been working on in addition to this looking at how climate change is changing these pictures so the next section I'm just going to talk about our home well water testing program because this seemed to be the most direct serious exposure to contaminants to families and according to USGS data about half of the county about half of all families rely on home wells so this is our home well water testing program we've heard a lot about just the outreach with families that Emory and John and Christine and our students including Jory last summer have been doing but in addition to just testing home wells we make sure those results get back to families and explain to them what it's about and what we've been able to do really in the last year is to provide home water coolers if their well water is unsafe for this strategy is yes if you've got really hard water and it's high in iron and it's high to resolve solids and there's a arsenic in there you can put in a water softener and you can put in an iron and manganese removal unit and then you can put in a reverse osmosis unit and then you can replace the chemicals on all three of those every month and by the time you pay for all that you can't afford to do it I learned this one I married a tribal member and called him back to reservation and moved in his grandparents' house and the water was so bad but really all we could do was flush the toilet with it we felt like he'd been in salt water after showering in it and we tried to use it we tried to wash dishes with it and stain my hands black from the manganese well it takes a while to understand all the ways that that water affects you but most families even if they were willing to deal with all that that's just too expensive so we found that these five gallon water coolers like you often find in office buildings have been an economical and effective solution and it's a short-term solution it's not perfect but it's the best we've been able to come up with so far so just briefly each of these contaminants we've mapped is a spatial picture looks like and it turns out the foremost common serious contaminants are manganese, uranium arsenic nitrate of these four manganese is the only one that will discolor the water and give it a funny taste it'll taste kind of metallic like iron and you may think you just have an iron problem of course we all know we need iron so don't worry too much about that unless you really learn about well water in Montana you don't realize that what you think could be iron is probably a mixture of iron and manganese and the manganese in fact is a neurotoxin it's especially serious for infants and children but even in adults it can cause something that gives you Parkinson's-like symptoms so it's quite a serious contaminant and you can see from this that especially the lower part of the little bighorn river so that's up on the map because these rivers flow north and the lower part of the bighorn river as well has manganese contamination issues and here's where nitrates an issue and this corresponds mostly where there is irrigated agriculture so it doesn't seem to be coming from people's home septic systems it seems to be coming from fertilizer from agriculture and here is a map for uranium and again you can see it's the bighorn river that middle valley where we have the worst uranium problems and traditionally in Montana, home wells were never tested for uranium so if you took your water sample and you had a job in Billings and I want a complete domestic analysis they'd run a whole lot of things but they wouldn't run uranium and it wasn't until Anita Mornal who's actually a pro-tribal member and she was doing her starting her doctoral research here is like you know I think you guys ought to be testing for uranium we said okay we'll try we'll add it to the list and we discovered this really is a serious contamination issue on the reservation and especially and you can see here in the lower corner of the map those are all uranium and vanadium mines and those are all in the headwaters of the bighorn river valley here so some combination of just naturally occurring erosion and gravels to be exacerbated for mining we're not sure which but we're not surprised by the geology that this is where it's showing up so in summary gosh it's sorry the summary here is about a quarter of all home wells are unsafe due to one of these four minerals and the worst well water you can see in the bighorn river valley 64% almost two thirds are unsafe just based on these four and area around co-agency and myola about a quarter of all home wells and there's an area around lodge grass and in prior that have better water quality so now really there are two ways of assessing health risk from home well water and we just started out looking at how does the water quality compare to what the EPA standard is for municipal water and doing an additive way of looking at the risk from those four common contaminants come up with about 24% about a quarter of all home wells rank unsafe that way there's another more complicated way about risk where you actually look at the factor in how much people are drinking on average per day throughout the year for how many years and whether they're a 50 pound child or a 200 pound adult if you calculate that way EPA is different standards oddly enough and you don't get quite the same answers if you look at it that way almost 40% of home wells are unsafe so it matters how you calculate that risk and this is just putting the picture together is very well unsafe again you can see Bighorn River throughout the middle really bad water quality everything that is red and dark red there is over the EPA standards and the ones that are orange you can calculate unsafe if you consider consumption one more note on water quality this is just a map of total dissolved solids so that's sort of a general measure of overall water quality anything there that is in yellow orange red or dark red is over the standard for town water for EPA municipal water so you can see more than 90% of wells on the reservation wouldn't be considered a good enough quality to be municipal water and this is not just a taste issue but it also means that along with high dissolved solids with high sulphate lots of wells have high iron high hardness and it makes it really difficult and expensive to treat the water to drinking water standard if all we had to say an arsenic issue and not these other ones you might just feel install an arsenic filter but this combination makes it very expensive and it also deteriorates your plumbing really quickly we discovered that our water was so hard and cruel that after year and a half it destroyed our hot water heater and while we replaced it once not really realizing what was going on and when it went out we finally realized that our well water was just not going to work with our hot water heater it's just a little bit about communicating results to families so they get a letter that sort of highlights the main things that are issues and what they can and can't safely do with their well water and they get a spreadsheet like this that explains the lab test results everything in yellow are things that are going to be hassle and the things that are red things that are health risks this is one of the worst well I did pick an example that's worse than average well water but a lot of wells look like this and actually where we lived that could be our report from where we lived in cruel the middle photo shows a demonstration of how you shock chlorinated a well this is a way of disinfectant with just a combination of diluted household bleach pour it down your well head and run it through your plumbing system and we actually made a short video that demonstrates this and explains it both in crawl and in English and that's on our Facebook page in the community so we'll also explain this to people and on the far right is just a picture of one of the water coolers we've been able to hand out that's what we're working on right now is looking at what is the seasonal difference at our wells worse in the spring when there's high water and a lot of runoff worse in late summer when water levels are lower and that's the question we're trying to answer right now and with that I'm going to let Don continue and Don is both our PI a little bit from college and our program leader for our research and he has been working on water issues and crawl for a lifetime so I want to talk a little bit about partnerships but before I do the first photo you see there is kind of the reason I really became involved in this whole this whole issue that we're dealing with and have been dealing with is that 35 years ago I was questioning why there's raw sewage running into the little big barn river in such volume that they're steam rising out of that flowing water in the middle of winter and why it wasn't frozen going and looking for an answer and not finding any answer or a solution and I was expecting an immediate solution and that shows you how little I actually knew that and I didn't know where to go to find solutions or answers and so for me to be here with everybody today you can't imagine how good it makes me feel you know, Christine, Jory and Emory and that is our future and I've told Emory many times and you know, it's been a pleasure to work with Anne and Mori and Sarah and the rest of the board members because we've taken steps to change long, forgotten and unsolved solutions and like Emory pointed out they are not quick solutions so 1981 is my start date the steering committee started in 2005 and so for that period of time between 81 and 2005 there was very little that we could do, we tried but so partnerships made everything, it made the difference and so the steering committee has been just invaluable for us to make small steps and what those pictures represent is a complete change of infrastructure in the talent pro-agency power to talent all sewer lines, all water lines the wastewater, lagoon all changed out but because in the early days we didn't have a supporting group that helped guide our way we didn't have the research where we can turn to and ask for research that helped, but we do now at one point it was even challenged on how valid our questions were and I couldn't validate it because I didn't have that background of researchers but we do now that same question is asked I know a source that I can find the answers to that but what Emory didn't point out is one of the biggest partners that we have is our tribal community and really establishing our trust in us as a functioning group of people that want to make a difference in 2017 we went out and tested a hundred wells in 2016 Emory and myself traveled 14,000 miles that summer starting in March and finishing in July in the most remote locations that you possibly could imagine we were there because that's a source of water for our tribal members when they're hunting when they're gathering berries or just camping all of those like Christine and Jordy pointed out those are our food sources and they're important to us yet and so we wanted to know the water quality in those areas and so when a tribal member asked us how the spring was up on top of mountains let's say that crystal caves we can tell them what that water looked like are on top of the priors we can tell them what that water looked like that was our way to build trust in our community we're not here and then we're going to be gone we live here we drink that same water as them so what you're seeing there is a photo of the spring in a Pliny Coos the old chief's house in the background and in the front you see the spring and the question there was why do we have contamination in that spring and so for the past five years we worked with Stephanie Ewing and a number of her associates and looking for an answer there we don't have a final answer but we have a pretty good idea and so when I talk about partnerships that is one of them this next photo here is this one this is a kind of a new one that we're doing and we're working with Stephanie Ewing and looking at uranium in the wells that we've collected samples on the Bighorn River in 2016 and so that's just kind of at the beginning stage I think Jory worked on it a little bit today but every one of these photos and slides that I'm showing you are partnerships that we didn't have before and because we didn't have them we didn't have answers we didn't have direction on how to resolve issues and so we do have that now you know I can't say that enough but this is another photo here this is one of our graduate students Kena he works out at Boseman he goes out and collects samples the photo that you see down below there is a photo of Kena showing some of little Bighorn students his procedure on testing and so the next photo is a new research project that we're actually starting with Steve Hamner and that is also looking at and trying to understand why we have a new kind of a contaminant in the little Bighorn River beginning stages of that and the reason we show that picture with those kids in the river so often is because like it's been pointed out we don't have another source that we can go to for recreation and in summertime when the extreme hot temperatures are out there our kids are in that river and it's not just that pro-agency it's all the way up the river in every community the rivers are just a part of our life and that photo there is taken at pro-fair there's maybe 1,000 tepees there and maybe 20 or 30,000 people in that area and that river is just heavily used and so for us to know the contaminants are in the river and we're not able to solve it yet it just drives that desire to get it resolved and finding the answer and the solution the next photo here kind of shows another part of it again you see it's not well there and it's right next to a horse corral and that well tested positive for coliform we thought we was going to find E. coli in there but we found coliform in there and so the other day Kristine and myself were out there again we took another sample and we didn't find coliform in there so that's another question is with all the new runoff and all of the contaminants that show up now at the high water time something else for us to understand these are some of our partners that we work with in different projects Debra Kyle and that there is with the p50 group of the University of New Mexico and again we're looking at the relationship between water contaminants and health issues from tribal members and so a couple of years ago we ran a health screening and this summer I think there will be another health screening those people that have high levels of metals in their water is it affecting their health and if so how is there a way to make those connections again this is a photo of our student interns and Kristine and in this particular instance it's a new grant that we're looking for and that's to try to look at arsenic in the little bighorn river why are we finding arsenic in the little bighorn river in such abundance that it can be a food source for a bacteria and where is that arsenic coming from in the background you see a rail track there is it coming from the rail line it's coming naturally out of the hill drainages and so that's another one that's a new a new partnership that we're trying to develop this last photo here is a group of young students that we went up onto the bighorn mountains where in the background is Bighorn Canyon and Yellowtail Dam is adjacent to that but these are fifth graders out of the pro-agency public school and I think there was some from Waila and Pryor and maybe Lodegress and so Vanessa Simons runs that program and that is teaching them fifth grade generation these are our scientists after Emory and Kristine and Jory are doing something else or maybe they're our age and say you guys do it so we're hoping it's going to do it and we know that we need to grow those scientists up and so sometimes in our classrooms they don't have time because of other curriculum needs so Jory our Vanessa's program is an after school program and so that's been a great pleasure also and these are some of our collaborators here that we've worked with and like I said the Crow Tribe is our main collaborator Little Bighorn College if it wasn't there for us to be located at we would be kind of no place to go so there's been a lot of partnerships that come about because of this and we all have the same goal let's make our communities and our water safe and healthy and so with that I don't have anything else I want to introduce Dr. Kemper she's been with us for the past 10 years and you know we've been very grateful for her presence and I think I think she can talk a little bit so I get the task of trying to wrap this all up and this is going to be fairly difficult I hope you've been impressed with some of the breadth and the depth of the research that's going on here of the number of people who have been involved and as was said at the very beginning of this presentation this is community based participatory research where the community has truly been involved in a driver of all the research that's taken place it's been in partnership because obviously as a researcher MSU researcher I have questions that I want to answer the community has questions and needs and you try and put those two things together and you come to compromise on how you're going to collect the data and then how you're going to disseminate the results I think one of the most rewarding things though as we've been saying this and I'll say it again is the ability to be able to engage some of the younger members of the community so that they are the next generation that carries forth some of the studies that have taken place here and they're the ones who can take the data that we've been able to collect translated to the communities and affect change and that will I hope continue from not only this next generation but generations to come personally for me this has been an incredibly rewarding opportunity as a researcher I started as a bench scientist so I did all the stuff you know, wet science at the bench I started life as a microbiologist turned it into an engineer and then be able to take some of those things that I've learned and translate that to something that can definitely solve problems on a community level has been an unbelievably enriching experience for me and then establishing some of the friendships that I've established over the years with a group of people that are here in this room and some who aren't with us right now in this project in the past so you've seen a lot of projects outlined here and this isn't even all of it so you can imagine the number of people the funding resources that have been able to be obtained to provide resources for the projects for the community the translational work that's done on the bench science work that's gone on and then the total integration with the community and coming up with solutions that we hope are making a difference on the core of reservation and I sure hope that this project continues for a very, very long time and many others get to have the opportunity to have this experience that I've been able to experience and they're all fabulous people and thank you so much for allowing me to be part of your team So, you know, we want to give a gift to Anne She's been with us for 10 years and she's been so good for us you know, it's made all the difference in our community and our steering committee and so with that Sarah we want to give you this gift an appreciation and showing our gratitude for being there for us in our community Thank you so much You're welcome OK, Laurie Laurie was my PhD student Thank you for coming today We really appreciate your time and carry on Oh They won't have any questions for them We want to give gifts to all of our wonderful presenters I know that's what we're doing now but please stay, ask questions there's also food out there that they're going to take away shortly So, did the depth of home wells have anything to do with the contamination you guys find or does it matter? So, we noticed that there's some people's wells are true of that, different depths Yeah And so, Emery was the student into that Actually, to me, like I said earlier to me is just an assumption but it's going to be a part of my analysis After I run an analysis I should have a clear picture but making an assumption I feel like it does play a part in the well depth So, shallower wells will have more contamination because they don't have the filtration through the ground and the deeper well And part of that is the geology too So, the water table has different layers Any other questions? Any other questions about climate change? So, what would you say to somebody that thinks that's just a cycle, you know, like the same thing happened 100 years ago and then went back to normal What would you say to that? Or do you think it's all because of greenhouse emissions and such? I think that it's human influence and it's human urban and it's being increased at a faster rate So, these changes are happening Yeah, it is a cycle It's going to go through these phases but CO2 emissions are going to drive that change even faster And so, I think that's one of the main things that we're talking about is comparing these cycles versus human influence change I think too when we talk about traditional ecological knowledge to UK If this was a cycle that had happened before, it would have been part of our oral histories and people would have said, well my grandmother said that her grandmother said this happened and this is something that we should be expecting and we don't hear those stories and so we're thinking if we really see the value of traditional ecological knowledge then it didn't happen the way I assume that it did at least in our area and how it impacted our communities or our times Well, there's refreshments out there and we want to thank all of you for coming and we hope that you'll take this information back and think about how you might use it to help other communities See you at the power