Grant to Swinomish Tribe supports community climate change solutions

Sea level rise and storm surge caused by the changing climate disrupts salmon and shellfish harvesting that indigenous people have depended on from time immemorial. The impacts on the culture are physical to the environment, physiological to the individual and psychological to individuals and community alike. A $360,000 two year grant to the Health Department of the Swinomish Indian Tribal Community from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation will advance work the tribe has done and support the creation of tools that other indigenous communities will be able to employ.

Jamie Donatuto, a tribe environmental health analyst, leads the project, which addresses the full spectrum of indigenous health from climate change impacts, she said. “It is not just physiological health. It is also the cultural and spiritual and mental health impacts, not only to the individual, but on family and community scales.” She used the term solastalgia, “the extreme hurt felt by the loss of connection to one’s own land. This is important to indigenous people who have been on the land for countless generations.”

Donatuto has been working on climate change projects since 2008. She led an innovative project studying how sea level rise and storm surge near the reservation will impact clam, crab and salmon habitats at six different sites. Her study examined the mental, social and cultural impacts of a disrupted “first foods” supply to a community as closely connected to the land as the Swinomish are.

The tribe has been a leader in climate change work for a long time; Donatuto and other Swinomish staff partnered with the U.S. Geological Survey. “We created cool models,” she said, “and went directly to the community and asked what the health impacts would be” from losing these food sources.

Donatuto credited Tribal Elder Larry Campbell and Swinomish staff Myk Heidt’s participation, as well as staff from Swinomish fisheries. “Larry, as a Swinomish elder, provides a lot of oversight and guidance to this project,” she noted. The two emphasize health from an indigenous, social perspective rather than focus on the individual’s physical health. “We are doing a disservice when only looking at individual physical health, not getting full impact of what tribes are facing,” she stressed. “We went directly to community members and asked what the health impacts would be to them.”

Community results impacted by climate change damages the social fabric of a tribal community, Donatuto said. The teaching from elders to children cannot take place if members cannot get to shellfish and other sites and are thus unable to pass the culture on to the next generation. “The availability to share resources, that community sharing, is an important community aspect within the Tribe,” Donatuto pointed out. Her work shows the loss of these foods impact the entire spectrum of human health.

“This new project evaluates what we did and how it will be useful for the community itself and other communities as well,” Donatuto said. Its results will show if the just-completed project is effective for the tribal community and for other indigenous communities. It will consider methods to address the full range of indigenous health in its policies.

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation sought proposals looking at climate change in new way, Donatuto said and she applied, believing “we had a pretty good chance; what we did had never been done before and was pretty innovative.” She said theirs is the first of its kind in the country. It is now one of seven projects across the country emphasizing innovative health based solutions to climate change.

The Foundation has partnered with the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication to study health, health equity and climate change solutions.

The seven communities chosen last July, from Anchorage, Alaska to Buffalo, New York, have all developed and implemented projects that address the health impacts of climate change, while working to improve health equity. Grantees will assess and learn from their strategies for creating healthier, more resilient communities, a press release from the George Mason Center states.

“While climate change can harm the health of anyone in America, some communities and groups of people are more likely than others to be harmed,” said Dr. Mark Mitchell, a public health and environmental health physician. “Climate change exacerbates health disparities in the most vulnerable communities, including tribal communities, communities of color, and low-income communities. That is why culturally relevant solutions that address health equity are critical to creating climate resilience.”

The Swinomish project will evaluate the efficacy of I-BRACE—an “indigenized” version of CDC’s Building Resilience Against Climate Effects (BRACE) Framework—which incorporates a model of indigenous values-based data collection, analysis and decision-making into a traditional public health model, the release states.

The Washington Department of Health Office of Environmental Public Health Sciences and the University of Washington School of Public Health are also participating.