“Tó éí íná át’é”- “Water is Life”
Water management research by and for the Navajo Nation
by Scott Burg
The Navajo Nation is the largest contiguous Native American reservation in the continental United States. Located within the Four Corners region of the American Southwest, its borders span 71,000 square kilometers across Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah. Over the last 100 years, mineral extraction on the Navajo Nation has resulted in significant water contamination with uranium and arsenic rendering much of the surface water supplies unsafe. While scientists and other researchers have attempted to identify the exact sources of these contaminants as well as develop mitigation strategies to educate and inform impacted communities of the health and safety risks of drinking from unregulated wells, many of these efforts have fallen short of proposed goals due to community resistance of outside involvement, negation of indigenous science knowledge and methods, and lack of direct participation and consultation in the research itself by Native Nation trained scientists and community members.
To increase the involvement of Native-trained researchers, improve participation of community members in mitigation efforts, and to train and prepare the local workforce, scientists and students at Diné College, a four year HLC accredited tribal College located in Tsaile, Arizona, are undertaking a comprehensive multidisciplinary and community-centric research and engineering project to directly address water management issues from a locally and culturally-informed perspective called Water is Life.
Water is Life
Begun in 2021, Diné College ’s Water is Life (WIL) project is a 5-year initiative funded by the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Tribal Colleges and Universities Program (TCUP). The goals of WIL are to improve water security in the Navajo nation while building a strong research infrastructure at Diné College. This proposal is built on the necessity for Navajo Nation and Dine’ College researchers to get involved in more innovative projects, directing the development of research questions, executing research methods, while simultaneously providing opportunities for student participation in the rigorous intellectual aspects of research. As importantly, this project allows participants to retain sovereignty and control of research samples and data on the Navajo Nation.
The scope of research includes a wide range of activities stemming from ongoing water sampling of local rivers, aquifers and wells, in field and locally-based testing and analysis of samples by Diné College students, field testing of filtration plant, animal, and molecular matter to determine sources of water contaminants, and the design and implementation of a water purification system for filtering harmful bacteria and viruses, as well as disinfecting local water supplies.
Diné College contracted Rockman et al Cooperative, a national research and evaluation firm to serve as the project’s external evaluator. This article summarizes some of the primary findings from the Year 2 project evaluation of WIL, stemming from interviews conducted with project researchers and students in May 2023.
Water sampling
The San Juan River is a major water source for communities in the Four Corners Region of the United States (Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico, Utah) and is a vital source of water for the Navajo Nation. Over the past year, WIL researchers with assistance from Diné College students have sampled the river across 21 sampling sites, while more than 100 samples were collected from other sites in Western and Central agencies from the city limits of Farmington, New Mexico (and the start of the reservation) to the mouth of the Mancos River.
According to members of the research team, sampling volume and methods for identifying potential sampling sites have improved over the past year permitting researchers to expand and diversify site testing parameters, and more accurately pinpoint sources of water contamination through microbial source tracking (a group of methods intended to discriminate between human and nonhuman sources of fecal contamination). Data will be examined in relation to the river flow and discharge from Navajo Lake. The objective is to clean the data and share it with the Navajo EPA and any interested Navajo Chapters. Additional community outreach will be contingent on the results of this source tracking.
We can do the source tracking and then find if it comes out to be human. Is it septic tanks or is it animals? There’s nothing you can do, but the source tracking will tell us the next step. If it turns out to be human then we go to the chapter and talk to the people about what we found. — WIL researcher
In areas where there are few sources of safe drinking water, some community members have resorted to collecting water from windmill-powered wells originally built for sheep and cattle. To help pinpoint the types and sources of these contaminants, the breadth of testing sites has been expanded to include windmills, as well as more than 100 well water, lake, and springs samples from the western and central agency within the Navajo Nation.
The goal is to link testing sites across a number of studies to provide a more holistic picture of water contamination that is impacting local communities. What makes this study particularly unique is that the data collection on the microbiata of local waters has not been done at this scale before.
Initial research data was shared by the research team with local community members at the Tuba City, Arizona chapter house, and will be shared with the Navajo Tribal Utility Authority (NTUA), the Navajo Nation IRB, the Navajo Nation EPA, and local Water Resource Departments before any formal publication of research results.
Navajo student participation
Expanded testing requires additional field and analysis support, which is being provided by Diné College graduate and undergraduate students. Traditionally, Native Americans have been marginalized in the STEM disciplines. While students being trained in STEM at Navajo institutes and organizations have had the opportunity to do field research they have largely not participated in the analytical work that happens in collaborators’ laboratories. One goal of WIL is to provide students with the scientific and analytic skills to develop a workforce to build relationships with other universities that focus on Navajo (Native American) developed and directed research.
Student participation in the WIL project has been instrumental in helping to improve the quality of community outreach activities to educate and inform the public about water contamination. Traditionally, local Navajo community and chapter house members have been skeptical about the merits of scientific research in part because such studies may violate cultural taboos, including profaning the sacred with regard to certain animals, plants, and activities commonly involved in these research activities.
Changing community attitudes
During WIL’s first year project researchers made scant headway in changing local attitudes about their work, or in generating interest in community water testing activities. Year 2, however, has seen a marked change in community attitudes towards water research, due in large part to student involvement. Seeing Navajo students, in particular their sons, daughters and grandchildren, actively participating in scientific activities, has helped break down community resistance to participating in and learning from these studies.
My grandma’s very interested in what we do because it involves the water. She recently had pylori which is another common disease sickness or disease that’s happening involving water that we’re kind of picking up on. That really struck her. Whenever we find out stuff we like to let her know. She’s always like, can you just test our water? — Diné College student
Multidisciplinary field research
One component that makes WIL particularly unique is the opportunity to approach water quality monitoring research from a multidisciplinary perspective. This summer three WIL researchers, a veterinarian, a botanist, and an ecologist, hope to gain a better understanding of the biodiversity distribution across the region’s greater watersheds by monitoring and identifying sources of potential water contaminants across diverse plant and animal species (down to the microbial level). To begin this study the research team plan to identify a single ‘pristine’ watershed to set up a variety of ‘traditional’ monitoring equipment such as cameras, acoustic bat monitors and plankton nets.
Researchers are also planning to place a series of stream collectors to collect samples using environmental DNS (eDNA) techniques. eDNA analysis is an effective method of determining the presence of aquatic organisms such as fish, amphibians, and other related species. It allows researchers to build up a far more detailed image of which species live in the environment than by simply identifying species on sight. It also enables scientists to find and identify a whole host of small invertebrates and microorganisms that are ubiquitous in all environments, but very rarely counted due to their small size.
Through eDNA sampling it may be possible to detect a type of water originated fungal disease, which could impact human health as well. There are even proposed research offshoots. One of the researchers hopes to study fecal matter in order to trace what the wildlife is like, and also to see what’s in the water and correlate it with what animals are consuming.
Modeling in this fashion can help to pinpoint how disease or contaminants move within species or where they originate. The research team wants to know what’s happening in the water, down to specific organisms that live in these environments. They are excited about the findings that eDNA sampling may turn up. The researchers realize that they are charting new territory, and with that, comes both opportunity and uncertainty.
I think absolutely the work could have ramifications beyond the grant, because a lot of this, there’s nothing out there, especially not on the Navajo land. We have zero idea what we’re going to find, and how we’re going to find it. Just in preliminary work like the very first sequence I looked at for one of my students, it was something that hasn’t been described yet. So, I’m like, well, here we go! I can only imagine what we’re going to be running into. -WIL researcher
WIL researchers will be conducting research in diverse watersheds. Knowing genetic diversity from watershed to watershed is a function of the natural watershed and the human impacts of use. The human impacts of use of a particular watershed are going to determine the ecological dynamics of that watershed, and because of that will directly impact the water quality,
Water purification
With an area the size of West Virginia, the Navajo Nation is the largest reservation in the United States, but some areas have never been connected to central power and water due to rugged terrain and low population density. Today, the Navajo Nation estimates that of its 357,000 residents, up to 35% do not have running water in their homes. Neither organized water delivery nor water treatment is widespread in remote locations of the reservation. To help address this issue Diné College and their partners from the University of Arizona have designed a solar-powered water filtration system to address the issues of 1) transporting water to remote homes, and 2) treating the water for potable use.
Over the past couple of years project researchers and engineers have made great strides in refining the design and initiating an installation of this off-grid water purification system. By putting the water through a coarse fill filter to first remove particles, and then provide UV to provide the finished water, the power requirements for the system are much lower, and the pumping is much simpler. The changes in design were informed not only by engineering concerns and constraints, but by input from community members from across the Navajo Nation, which informed and addressed the unique needs of each separate community.
The initial deployment of two water filtration units took place this summer in a small settlement bordering Monument Valley. To assist in the deployment, the research team is working with Sixth World Solutions (SWS), a community-based, for-profit business that works within Navajo communities to build local human capacity and pursue sustainable development objectives. SWS staff have been instrumental in building relationships with community members in educating them about the utility and function of these water purification systems, as well as helping to build frameworks for sustainability and expansion of these efforts.
I know someone in Shiprock (New Mexico) that hauls water and everything. I just said, what do you think about it (water purification)? He said, well I’m interested if it’s going to help improve my water. I want it. So let me know if you’re going to put one in my house. That’s the same way that happened in Monument Valley. They (SWS) were talking to relatives about how their unregulated water source might be contaminated or they don’t know what’s in it. The (the community) wanted us to find out. — WIL researcher
The research team estimates that this initial testing after the deployment period could take up to eight months, perhaps stretching into 2024. In addition to actually deploying the systems, project staff needed to identify a ‘drinkable’ water source for this field test. Now that a site has been identified, negotiations are underway with the local chapter house to secure the necessary rights permits.
Long term, WIL researchers see opportunities for Diné College to work in collaboration with the Navajo Nation (and state and federal agencies) and SWS to potentially scale this program to other communities. Scaling this project could provide valuable career and educational opportunities for Diné College students. Possible commercialization of this water filtration system could prove to be a valuable source of revenue to support the College’s broader health and education activities.
Looking forward
In the Navajo culture, water is sacred; without water there would be no life. To be sustainable, water policy needs to be holistic, recognizing the connections to food systems, climate change, biodiversity and cultural survival. Overall the project demonstrates the importance of embracing these elements through research and water management solutions that fuse the knowledge, skills, and lived experience of scientists, students and community members from the affected regions of the Navajo Nation.
