Contested Contamination
Epidemiology Narratives, Environmental (In)justice, and Indigenous Women of North America
INTRODUCTION
Rachel Carson’s celebrated Silent Spring (1962) ignited a national conversation in the United States during the 1960s about environmental contamination. Laws and agencies were constructed in relatively rapid response, including the national Environmental Protection Agency and the Clean Water Act, both established and enacted in 1970. Environmental pollution and contamination issues crested in public discourse during the early 1970s after a series of visible contamination problems, including the ignition of Ohio’s Cuyahoga River and the visible smog choking the city of Los Angeles. But nearly 60 years — or roughly two human generations — later, environmental contamination as a national, bipartisan issue has largely fallen out of rousing support in the U.S. Although federally regulated toxic waste sites still remind Americans of its polluted past, the conversation around contemporary environmental contamination has since migrated from the very visible (rivers on fire) to the mostly invisible (groundwater contamination / synthetic chemicals).
At the same time, a new wave of climate change activism has catapulted to the top of major environmental organizations’ agendas — and has arguably diverted attention on local environmental contamination issues to issues that span a national (even international) scale (MacGregor, 2014). I argue that these locally-based environmental contamination stories are as important as the advocacy surrounding climate change, for the maintenance of both public and environmental health. For if we are poisoning our own ecosystems and bodies beyond repair, who will be around to know if the world stays below 3 degrees Celsius in a few centuries?
This paper explores the critical environmental justice research gaps in environmental toxic exposure studies, Native American communities, and women’s bodies. I emphasize the importance of continuing environmental exposure research in the face of climate change, due to its relative ‘invisibility,’ compared to other, more visible environmental concerns like coral bleaching and deforestation. I then discuss the scientific consensus surrounding risk and environmental toxic exposure in women’s vs. men’s bodies. Next, I examine environmental exposure among Native American/indigenous communities in the United States of America, highlighting their unique positionality on environmental racism/injustice issue and utilizing the theory of intersectionality. I then analyze competing discourses present in current epidemiology research, juxtaposing this research with ‘alternative’ indigenous voices in activism and/or scholarship surrounding risk and related contamination effects for both people and the environment. In the concluding section, I highlight emerging environmental justice research ‘paths’ and join other scholars writing in this space, calling for: a bridge between environmental justice advocacy and research; the expansion of critical environmental justice scholarship; and epistemic justice within formal and informal knowledge creations.
WHY WOMEN? Understanding sex and gender differences related to toxic exposure
The workings of a woman make her a biologically distinct specimen, metabolically speaking. Despite the fact that women metabolize drugs differently than men, fewer than 45 percent of animal studies on anxiety and depression use female lab animals (Westervelt, 2015). This disproportionate ‘use’ of male bodies for clinical and toxicology trials has since been documented (Westervelt, 2015), though it remains a revelation largely unacknowledged in popular discourse on medicine. In theory, labels on medical drugs or potentially toxic substances should reflect its different digesters and their dosage needs accordingly; but many times these substances are incredibly un-sexist and make no biological distinction on their tiny-worded warnings. Amazingly, half the human population is often not even considered in clinical trials, and women’s dosage requirements are largely ignored (except for full-stop labels urging against pregnant women’s consumption/exposure, which may be disconcerting to the rest of the public). Worryingly, pollutants “widely found in foods and the living environment may elicit a more significant impact on the fetus than pesticides” (Caserta et al., 2011, page 425).
Starting in the 1920s and 1930s, and cresting with the publication of Dr. James G. Wilson’s book Environmental and Birth Defects (1973), scientists established the conventional wisdom of “teratogens,” or agents in the external environment that can cross the placenta and cause detrimental and inter-generational effects in the unborn fetus (Aston, 2014). Simultaneously, this was a time of heavy industrialization, wartime manufacturing, and chemical-making frenzy in the U.S. The Toxic Substances Control Act (1976) was meant to “ensure the safety of commercial chemicals,” despite the ‘grandfathering’ in of nearly 64,000 existing chemicals the day the law was passed [(Hamblin, 2016) and (Environmental Working Group, 2005)]. (After 35 years, only five chemicals had been banned [Williams, 2012]). An update for the outdated law was signed by President Obama in 2016, although “many health and environmental advocates claim it is a compromise bill that is too lenient on the chemical industry” (Mergel, 2016). In 2012, “more than 80,000 chemical substances [were] listed for use by the US Environmental Protection Agency, with about 1,500 new chemicals [being] manufactured or imported each year” (Mitro et al., 2015, page 1). One study conducted by the Environmental Working Group (2005) found that of “the 287 chemicals … detected in umbilical cord blood, we know that 180 cause cancer in humans or animals, 217 are toxic to the brain and nervous system, and 208 cause birth defects or abnormal development in animal tests. The dangers of pre- or post-natal exposure to this complex mixture of carcinogens, developmental toxins and neurotoxins have never been studied” (italics mine).
A peer-reviewed body of literature [(Caserta et al., 2011) and (Garcia, 2003) for this assignment] in support of women’s unique positionality concerning toxic exposure, is growing — it’s no longer just some ‘housewife hysteria’! Some known chemicals in consumer circulation today, such as parabens found in cosmetics and bisphenol A found in food-plastics, are known as “endocrine disruptors.” These invisible disruptors can have long-term and, again, inter-generational impacts at the cellular level (Caserta et al., 2011). Other pollutants and chemicals manufactured in our surroundings can “bioaccumulate,” or congregate in fatty tissues, of which women have more, anatomically. Humans, organisms who typically eat higher up in the food chain, can harbor these potentially toxic chemicals in greater clusters, or what’s known as a “biomagnification” effect. In 2007, a total of 216 chemicals were known to cause mammary gland tumors in animal studies, despite 73 of these chemicals reported readily in consumer products or in food, and 29 of the same 216 group produced at levels greater than 1 million pounds every year in the U.S. (Williams, 2012, page 100). Pesticides, another innocent-until-proven-guilty class of chemicals, can cause genotoxicity, tumor promotion, and/or immunotoxicity in women’s bodies, specifically (Garcia, 2003). Other known pesticide-related tumors found in women include: breast, endometrium, ovary, bone, and thyroid tumors, all of which are affected by the woman’s hormonal regulation (Garcia, 2003).
While women’s occupational risk factors to certain industrial chemicals like harsh solvents and agricultural pesticides has been studied, much less studied is the exposure and risk factors to chemicals present in women’s ‘everyday’ environment. Some estimates rank women’s indoor exposure levels at a higher risk than to ‘outside’ toxic exposures (Garcia, 2003). This barrage of daily, indoor chemical exposure rejects the one chemical-one dosage scenarios fundamental in many toxicology ‘risk assessments,’ which means that daily exposure to several toxins/chemicals through multiple, distinct avenues of exposure is still missing from the data analysis (Caserta et al., 2011). Meanwhile, gender-sensitive toxicology research is still lacking (Garcia, 2003), and the ‘maternal body burden’ is still largely ignored in mainstream toxic exposure assessments (Caserta et al., 2011), even though we know of the disproportionate risks to women’s health and well-being. Perhaps the increasing clinical infertility rate in industrially developed countries like the U.S. (~15% estimated worldwide) is a beacon of what’s to come of women’s bodies.
EXPOSURE AND INTERSECTIONALITY: Native communities and a history of environmental contamination
While the contamination concerns raised by the likes of Rachel Carson, Lois Gibbs, and Sandra Steingraber (1997) have had profound impacts on public consciousness, much of the narratives have prominently featured white, middle-class communities. These narratives have often overshadowed more marginalized communities, especially American indigenous communities, who already suffer from “disproportionate health burdens and environmental health risks” and mortality rates about twice that of the general U.S. population (Hoover et al., 2012, page 1645). For understanding why indigenous groups face more contamination concerns than their white, middle-class counterparts, one must acknowledge a legacy of “environmental racism.” Environmental racism, a term coined by Dr. Benjamin Chavis (Avoice, 2018), recognizes the historical placement of low-income or minority communities in the proximity of environmentally hazardous or degraded environments, such as toxic waste, pollution and urban decay. Scholars like Dr. Robert Bullard have conducted decades of environmental racism research focused on American communities of color, mostly research overlapping with Black and Latino folks. But this research has, once again, largely discounted and/or ignored indigenous voices in North America, despite Native Americans’ outstanding historical, political, and environmental stake.
The creation of the Superfund, a federal program enacted by the U.S. Congress via the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act (CERCLA) in 1980, was designed to finance the cleanup of hazardous toxic waste sites across the country. Today there are 1,341 active sites listed on the EPA Superfund’s National Priorities List (U.S. EPA, 2018a), a list that “contains the most serious uncontrolled or abandoned hazardous waste sites throughout the United States and its territories” (U.S. National Library of Medicine, 2017). That’s not including some 399 “deleted” sites, deemed so because: “all response actions are complete and all cleanup goals have been achieved,” according to the EPA (2018b). If roughly 1,400 major toxic waste sites aren’t enough to cause alarm, National Geographic Magazine reported in 2014 there are more than 47,000 hazardous waste sites in total across the country — with no end in sight (Scalamogna et al., 2014). That means less than 3 percent of all hazardous waste sites are considered a “priority” by the United States federal government.
In 2014, one out of every four sites listed on the National Priorities List was located in “Indian Country” (Hansen, 2014), which translates to approximately 600 Superfund sites near Native communities in 2017 (Hoover, 2017, page 8). According to Hoover (2017), “environmental mitigation for these communities lags significantly behind that for nontribal communities” (page 8), another disproportionate ‘effect’ from America’s colonial legacy of environmental racism against indigenous North Americans. The U.S. EPA currently has listed several “tribal land” programs within its Superfund agenda, including a Tribal Brownfields Program and guidance on “Underground Storage Tanks in Indian Country,” although specific case studies and tribes affiliated with these programs are decidedly missing from the webpages (U.S. EPA, 2018c). The EPA’s National Center for Environmental Research published a decade’s worth of “Tribal Environmental Health Research” in 2015 (U.S. EPA, 2015), but much remains to be seen if these and other indigenous-focused research programs will continue to be funded under a more conservative and anti-regulatory EPA agenda in 2018.
Vickery and Hunter (2016) write that these concerns of environmental injustice are distinct for Native American communities for three reasons: Native Americans groups’ traditions and cultures centered around outdoor experiences; the challenges in defining oneself or one’s community as ‘Native American,’ based on the U.S. government’s historical ‘preference’ for recognizing some groups ‘officially’ over others; and the historical legacy of tribal sovereignty in the United States. Sovereignty “enables (or is supposed to enable) Native American tribes to establish environmental regulations on their land … even if they conflict with state regulations” (Vickery and Hunter, 2016, page 5). Since the initial European ‘discovery’ of the New World North America, American Indians have been continually dispossessed of their lands for the sake of ‘American development.’ A look at America’s environmental history shows a systematic trend of dispossession and infringement policies in native communities, specifically: the U.S. government has failed to honor the majority of its treaties with Native American groups, preferring instead to ‘terminate’ its treaty obligations and “deconstruct Indian reservations through national legislation and urban relocation programs” since the dawn of industrialization (Rosier, 2013, page 715). In addition to formal dispossession policies, “new industrial development projects such as dams [have] eroded the land and resource base of numerous Indian reservations” (Rosier, 2013, page 715). This distinction of sovereignty arguably places Native American communities in a more complicated situation from other communities of color in the U.S. because of the colonial expectation of (but lack of political legitimacy for) achieving this sovereignty (Hoover, 2017).
Keeping this disproportionate environmental contamination information in mind, native women’s unique positionality concerning the elevated risks of contamination on native soil, for all of the biological/gender reasons explored in the previous section, elevates native women’s potential to ‘fall through the cracks’ when it comes to policies or public health interventions addressing Native American groups. This unique positionality — being a woman and self-identifying as a Native American — beckons the feminist term ‘intersectionality,’ a theory that recognizes the interconnected nature of social categorizations, such as race, class, and gender as they apply to a given individual or group, and regarded as creating overlapping and interdependent systems of discrimination or disadvantage. Not only can living within an indigenous community put one at a heightened geographical disposition to environmental contamination, as we have seen with the national Superfund data, but residing within a woman’s body puts her in an anatomical disposition, as well. Yet, research categorizations remain rooted in their single-stream camps, with much of the available contamination research focusing on women, exhaustively, or Native American groups, more broadly. The recognition that environmental health impacts could be potentially more severe for Native American women is a connection that deserves greater attention in the academic literature.
WHO SAYS? Explorations of epidemiology ‘research,’ and countering indigenous perspectives
Despite these elevated biological and geographical risks for Native American women’s exposures to environmental toxins, the epidemiology studies on the subject beg a second look. Granted, a magnitude of scientific evidence is needed to declare a direct, causal relationship between a specific contaminate and a physiological disease/ailment — but the few epidemiology narratives that focus on native people’s exposure rates are incredibly cautious. One study from the late 1990s on organochlorines and Alaskan Native peoples concluded that: “causative effects on human health from chronic environmental exposure to particular OC [organochlorines] has not been documented and remains controversial” (italics mine, Kuhnlein et al., 1995, page 2507), that “adverse health effects [related to organochlorines exposure] are by no means certain” (italics mine, Kuhnlein et al., 1995, page 2507), and that “there is no evidence, to date, of increased liver disease, cancer or reproductive or developmental disorders related to OC intake in the populations reported here” (italics mine, Kuhnlein et al., 1995, page 2509). The authors advised that “the beneficial effects of breast feeding outweigh hazards of OC carcinogenicity” (italics mine) and that “regulation or advice to alter traditional food consumption patterns to avoid exposure to OC does not appear to be warranted for the communities studied” (italics mine, Kuhnlein et al., 1995, page 2509).
Polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), a chemical compound once used in manufacturing, has since been deemed a “toxic and persistent chemical” by the EPA and officially banned for its continued use in industrial production (U.S. EPA, 1979). Yet the exposure threat of PCB and other “persistent pollutants” due to unregulated contamination remains. A more recent epidemiology review discussed the results of 2006 study in which Native Alaskan women’s breast cancer rates and exposure to persistent chemical pollutants was found to be “not statistically significant” (Holmes et al., 2014, page 2). The authors concluded in their own study of Native Alaskan women that there was “no association between the median concentration of persistent pesticides, PCBs… and breast cancer status” (page 4), while highlighting “similar studies of breast cancer and exposure to PCBs reported conflicting results” (italics mine, Holmes et al., 2014, page 2). The authors conclude that their “study suggest[s] a possible association between breast cancer” and the flame retardant polybrominated diethyl ethers (PBDEs) (italics mine, page 7), while suggesting their results linking the synthetic chemical mono-2-ethylhexyl phthalate (MEHP) and breast cancers may, in fact, be “a chance finding” (italics mine, page 7) and “should be interpreted with caution” (italics mine, Holmes et al., 2014, page 8). Despite some evidence to the contrary (Williams, 2012), Holmes et al. (2014) write that:
“Studies of DDT or PCBs have not demonstrated with any certainty that exposure to these chemicals results in increased risk of developing breast cancer. The health effects of exposure to relatively new environmental chemicals, such as PBDE and phthalates, are not well understood” (italics mine, Holmes et al., 2014, page 9).
This cautionary tone from a team of ‘circumpolar health experts’ is quite benign, compared with the urgency of Native American/American Indian voices and their responses to the perceived health risks associated with PCB chemical exposure, specifically. Vi Waghiyi with the Alaska Community Action on Toxics has spent the last 15 years expressing her concerns about the levels of environmental pollution in Native Alaskan communities, especially in rural Alaska. Says Waghiyi:
“Those of us who live off the land and ocean, we’re among the most contaminated populations on the planet because of our reliance on subsistence foods. In our region, Little Diomede, because of their isolation, they eat the most traditional foods. And we’re behind them. 70–80% of our homes eat only traditional foods” (Schmidt, 2018).
Waghiyi is a cancer survivor, along with half the members of her family of eight (Schmidt, 2018). Cancer remains the leading cause of death among all Alaska Native peoples (Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium, 2017). In just the past 20 years, collective cancer rates have spiked among Alaskan Native women, who are now 20 percent more likely than U.S. white women to contract cancer (Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium, 2017).
The likelihood that PCB contamination in Alaskan Native communities is related to the spike in cancers and other severe health consequences is but one example of the contrasting narratives coming out of epidemiology journals and indigenous communities themselves — much like how the chances of ‘finding’ a Native American community near a registered Superfund site is more than a onetime coincidence. The Akwesasne of the Mohawk Nation live downstream from three aluminum foundries along the St. Lawrence River, which was found to be polluted with PCBs during the late 1980s, tainting “water, fish and people … with toxic chemicals” (Bienkowski, 2012). Akwesasne women have self-reported higher rates of miscarriages in recent years (Hoover, 2017), and have since “embarked on a courageous path to rejuvenate the environment and support cultural practices to ensure there will be a seventh generation” (Akwesasne Task Force on the Environment, 2018). Similarly, Anishinaabe women living near Sarnia, Ontario, in so-called “Chemical Valley,” were found to have a 24 percent higher risk for stillbirth or miscarriage than the U.S. national average, according to one study conducted in 2005 (Bienkowski, 2012). Samples of blood serum from the St. Lawrence Island Yupik people “contains PCB levels 4–12 times higher than that of the general U.S. population” (italics mine, Hoover et al., 2012, page 1646). “Although a systematic health study has not been done in this community, the residents believe they suffer from excess rates of cancer, thyroid disease, diabetes, and cardiovascular and other chronic diseases,” as well (italics mine, Hoover et al., 2012, page 1646).
Native American communities the continent over are saying there are noted discrepancies when it comes to environmental and public health problems following contamination. Many people from these communities are now speaking out and presenting their own ‘alternative’ narratives to challenge the so-called ‘official scientific findings.’ Organizations like Women of All Red Nations have suspected links between the Northern Plains’ legacy of uranium mining and the elevated health risks of the Lakota peoples, who have a “cancer mortality rate approximately 40% higher than that of the overall population” (Hoover et al., 2012, page 1646). ‘Wherever we’re looking, we’re finding contamination,’ says one Crow Nation tribal elder of the Crow Reservation, a place where “metals and salts taint the groundwater that serves as drinking water for most of the tribe” (Bienkowski, 2016). As these stories of water, food, human body contamination emerge from indigenous North American communities like an endless effluent, it’s important to remember that it’s “more than just treaty rights for Native Americans. It’s basic environmental justice” (Bienkowski, 2016).
CONCLUDING THOUGHTS: A new wave of critical environmental justice activism, research, and agenda-setting for 21st century America
Environmental justice is the pursuit of the fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people, regardless of race, color, national origin, or income, with respect to the development, implementation, and enforcement of environmental laws, regulations, and policies. This body of theory and praxis remains relevant today because, as authors Temper and Del Bene (2016) argue, only “a transformative approach and the restructuring of dominant economic models, social relations, and institutional arrangements can address social, political, economic, and environmental inequities” (page 42). Much like other social justice gains in the United States, “the last two decades have seen important theoretical, empirical and policy advancements in environmental justice generally, [but] much remains to be done regarding Native Americans” (Vickery and Hunter, 2016, page 1).
Research within and among indigenous communities has had a fraught history and must be traversed with deliberate respect in the decades going forward. In the past, indigenous peoples have been treated “as subjects and not colleagues” of scientific inquisition, many not receiving a study’s results or simply disrespected as ‘objects’ of inquiry (Hoover et al., 2012, page 1647). Therefore, establishing partnerships and participatory research action protocols are critical steps in continuing and implementing new research agendas in Native American communities. One of the challenges for ‘Western’ science will be measuring other indicators of cultural, spiritual, and communal health beyond the standard metrics of disease, which often “do not coincide with Native American understandings of risk, health, and comfort” (Vickery and Hunter 2016, page 4). Perhaps the determination of risk itself “needs to be calculated differently in Indigenous communities” (Hoover, 2017, page 12). Another research challenge, in thinking about native struggles for environmental justice, is the need to contextualize and include historical accounts of land dispossession and indigenous sovereignty rights (Vickery and Hunter, 2016, page 7), while incorporating a “more complex understanding of nature and justice in the past, present, and future of settler colonialism” (Hoover, 2017, page 10).
Environmental justice research can improve its methodology when it comes to examining contamination in Native American communities. Moving towards a “critical environmental justice” scholarship, which would “not just document cases and successes but also [provide] a more critical examination of the movement’s tactics, strategies, discursive frames, organizational structure, and resource base” (Pellow and Brulle, in Hoover, 2017, page 13), is one suggestion. Bridging theory and praxis within environmental justice scholarship, to join research and advocacy agendas into a “research alliance” framework, is yet another suggestion (Temper and Del Bene, 2016, page 43). Critiquing the creators and proponents of knowledge, under a call for “epistemic justice,” in which “other knowledges are produced and theorized and hegemonic worldviews are questioned and reformulated,” is a third suggestion (Temper and Del Bene, 2016, page 42). Researchers can also recognize research privilege, evaluate their ‘tools’ for research collection, and understand power hierarchies embedded in the research model itself, as well (Temper and Del Bene, 2016, page 46).
While indigenous North American women face some of the most disproportionate environmental contamination risks across the country, they are not voiceless victims but actors with agency. Many are now calling to expand environmental justice to include “reproductive justice,” or “the right to have children, not have children, and parent the children we have in safe and healthy environments” (Hoover et al., 2012, page 1645). According to SisterSong, a women of color reproductive justice collective, reproductive justice “is based on the human right to make personal decisions about one’s life, and the obligation of government and society to ensure that the conditions are suitable for implementing one’s decisions” (SisterSong, 2012 in Hoover et al., 2012, page 1645). Another grassroots organization Women of All Red Nations has identified control over reproduction “as one of the essential elements of Native sovereignty” (Hoover, 2017, page 5). From one group of indigenous authors: “We want to expand the definition of reproductive justice to include the capacity to raise children in culturally appropriate ways. For many indigenous communities, to reproduce culturally informed citizens requires a clean environment” (italics mine, Hoover et al., 2012, page 1648).
Widespread environmental contamination has plagued the United States since heavy industrialization began in the last century. Nevertheless, women and marginalized communities like Native American groups, who are still very much present on this landscape, bear the brunt of this toxic burden — and indigenous women’s bodies, most acutely. Acknowledging centuries of dispossession and the legacy of unequitable contamination is a start for those interested in critical environmental justices work with indigenous peoples in the U.S. Understanding ‘subject’ agency and research privilege within and among this quest to ‘do good’ by Native Americans is a crucial second step. Applying the theory of intersectionality, to ‘see’ the disproportionate effects on indigenous women’s bodies is imperative for this research to advance and gain further legitimacy. Working to dismantle power imbalances within and institute the ‘right’ to a clean and healthy environment for everyone should be the sounding siren for us all.
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