Nature: Tribal colleges expand reservation research opportunity

Thursday, March 3, 2011  

"Katie McDonald had never given much thought to the trout in Flathead Lake — except when fishing with her family. She didn't wonder about heavy-metal pollution or how that might affect people eating the fish. But that was before the then-19-year-old student started a bachelor's degree in environmental science at Salish Kootenai College in northwest Montana and had to choose a research project. She saw that trout consumption was going up on the Flathead Indian Reservation, where she lived. Poor people, in particular, had begun to receive donated fish. So McDonald set out to see whether there was cause for concern.

Her institution is a tribal college, one of 36 scattered around the United States and serving some of the least-developed communities in the country. But thanks to several federal programmes seeking to boost science within tribal colleges, McDonald had access to equipment such as a state-of-the-art mercury analyser. She ran samples of the lake trout (Salvelinus namaycush) and found surprisingly high levels of the toxic metal.

The results were compelling enough for the tribal government to advise women of childbearing age to avoid eating older, larger fish from the lake altogether — a more stringent recommendation than state guidelines that suggest eating no more than one a month, says Barry Hansen, the tribes' fisheries biologist.

Douglas Stevens, head of life sciences at Salish Kootenai, says that McDonald's work shows students how their scientific research can serve the local community."

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Science education: Research on the reservation (Nature 3/2)