TAINTING TRADITIONS Article by Natasha Walker
Photography by Natasha Walker & Erin Middleton
There is an ancient Native American saying that when the tide goes out, the table is set. This saying still holds true for many of Washington’s coastal tribe members. Every year, when the tide is just right, they travel to ancestral beaches with the same fervent objective as their forefathers – to harvest and store.
But the very fabric of this tradition is in jeopardy. A muddle of contaminants, both natural and introduced, are lurking in Washington’s waters and accumulating in the tissue of unsuspecting bivalves with each pulse of the tide. And while federal and state organizations attempt to employ strict water quality standards for acceptable levels of pollutants, flaws in risk assessment practices may be placing coastal tribe members’ health in peril.
A member of the Lummi tribe, Tyson Oreiro has been gathering oysters, clams and mussels from the shores of Lummi Bay since he was a child.
His ancestors have always been gatherers. His father was a shellfish harvester, and his father before him.
Shellfish have offered his family sustenance, income, ceremonial provisions and—perhaps most importantly—a link to the past.
"My grandmother used to always put it like this – when we are eating our traditional foods, it’s like feeding our heritage," he said. "She used to always say, ‘I’m feeding my Indian.’"
But the shellfish that have nourished the Native American spirit for generations come at a price these days.
Contaminants such as methyl mercury, fecal coliform and domoic acid are filtering into Washington’s shellfish. While the fish they reside in often remain unharmed, these pollutants pose considerable health risks when ingested by humans.
According to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), methyl mercury has been attributed to developmental deficits in children. Fecal coliform bacteria, often a result of untreated sewage, have trickled into Washington’s bays, carrying a potential array of viruses. Domoic acid, a deadly neurotoxin created by a class of phytoplankton, has extended its annual stay in Washington, said David Fyfe, a shellfish biologist for the Northwest Indian Fisheries Commission.
And that is just to name a few.
A considerable number of studies off Washington’s coasts have measured the effects of these pollutants. Over the past few years, however, the EPA has been working to recognize communities particularly at risk for health hazards posed by marine pollutants and some researchers have begun conducting assessments with large-scale consumers in mind.
The significance of dosage, or the amount of shellfish consumed, has sparked a flurry of seafood diet surveys and has brought specific attention to large-scale consumers such as coastal Native Americans.
In 2002, the EPA awarded Huxley graduate Jamie Donatuto a $1.2 million grant to explore possible acute and chronic health risks posed by toxicants in the shellfish consumed by the Swinomish tribe of La Conner, Wash.
Her team performed seafood diet surveys to determine how much shellfish Swinomish members were ingesting, as well as how much they wished they could eat.
Though data has not been published yet, Donatuto said she discovered seafood consumption rates are far higher than those of the average non-tribal American.
Preliminary estimates of daily consumption for the Swinomish tribe were around 300 grams of seafood per day, nearly 50 times the 6.5 grams per day, or one seafood meal a month, that Washington State lists for setting water quality standards, Donatuto said.
Joan Hardy, a toxicologist for Washington’s Environmental Health Assessment Department, said she uses upper seafood consumption rates in her evaluations.
"I have a particular concern to protect any high-risk populations," Hardy said. "We have to ask ourselves, given the levels of contaminants and given what we know about consumption rates, are there any populations exceeding the recommended daily intake?"
Already, the EPA has raised their default consumption rate used in national health risk analysis from 6.5 to 17.5 grams per day. Lon Kissinger, a risk assessor for the EPA, said they have also begun to propose a 142.4 gram per day rate for assessing risks of coastal tribe communities.
But even this number, Donatuto said, may still not be protective enough of Washington’s harvesting tribes.
Another dispute brewing among risk assessors involves the calculation and inclusion of cultural risks in health hazard evaluations.
For many Native Americans who have been consuming shellfish as part of a subsistence-based lifestyle for generations, the fear of cultural loss may be far more pressing than any biological one.
"It’s all a part of our historical tradition," said David Oreiro, adjunct faculty at Western and vice-president of the Northwest Indian College. "The whole idea of not eating shellfish anymore, it’d be really foreign to me. If I wasn’t able to go out and pick up an oyster or go out and get a clam, that’s basically like not speaking your language anymore."
Beach closures due to high levels of pollutants are only enforced on commercial and recreational harvesters and Native American ceremonial and subsistence harvesters can continue to gather and consume shellfish, despite contaminant warnings, Fyfe said.
"If you tell them they might have a chance of getting sick from the shellfish, they think about it, and it really bothers them," Donatuto said. "But they’re not going to stop eating it, because the cultural significance outweighs any health risks."
The inability to consider such cultural risks is a definite failure in the EPA’s risk assessment procedure, Lon Kissinger said.
The problem is that risk assessors like Kissinger have to follow policies that approach health hazards from a solely scientific point of view, said Donatuto, who worked with Kissinger on the Swinomish project.
"Risk assessors need to quantify things, to put a number to it," Donatuto said. "They can’t really fit their mind around non-numeric issues like cultural loss."
The solution then is about as complex as the contaminants themselves. Even if water quality standards become more stringent, who determines what levels of pollutants are still acceptable for habitual shellfish consumers? And will assessors consider all risks for Native Americans, both biological and cultural?
It took over a century for the Puget Sound tribes to ensure their treaty rights to a particular quantity of fish. How long will it take to ensure quality?
Natasha Walker studies environmental journalism. She has been published in The Western Front.
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