The integrated approach described in the UNM Center for Native Environmental Health Equity (Native EH Equity) will for the first time address, across multiple tribes, disparities in social determinants of health, and tribal cultural and traditional practices with the potential to provide resilience to reduce the effects of environmental disparities on the health of Native Americans. The Native EH Equity approach, also for the first time, provides an integrative understanding of the generalizability of risk and resilience factors across multiple tribes - Navajo Nation, Crow Nation, and the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe (CRST) - to improve both our understanding of these relationships, and our ability to develop and prioritize evidence-based risk reduction and prevention strategies. The focus of Native EH Equity will be to develop common data sets that for the first time will standardize our approach to assessing these variables across multiple tribes. Achieving these goals requires a strong administrative structure to ensure consistency across all components of the Center, to ensure parallel data are collected from each of the partner tribes, and that data are managed in a structure that ensures integration and allows comparative analyses. The Administrative Core (AC) for Native EH Equity brings decades of experience working with Tribal communities, leadership, and agencies; of managing and analyzing large and complex datasets; of oversight of career development programs; of integrative analyses allowing replication of findings with multiple levels of data; and of successful translation of results to enhance understanding in communities, among researchers, to federal agencies, and to health care providers. The goal of the Administrative Core (AC) is to facilitate responsible management, resource allocation, integration and communication within the team; to foster successful career development for new investigators; to provide and manage pilot funding; and long-term to develop sustainable partnerships integrated within the institutional and tribal structures to ensure sustainability of research on Native Environmental Health Equity.
OVERALL - Center for Native American Environmental Health Equity Research Because of their reliance on natural resources to maintain traditional diets, lifestyles, customs and languages, Native American communities in the Western United States have direct and frequent contact with metal mixtures from unremediated abandoned uranium and other hardrock mine sites. Exacerbating these exposures are disparities in infrastructure, especially drinking water supplies and unique social determinants of health from poverty in rural and isolated locations. Addressing these pervasive environmental health disparities with primary biomedical and environmental research and Native-focused community engagement is the focus of the University of New Mexico?s proposed Center for Native American Environmental Health Equity Research, or ?Native EH Equity?.
