Native commission wins grant to study traditional foods Story-Date: 06:13 p.m. PST Wednesday, August 19, 1998 ------------------------------------------------------------ Native commission wins grant to study traditional foods By Rosanne Pagano Associated Press Writer ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) -- Born and raised in Barrow, Harry Brower recalls the days when he'd help his mother render seal blubber into edible oil, stirring the liquid until fat dropped to the bottom of the bucket. These days, the 40-year-old Inupiat Eskimo hunter says, rendered seal blubber doesn't sink. "It used to in the past and I'm not sure what the cause of that is," said Brower, a fish and game researcher in the nation's most northern community, on the Arctic Ocean. helps track the abundance of traditional fish and game. His observations are exactly the kind of evidence being sought by Anchorage-based researchers awarded a grant this week to study the possible contamination of foods such as whale, berries and seal traditionally eaten by Native Alaskans. The Alaska Native Science Commission announced the three-year, $700,000 grant from the Environmental Protection Agency on Tuesday. The project -- which relies on traditional "talking circles" to gather information from Native hunters, fishermen and cooks -- will combine villagers' observations with Western science in a first-of-its-kind examination of subsistence foods statewide. "The commission wants to hear what people have noticed," said Mary Killorin, a research associate director with the Institute for Social Economic Research at the University of Alaska, Anchorage. The institute is participating in the grant. While subsistence food quality was a focus of research following the Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989, studies then were limited to traditional foods consumed by Alaska Natives from the polluted regions of Prince William Sound. The commission's scope is much broader. Field hearings are scheduled to start Sept. 30 in Nome, a Seward Peninsula hub city in northwest Alaska, followed by stops over the next year at Sitka, Fort Yukon, Bethel and the Aleutian Islands. Sessions are pattered after a traditional talking circle, the Native version of a New England town meeting. Killorin said villagers have testified at "zillions" of hearings over the years about unexplained oddities such as hairless seals, darkened burbot livers and off-tasting Labrador tea, a commonly used plant steeped into tea and used to treat everything from arthritis to upset stomach. "We have heard about lesions on fish, changes in the wind, changes in the air quality," Killorin said. Northwest Alaska Natives for years have complained about increasing cancer rates that may be linked to the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear reactor explosion in the Ukraine or radiation generated by U.S. military projects in Alaska. No direct link has ever been established but Killorin said she hoped the EPA project would be a repository for local observations. The hunting and gathering ways of Alaska Natives -- Tlingits, Haida and Tsimshian in the southeast, Eskimo along the north and west coasts, Aleuts of the Aleutian Islands and Athabascan through the interior -- have been documented by scientists since the earliest contact with whites; Killorin says the so-called "traditional knowledge" project is different because Natives will be equal partners in the research. David Norton, a staff scientist with the Barrow Arctic Science Consortium, said he welcomed more scientific study that attempts to join Western and Native approaches. "It can be done with a lot of patience," Norton said in a telephone interview from Fairbanks. "What comes out of it is a lot of mutual respect." Norton, who is pursuing a similar study also funded by federal money, said Alaska's traditional foods generally are pure despite airborne and land-based pollutants that may creep northward from industrialized regions. However, contaminants have been detected in parts of Russia and extreme northeast regions of Greenland, Norton said. "We're very concerned that southern sources of pollution may be accumulating in the Arctic," he said. "We want to start studying now." ------------------------------------------------------------