Deborah Daley 00:06
Hello and welcome to Changemakers, a podcast series brought to you by Nature, where we shine a light on fascinating and extraordinary scientists.
I’m Deborah Daley, global Chair of Springer Nature’s Black Employee Network, and I’m very proud to present this series, where we explore exclusion in science and how some researchers are doing something about it.
In episode six, we meet a US researcher who works tirelessly to bridge the Native American worldview with Western science.
Joslynn Lee 00:50
Yá’át’ééh.
My name is Joslynn Lee. I am of the Diné (Navajo) and Keres-speaking Laguna-Acoma people, and I’m currently an associate professor of chemistry at Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado. And I am really excited to bring my Indigenous values from my cultural upbringing into chemistry and STEM courses that I teach here.
So I grew up in New Mexico. And this wasn’t too far from where my dad grew up. He grew up in Shiprock, New Mexico, and that’s one of the larger towns on Navajo Nation.
My mom grew up in a little village of Mesita, which is part of Laguna Pueblo. But growing up not fully immersed on the reservation was where I missed being able to speak my Native languages and being what we call inter-tribal. So that’s being background from multiple tribal nations or Indigenous groups.
So that also brought more lived experiences that I think differ from a lot of other Indigenous folks.
But with that, I had a different perspective from my peers who grew up in the city and may not have had connections to their traditional upbringing.
My nálí. So this is what we call your paternal grandparents on your Navajo side. She was the first person who really got me into science, and she raised goats and would herd them in her younger days.
Now she’s a little bit older that it’s hard for her to get out walking, so my parents would drop us off, and we would spend time with her, and we would also go sheep herding or goat herding with her.
And along those experiences, I got to see the vast geology, and not really knowing the scientific terms, but just making observations.
And I think when I reflect back on that, that is a key component as a scientist. So on these walks, we would look at various plants, and she would highlight which were medicinal or which were edible.
And I think that experience really got me captivated by how we use plants, how we take care of them, how we talk to them.
And then I would go back to school in the border town, where we really didn’t have that training. It was more of classification. This is a plant, and that’s it. There was not really a reciprocal understanding of it.
So I think early on in my perspective as a scientist, it was more battling the two worldviews that we didn’t really talk about as a family. It was more you kept them separate.
It wasn’t until I got to college that I was taking organic chemistry, and I had a really great professor here who was interested in how I could bridge some of my cultural background into organic chemistry.
So we had a natural dyes lab. And with that, I go back to the plants that my nálí, my grandmother, shared with me, and she took me out, and I was able to gather some plants, bring them back to the lab and look at some of the colouring, but also identify some of the molecules that were used on the medicinal side, both from literature, but also using some of our spectroscopy methods.
So that was really a unique space that I got excited, on how I could bring my whole self in science. And also, you know, think about the knowledge you share.
Because I had the discussion with my professor of like, “I can’t share where this plant is from, because I don’t want other people going through and gathering it, or studying it.”
And, you know, I wanted to return stuff that wasn’t used in lab back home, because that’s sort of what we were taught culturally.
So that was my experience of thinking about my culture being Indigenous. And then you know what ways I could identify spaces in my college career.
So Fort Lewis College is a Native American-serving non-tribal institution. Thirty per cent of our student population identifies as Indigenous, Native American, Alaska Native.
So that designation is similar to a Hispanic-serving institution or minority-serving institution. But at the school, and why I chose to work here, was because of the higher population of Indigenous students.
So currently I teach our lower division general chemistry classes and upper division biochemistry courses. That’s my teaching portion.
The research side, because I’m an assistant professor, my group, we study microbes in various environments, specifically environmental.
And one project we have is studying the microbial makeup of acid mine drainage.
So in the beautiful mountains around Durango in the early 1900s there’s been a lot of mining. And some of those mines have been abandoned and not fully cleaned up.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) of the federal government here has allocated money, but there are over 400 mines, so I’m interested in what are some of those unique microbes in those extreme conditions of low pH, and how they uptake different metals.
So that’s one avenue. Another is looking at that shift in the microbial makeup at some of those extreme conditions in rivers, and then how that moves down into New Mexico.
So following the Animas river that’s in Colorado, linking up to the San Juan river in New Mexico, and that San Juan river goes through Navajo Nation.
So there have been a lot of questions on, what is the health of our rivers? So that’s one thing. I’m trying to do more of a longitudinal study to identify impacts of some of this runoff that we get when we have freeze-thaw, because we get a lot of snow in the mountains up here. And what are the cycles? What are the shifts.
Do we see more metals that are released? And then what do some of those microbes do? Do they uptake some of the metals, or as their sort of bio, natural bioremediation? Or do we need to be more careful in the cleanup of this?
So when I think about my values and knowledge system in my role currently, I think about growing up, being shown the land, sort of seeing my responsibility to take care of it.
So I think that aligns into why I do the research I do. I care about our water. I care about the plants because we rely on them.
And even though I’m not in my exact traditional homelands, you know, we’re bordering them, where I’m at in Durango, Colorado, but just knowing the river ways are connected, so everything that happens in the mountains is what’s downstream water sources for where the desert is.
And growing up, learning about how to think about taking care of other people, was also an embedded value for me.
So as I’m thinking of my role as a faculty member, thinking about who’s in my classroom, trying to build a community of support, but also empower the students who I’m teaching to see themselves as also the same position of they want to take care of Mother Earth, Father Sky.
So they’re here to get an education, to be able to go back to their own home communities and see how they can either advocate, do research to help answer questions, and also think about sustaining their language, their cultural practices.
When I’m thinking about, you know, not just teaching chemistry, it’s also a group of students that have the same lived experience that I do.
That we all have this goal that it’s not…we’re just here to learn chemistry, to get a job, it’s much bigger than that.
And trying to get other faculty to be aware of this. That these students, you know, may not came come from the best educational system, but they really want to have those final goals to help their families.
There are ways that I think about my learning, so I do a lot of storytelling or, like, talk about experiments on how people get to finding out knowledge, because that’s how I was raised, on how we know about spaces within our tribal communities and how we use land.
Because when I think about my Keres side, we don’t write down, it’s an oral tradition that’s passed. So you have to speak the language, practice ceremonies. And not growing up there. I don’t have all of the full understanding. On my Navajo side. You know, there is a written language.
We think about the Navajo code talkers also, so it’s been written down. But there are also oral stories that help us learn about concepts think about our ways of life.
So for me, when I’m thinking about instructing in the classroom, a lot of students who don’t come from that sort of upbringing don’t like the style as much of hearing about more of a story and coming back around to it.
That’s one thing I’ve seen in some of my student evaluation, is that I’m very long-winded in some areas, but we still do some hands on-activities, but it takes me maybe two to three lectures for them to finally get to like, “Oh, we follow this full circle that you’re coming back to for a concept.”
And then another main worldview, it’s called hózhó. And this is for Navajo, that we try to see a balance in how we live our lives, and that’s sort of like our level we want to get to.
So as you’re progressing from a child to an elder, you have different lived experiences.
But the ultimate goal is to make sure you’re taking care of yourself, but your people around you, and also Mother Earth, and every decision that you make will get you to that direction.
So when we talk about our tribal elders, they’re the ones who have the knowledge, the experience, and they are trying to attain that level of their livelihood.
And when I think about how I also rely on their knowledge, on not just my education, but just how you are as a human being.
So that’s one thing I think a lot of students would want more elders on campus, but we haven’t really figured out the best way that we could help that connection.
So there are different things I think I can do in the classroom, in research, and then having access for students to see that you can have your Indigenous values when you’re in academia.
When we think about our traditional stories, a lot of these we see as gifts. And they’re also like beings.
So there’s a respect for, like, a plant. It’s not just like a plant to us. This is another living entity that, you know, we see in a different manner than people.
So whenever we have students who have to dissect or go and collect samples for class, like, it’s really tricky for them because a lot of them see them as, like, beings that, in our culture, we respect at a different level. And we have to make an offering.
But if you’re in a classroom, you’re going out collecting stuff, and you have to just, like, pick something up, but that’s not usually the manner you approach a plan. It can be very uneasy for a lot of students.
So we’ve talked about within our school, how do we balance that field collecting or even dissecting? Because some of the animals that we see in our Indigenous practices are protectors, and we shouldn’t harm them.
Others may have a taboo or bad perspective that we aren’t supposed to engage with them. So that’s another thing of like, how do you build an inclusive class that is mindful of cultural practices but provide some of the knowledge that you can gain from it.
So yeah, so microbes are an area I got into because I didn’t have to figure out how do I prepare students working with a cell line or something that comes from a human?
Because for us Navajo folks, we’re not supposed to touch things from another human or interact with it, because we don’t know what happened to that individual.
So working with human cells is really tricky. I think for a lot of indigenous folks. Some people may not be that traditional, so they don’t practice it. So that’s another nuance that we see.
We can’t assume everybody who’s Indigenous doesn’t have this. But how do we create that space to talk about it is one thing I’ve been learning being a faculty member.
When we think about the word diversity, when I think about it in the context of science, it’s really the idea that you have different viewpoints.
So when I think about research questions that I’ve encountered in my graduate training, postdoc training, I don’t just focus on one thing. I see the interconnectedness and other areas we have to consider.
My Indigenous perspective is all the actions we have are going to have effects on other things.
So if we extract something from Mother Earth, in our perspective, we go back and either return it, or fix or update or modify to get it back to the most original state to avoid any repercussions happening.
So that’s one thing I always think about whenever I’m out in the field, is to have less impact. But when we’re looking at research questions in the lab, is just we can’t look at one thing on its own.
We can start with that, but you have to think about the interconnectedness to other entities within the cell if you’re looking at it.
As students have that reminder of just like, “Oh, even though we’re focusing on maybe one molecule, there is some connectedness to other organisms that we see.”
So we talk about antibiotics, like those come from bacteria. So it’s, I think, really cool to have that more worldview or whole perspective that can encourage people to think outside of the box or have more creativity.
So when I think about the idea of diversity in science and why it’s so crucial and different worldviews, it’s mostly that sort of reminder that not everyone is going to approach science in one way.
Deborah Daley 18:33
In the next episode, we meet a Mexican American research leader who has turned mentoring into an evidence-based science.
