A hawk sits on the ledge of my office window. It stares me down. I say, “I’m working here, I’m writing about our outreach work with the Gila River Indian Community ” It seems to smirk; it seems to say- “you know nothing about those people- you and your civilization,” and scuttles off after a bug. The hawk is right. It is hard to fathom the uncertainties the people face and the environmental dangers that surround them.

At SWEHSC we form partnerships in order to learn from and inform our neighbors about the risks to their health posed by environmental hazards. In January and February of 2009 we hosted four environmental health-training sessions in the Gila River Indian Community with a team from the Community involved in the EPA Community Action for a Renewed Environment (CARE) project there. The sessions were well attended by the people in the Community and by the CARE partners.

The outreach team from SWEHSC consists of Marti Lindsey, the director, and Thomasina Blackwater, an undergraduate at the University of Arizona learning about outreach to Native communities. The goals Lindsey and Blackwater have are those of the CARE project, to empower the members of the Gila River Indian Community to know about environmental hazards and to form a plan to clean up their community. Including everyone is a top priority. The four environmental health researchers that attended as featured speakers were Dr. Clark Lantz, Dr. Mark Riley, Dr. Walt Klimecki, and Dr. Fernando Martinez.