Growing up in the Pacific Northwest, Master of Professional Studies student in the University of Arizona’s (U of A) Indigenous Governance Program RaeAnna Rabang says she’s always “felt really spoiled” in terms of her access to food.

As a former citizen of the Nooksack Indian Tribe (her family was forcibly disenrolled from the tribe in 2013), Rabang says her household had always been blessed with abundance. “We have all this salmon. We have all this seafood,” Rabang says, adding, “My family is always feeding us. People come by and it’s always, ‘Oh, are you hungry?’”

To Rabang, access to traditional food and medicine – and to the knowledge of how to locate and harvest those items – was just part of life in coastal Salish lands. If she wanted to learn how to can salmon or harvest cedar root, there was bound to be at least one family member nearby that could teach her what she needed to know.

Rabang says it’s for this reason that she was surprised to learn that not all Indigenous people enjoyed the same sort of access to these things that she’s had. “It’s all about food in our family,” Rabang explains, “and it’s just sad to see that there are people out there that don’t have enough.”

With her new project, titled Traditional Foods: Resurging through Old Knowledge, Rabang hopes to “breathe new life into the time-honored food traditions of Coast Salish Peoples” by documenting the Indigenous food and medicinal knowledge that surrounds her and preserving it for the benefit of future generations.

Rabang recently received a $20k Native Pathways Graduate Research Award from the U of A Agnese Nelms Haury Program in Environment & Social Justice to support this work.

Documenting and Sharing Traditional Knowledge

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Rabang is currently kicking off ‘Phase One’ of her Traditional Foods project by identifying individuals with traditional food knowledge in the ancestral territories of the Stó:lo people in British Columbia that she would like to interview and photograph.

Once her research has been collected and aggregated, Rabang will work with a local nonprofit food bank called Nourishing Nations to implement multiple public-engagement components of the project. This effort could take multiple forms including photo exhibitions, storybooks and public workshops.

Now a grandmother herself, Rabang says that the importance of documenting the sort of information she expects to uncover in her research is more clear to her now than it has ever been in her life. 

“It’s important… for the stories to continue on,” Rabang says, “and to remember who you are and where you come from.” 

These are the lessons, Rabang says, that she hopes to preserve for her children and granddaughter. “For me, I can sit and talk with my aunties about their old stories and it’s just fun to sit there and listen to them,” she says, adding with a laugh, “and then it’s going to be my turn to be an old auntie.”

Indigenous Healthcare Utilization at U of A

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In addition to Rabang, this year’s Haury Program Native Pathways Graduate Research Awardees include a second Native Nations Institute affiliate.

Indigenous Data Sovereignty Scholar and PhD candidate in the Mel and Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health William Carson (Ohkay Owingeh) also received a grant for his project, titled Exploring the relationship of Indigenous identity, perceived stress, and healthcare utilization among Indigenous identifying students attending the University of Arizona.

U of A has more Indigenous undergraduate and graduate students than any other time in the school’s history. Despite this, Campus Health is observing declines in utilization of healthcare services by Indigenous students. 

Through community partnerships with Campus Health and Indigenous serving organizations on campus such as Native American Student Affairs and the Office of Native American Advancement & Tribal Engagement, Carson’s mixed-methods dissertation research will critically examine potential barriers to care and ways in which Indigenous identity impacts students’ healthcare decision making.

“Haury is an incredible program and I am honored to receive this award,” Carson says. “The funding I have received will help ensure that my project is not only able to be completed, but will be a driver for change.” 

Carson says his goal for the project is to help current and future U of A students through improvements to the campus healthcare system. 

Funding from the Native Pathways award will enable Carson to purchase all the tools necessary to complete his project while also ensuring that all participating Indigenous students are compensated for their knowledge. Carson says the funding will also allow him to hire additional Indigenous students as assistant researchers on the project. 

“The partnerships I have been able to make will ensure that student voices are heard and listened to once the project is finished,” Carson says. “Once completed, there will be funding for creating materials to be distributed to Indigenous organizations across campus, as well as funding for sharing results at conferences.”

Learn more about this year’s Haury Native Pathways awardees here.