Wabanaki Traditional Cultural Lifeways Exposure Scenario
Author:
Barbara Harper PhD, Darren Ranco, PhD, and the Maine Tribes
Date Published:
7/9/2009
Description:
This project was a coordinated effort among the five federally recognized Tribal Nations in Maine and the US EPA. It was produced under a Direct Implementation Tribal Cooperative Agreement (DITCA) awarded to the Aroostook Band of Micmac Indians on behalf of the five Tribal Nations in Maine. A DITCA is a unique funding mechanism authorized by law and developed by EPA for the purpose of awarding Cooperative Agreements to Federally Recognized Indian tribes to assist the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in implementing Federal environmental programs in Indian Territories. EPA is required by law to have sufficient information to protect designated tribal uses when reviewing or approving water quality standards applications and this funding mechanism allowed EPA to work cooperatively with the Maine tribes to collect sound scientific data documenting tribal cultural practices and resource utilization patterns in the form of tribal exposure scenarios.
This project has resulted in the development of the Wabanaki Cultural Lifeways Exposure Scenario ('Scenario'), a numerical representation of the environmental contact, diet, and exposure pathways present in traditional cultural lifeways in Maine. These traditional uses are described as a single best representation of subsistence-traditional lifeways. This project report is intended to reflect the lifeways of people fully using natural resources and pursuing traditional cultural lifeways, not lifeways of people with semi-suburban or hybrid lifestyles and grocery-store diets. Present-day environmental conditions may not allow many people to fully engage in a fully traditional lifestyle until resources are restored, but this is still an 'actual' and not 'hypothetical' lifestyle. This project will help to ensure that exposure pathway information that is collected for the Tribes in Maine will not be biased by contemporary consumption rates.
The Exposure Scenario is presented in a format typically used by regulatory agencies during development of environmental standards and evaluation of baseline environmental risks. This project enables EPA to assess the relation between traditional cultural lifeways (sometimes referred to in the report as the shorthand term 'subsistence') and contemporary applications of this information (development of standards or risk assessment). Wabanaki Traditional Cultural Lifeways Exposure Scenario originally available at http://www.epa.gov/region1/govt/tribes/pdfs/DITCA.pdf, last accessed June 9, 2015.
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