JEDI Research Spotlight: Dr. Sarah Abney

By:  Dr. Victoria Rexhausen (2024 JEDI Co-chair) with JEDI committee support

Welcome, Sarah! Thank you for sharing your experience with current early career researchers in water and hydrologic science. Could you introduce yourself and your research focus?

My name is Sarah Abney. I am a water quality researcher and now water resources manager for the Hopi Tribe. My current focus is water quality at the nexus of public health and economic sustainability. For the past few years, I have been working with tribal and indigenous communities to get water quality data to maintain public health and fight for rights for their water quality. On the side, I do consulting work with sustainable technologies, developing cutting-edge technology for water treatment.

What does your day-to-day look like as the Water Resources Manager for the Hopi Tribe?

We have a very diverse grant portfolio. Water Resources is 1 out of 8 programs. On the government side, we deal with Indian Health Services (IHS) on infrastructure projects, including drinking and wastewater. We also work with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), and the United States Geological Survey (USGS). However, in the water resources department on the reservation, we are expanding our outlook on what water resources means. Historically, water resources management looks at rivers, goundwater, and streams. However, our program additionally prioritizes helping Hopi sinom (“people” in Hopi, including humans and animals). This requires outreach to see what our priority projects should be.

My personal day-to-day ranges from desk work writing grants and processing paperwork, project applications, completing reports or permits, and interfacing with governing agencies. Other days, I may be out in the field sampling, overseeing water techs, investigating something a community member told us to look into, and generally overseeing the land. We can be great water stewards as hydrologists, and the desk work serves a purpose in organizing our work, but getting out in the field is the most important step to seeing what is really out there and synthesizing what you see into words when writing grants.

My day-to-day is a bridge between the field and the office, but also a bridge between Indigenous values and scholarly work. I am not Hopi. I am an international scholar and Indigenous at that. Still, I am bridging Indigenous values and Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) with the scholarly side of water research. These two things can be hard. I am trying to share the academic side with Hopi, but also convey tribal knowledge to federal entities and advocate for them to respect it.

What have you learned about TEK and how do you incorporate Participatory Active Research (PAR) and TEK into your work on the Hopi Reservation?

TEK and Indigenous perspectives are at the forefront.  I use academic ways of quantifying and exploring data, but integrate [that framework] into TEK rather than integrate TEK into the “research”. The water resources manager position is not a research position, but we need to do research in order to quantify resources to understand and prioritize needs correctly. Then, TEK must be transferred into scientific language for federal grants in order to meet the needs of the reservation.

My experience interfacing with the community comes down to understanding my role as a tribal government employee rather than an academic. It takes different types of relationship building. We have to meet certain expectations to meet the needs of the community. I don’t bring academic jargon into the conversation. I ask questions about what they are seeing and what their experience has been in different locations in the tribal lands. That is the most important part of incorporating TEK– you have to understand Indigenous perspectives of what is going on and what they see. We will have these conversations in a casual setting, and I will take notes. Then, I synthesize that into a more scholarly presentation for other stakeholders and funding agencies.

Tell me about your undergraduate/graduate school experience. How has it most inspired the work you do now?

I have a multidisciplinary career track. In undergrad, I started with a dual degree in biochemistry and Spanish. My pre-med track brought me to a master's in biomedical science focusing on immunology. I took a service-learning trip to Honduras, where I learned that medicine is limited by reliable access to quality clean water. This was eye-opening. When I began my master's, I studied how alcohol dysregulates the immune system. The most important takeaway from this research is that alcohol is very present in US culture, but chronic or even acute consumption of alcohol disrupts the immune system. Simultaneously, safe drinking water regulations are designed with the assumption that the majority of the population is in good health. While the water quality regulations slightly cover immuno-compromised and the elderly, they advise that at-risk communities boil their water. However, other research suggests that we are immuno-compromised every time we drink alcohol. So this begs the question– what are the implications of our social consumption of alcohol on our water safety?

These two things brought my research to water, and my focus shifted in 2017-19. I started noticing the upcoming water crisis due to climate change, and understood the implications of reliable access to clean water on public health and access to medical care. This took me to my Ph.D. in water quality under Charles Gerba, one of the most renowned water quality specialists in the world lab focusing on microbiology and virology.

My Ph.D. was a very integrated process. I was trained in hydrology to understand where and how water moves. Then I added contaminants into that model in order to test bacterial removal rates from filters and UV technology. I was also an NSF Indigenous Food Energy and Water Security & Sovereignty Scholar (Indige-FEWSS (1)). That opened my eyes to what Indigenous peoples in the United States face with access to clean water. I understood what my own country of Jamaica was facing, and I knew there were other communities throughout the US, including my own where I grew up in the state of Georgia, that didn’t always have access to safe water.

I learned a lot about access to clean water with my fellowship with Indige-FEWSS, including engineering experience. We had a food group, an energy group, and a water group, and we learned a lot from each other and the communities we are working with in the Navajo Nation. We didn’t always have access to enter the reservation due to COVID-19, but I did have other experiences to gain knowledge about water access issues. For example, downtown Detroit has one of the oldest water infrastructure systems in the US. This aging infrastructure prevents access to safe drinking water especially in BIPOC communities. I also went to Mexico, and saw how water quality impacts communities in both the city-scape and the indigenous Mayan pueblos as we enter a water quantity crisis.

What steps did you take between obtaining your Ph.D. and your current position?

I went back to Mexico as a Fulbright scholar to collect water quality data before the construction of TrenMaya (2). Groundwater from cenotes (a natural sinkhole exposing groundwater, especially in Central America) is the primary source of water for all communities in the Yucatan Peninsula. It is chlorinated and bottled into 5-gallon jugs or water bottles, then delivered to homes. However, events like hurricanes disrupt access to water deliveries, which in some remote villages can take months to restart, deeming direct use of untreated cenote water an emergency resource. It used to be the Mayans’ main way of obtaining drinking water.

As advocates for reliable access to clean water, we must understand the economic structures that are entangled with water in the present day. In Mexico, their clean water sources are now being contaminated from human and industrial sources as tourism economies flourish, increasing economic strains on indigenous pueblos to seek new ways to make money to remediate impaired water quality or even vacate the land. In Detroit, water is more expensive than water in the Southwest Desert, despite their proximity to one of the world’s largest freshwater sources (the Great Lakes). Water bills range over $200 a month, and debt from utilities is added to property taxes. This is primarily impacting low-income and BIPOC communities, and families are being evicted out of their homes due to the unaffordable price of clean drinking water.

I took natural resources economics and indigenous economics to understand how the capitalist view of water shapes the global market and how TEK can be incorporated into our current economic structure. The main thing I have learned through these learning experiences is that we need to understand that even if we know the cutting-edge technology for water treatment and distribution, the premier water infrastructure already exists because of Mother Earth. We need to protect that infrastructure as we expand into man-built infrastructure. When we talk about water infrastructure and water resources, we must center around the TEK knowledge that Mother Earth has her own water infrastructure.

Based on your experience with the Hopi tribe, what is one thing you would share with current academic researchers looking to decolonize their research framework?

I would say first recognize that they are in a colonizing institution, and it is not that easy. Secondly- although we have been trained to take the lead in a lot of research, decolonizing research- especially work with Indigenous peoples- is realizing that even if you're the best scholar in the world, you are going to have to give the reins of your research to the community. There is a massive awakening of resilience that is happening right now, and that really comes into effect when we talk about how we are working with communities. This applies to BIPOC communities across the board. When we work with communities, it should be stewardship and cooperation, with the same respect you would offer to a co-author on a paper. If you are working with a community leader, they should be listed as a co-author because they are supplying a massive amount of information. We are working in a world where data is worth more than oil or gold. These communities should be compensated through recognition but also through monetary means.

Decolonization means moving from a hierarchical structure, with one leader of the masses, to a circular structure where there is not one sole leader, and everyone is the leader. There should not be just one PI, there should be several, and one should be Indigenous. There are scholars who [extracted] data from communities but then never shared the results. Don’t come in [to a community] with a project in mind. Instead, treat them like a PI. When you come into a project with a co-PI, the people sit at a table with a blank whiteboard and say, “What should we do?”. That is how the conversation should start. As researchers, we often ask, “What can I do for my field of research?” rather than “What can I do for this community?” But the most powerful question is “What can I do for you?”.

During my work in Mexico, I asked, “What can I do for you?” I learned that people didn’t understand what the microbiological water quality in the cenotes looked like pre-TrenMaya. They didn’t have information or direction as to how they could protect their water. So I got them data, came back and explained it to them, and told them how they could use it to advocate for their rights in court. Decolonization is not fully tearing the structure apart. It is allowing and helping people and communities that have been systematically disadvantaged to make gains in that structure and move onward toward that circular structure.

Any final thoughts?

We all say “Water is life” because it is– but there is a deeper sense in remembering that water is living and should be respected as a living being. So when we work with water, everything I said about engaging and respecting communities applies to water. Water is a community in itself, and as water stewards, we must recognize that. Water quality issues persist when pollutant loading outpaces Mother Earth’s capacity. Treatment technologies that emulate nature’s intelligence tend to be the most effective. For example, filtration mechanisms are based on size exclusion, mimicking water percolation through the soils to the aquifer; UV treatment technologies for sterilizing microorganisms are inspired by the sun. What I have learned in my work is that there is no better-designed water infrastructure than what had already existed before we laid our first pipe on the ground. 

Footnotes:

1. Indige-FEWSS is an NSF funded program intended to train STEM scientists and researchers to work with and within Indigenous communities to address food-energy-water challenges. https://resilience.arizona.edu/what-we-do/indige-fewss 

2.  TrenMaya is a mega-railway project in Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula that has launched a major socio-environmental conflict among Indigeneous groups, scientists, and envrionmental activists (Bertram & Martinez, 2024).

References

Bertram, D., & Martínez, N. (2024). Development or ecocide? Sociotechnical imaginaries and infrastructure in dispute in the controversy over the Maya Train. International Forum , 64 (4), 773–844. https://doi.org/10.24201/fi.v64i4.3097