ECHO Discovery Summary

Navajo Birth Cohort: Understanding Diversity, Disparity, and Resilience through ECHO

Dr. Johnnye Lewis of the University of New Mexico gave a presentation where she discussed the ECHO Program’s Navajo Birth Cohort.

In 2019, NIH facilitated a data-sharing and use agreement between the Navajo Nation and ECHO Program grantees. The agreement was created to respect Navajo Nation cultural beliefs, Tribal sovereignty, and community values. The first Tribal data-sharing agreement for a nationwide research consortium creating a large-scale database, it lays the groundwork for discussion with other Tribal Nations considering participation in biomedical research programs.

During her presentation, Dr. Lewis highlighted the importance of understanding diversity, disparity, and resilience of indigenous peoples in research and ECHO’s role in building and maintaining diversity of these peoples among its cohorts.

In a follow-up conversation with Dr. Lewis, she discussed the Navajo Birth Cohort and why it’s important to include indigenous peoples in child health research.

Understanding Tribal Sovereignty

The Navajo population holds a unique position in the country as the first and only peoples who retain their sovereign (self-governance) status within the U.S., says Dr. Lewis. Sovereignty is the basis for holding a negotiation status on policies of the federal government that impact tribal members, and for their control and ownership of data collected on tribal lands.

“The mistreatment of indigenous peoples has occurred through a series of broken treaty promises since the time of first contact,” Dr Lewis notes. “This process has been formally documented within the congressional record as lands guaranteed in perpetuity have been taken away.”

The Navajo Birth Cohort and ECHO

While the Navajo Birth Cohort is not the only source of tribal participants in ECHO, their recruitment across tribal lands and by tribal members makes this cohort the most representative of an indigenous population as a whole still living on tribal land.

“The Navajo Birth Cohort has already raised questions on the appropriateness of assessment tools, understanding the potential variability in developmental trajectories, and continuing to remain sensitive to the appropriateness for our tools and methods before interpreting our data and generalizing our results,” says Dr. Lewis.

Through inclusion of the broad range of cohorts in ECHO, and making sure that all remain included and the variability continues to be examined, ECHO provides the opportunity through its research efforts to truly understand factors that contribute to child health and development in the U.S. population.

Speaker:

Dr. Johnnye Lewis, PhD

University of New Mexico

Speaker Bio: Dr. Johnnye Lewis is a toxicologist and the founder and Director of the Community Environmental Health Program at the University of New Mexico’s Health Sciences Center College of Pharmacy.  She holds a MA in Psychology (University of Victoria),  Ph.D. in Pharmacology (University of Manitoba), and did her postdoctoral work in inhalation toxicology at the DOE Inhalation Toxicology Research Institute.  After running her own environmental health consulting business, she went to the University of New Mexico in 1996 and began building community/research partnerships, primarily with Indigenous communities, to address environmental injustice concerns through team science that integrates population and field  studies with mechanistic laboratory studies to link exposures to outcomes, confirm mechanisms, and develop environmental and health interventions to reduce risk.  She is the Director of the UNM METALS Superfund Center (NIEHS), MPI of the Navajo Birth Cohort/ECHO study (NIH-OD) and of the Center for Native American Environmental Health Research Equity (NIMHD).

Date: Tuesday, June 9th, 1 to 2pm