Transcript: Gillian Mittelstaedt Spotlight Video
One of the most significant challenges is that you have a very high rate of asthma in many tribal communities. And you have good medical care, at least for the Tulalip tribes, they have very good medical care, good treatment, but you can only take so much medicine when you go home each night to a home that has contaminants and has that triggers and continues to assault your respiratory system. It’s hard to get well – completely well. So at the Tulalip tribes for example, we have you know provided quite a bit of housing but definitely some of those housing units have mold issues, wood smoke like an older wood stove that isn’t certified where you get a lot of particulate matter staying in the home and a lot of that wood smoke.  So mold is a challenge, wood smoke is a challenge, dust and dust mites – a challenge for every house. But the fundamental issue is that while we recognize those are triggers, we recognize what they do to the lungs, there really is not a lot of funding anywhere but specifically for tribes to go in and do remediation and to address those things. 
I’m funded right now to do, to create a – it’s called the Northwest Tribal Healthy Homes Working Group. And the idea there is to take tribes in Washington, Oregon, Idaho and Alaska, and just basically bring together a dialogue, a tribally-led, tribally-focused dialogue about the entire range of asthma in tribal communities and what we can do to specifically to address the housing conditions and the indoor air that are exacerbating it.
So the idea of the Working Group is to create some momentum to draw focus on it for tribes but also to draw focus on it for federal agencies so they see the acuteness of the problem and maybe help start moving more funds toward what tribes could do.
Tribes all over the country are at very, very different levels of what they’ve been doing or what they need to focus on, but increasingly, you get some tribes that have been leaders and have been doing some really good outreach and education work or doing it in a clinical setting for a number of years, connecting those people and bringing those experienced tribes who have knowledge and have a program to share and resources. And through the tribal website that’s been created, through these meetings – we have monthly calls – the goal is to show other tribes you know you can build your own program, you can learn from other tribes, and there’s a lot of resources out there.
I’d also like to see sort of advocates or champions in the community, people who live literally every nine or ten houses, who is someone who is a resource who knows about indoor air, understands asthma. And when they are with their neighbors and their community members or at tribal events they can be a resource and answer questions and refer people to what’s helpful. So I want to kind of weave it into the community instead of it being an outside component. 
Just build on what you are doing and consider yourself a program already and just build on it because usually people who are going to be building an asthma program are just someone who may work for housing, they may work as an RN, they might be in the environmental department. But they don’t have a budget, they don’t have staff, and they don’t have time to go out and train. And so it’s easy to get overwhelmed with how much you can do with an asthma program. So my advice would just be, just build on what you are already doing well. And get it out to the community, that whether it’s – you’re doing school-based education, or you’re working in the clinical setting, build on that and start to get partners involved if you can, but don’t think you need to go from where you are today to building this huge program because it is overwhelming and you cannot do it alone you need to build some partnerships and see how other people can help you in different settings. 




WA III-23
3/15/11