Awards Database

Partners: University of Arizona Center for Regional Food Studies, El Rio Health Centers and African American Coalition for Health and Wellness, Inc.

• Award Date: May 2021
• Duration: 5 years
• Status: Ongoing

In light of the "twin pandemics" of covid-19 and structural racism/police violence, and the greatest impact being on Black communities in the US, as part of the Dunbar Wellness Project, Dunbar will document the impacts both now as well as into the coming decade of the events that have unfolded in 2020. Dunbar will recruit a cohort of 20 Black/African American Tucsonans of varying ages, genders, and socioeconomic backgrounds to interview them about their health status, experiences of care, strategies for maintaining health and wellness, and how place/space factors into their feelings of healing and belonging. Interviews also include "cartographies of healing" through which individuals engage in a process of “counter-mapping” to render visual representations of important sites of healing, care, and belonging as these have emerged or changed during the pandemic.

In addition to soliciting updates to health status and cartographies of healing each year, Dunbar would also seek to collect life histories, genealogies of displacement and family histories, and illness narratives of cohort members. Narratives collected through these interviews are both key to informing future health and wellness programming at the Dunbar and for understanding the broader health and demographic shifts that are underway in our region. 

• Award Date: May 2021
• Duration: 8 months
• Status: Completed

Funds to support a conference in celebration of the 20th anniversary of the creation of the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples mandate, and the 20th anniversary of the creation of the IPLP program. The two-day conference will bring together Indigenous human rights advocates and movement leaders who were directly involved in creating the mandate. Speakers will included rights defenders on the front lines of Indigenous human rights advocacy from Guatemala, Chile, Canada, New Zealand, Tanzania, and other countries and Native Nations.

• Award Date: May 2021
• Duration: 1 year
• Status: Completed

The award helped the Navajo Nation COVID-19 Water Access Coordination Group produce the documentary Working Together for a Better Future. The video highlights the collaborative efforts of dozens of state and federal agencies, along with non-profits, universities, and philanthropies working together with the Navajo Nation to address water access challenges during COVID-19.

Partners: Maurice Upshaw, NNDWR Water Management Branch and Teresa Miguel-Stearns, UArizona Law Library

• Award Date: Mar 2021
• Duration: 8 months
• Status: Completed

The Library Preservation Project, conceived to preserve and give public access to valued, one-of-a-kind documents, some dated back to the 1930s, involves three phases:

Phase I consists of securing over 8,000 water resource documents, reports, and maps from NNDWR Library at the Daniel F. Cracchiolo Law Library. For now, the only people who will have access will be researchers that will be pre-approved by NNDWR on a case-by-case basis and facilitated by the Daniel F. Cracchiolo Law Library.

Phase II consists of preparing and digitizing the collection. At this point, Daniel F. Cracchiolo Law Library plans to recruit and hire students to help with Phase II work, including preparing the collection materials for digitization, creating metadata, and performing quality control. Leads secured funding from CERES for phase II.

Phase III is a collaborative effort between the Daniel F. Cracchiolo Law Library and the UArizona’s Communication and Cyber Technologies to create a database to host the digitized library. Once the collection is digitized, most of the collection will be publicly available, with NNDWR determining which resources will require restricted access.

The Library Preservation Project honors the tribal and information sovereignty of the Navajo Nation and their data and resources while working with the NNDWR to provide access to essential information to improve all aspects of water resources in the Navajo Nation

• Award Date: Mar 2021
• Duration: 1 year
• Status: Ongoing

The award supports the work of Dr. Felina Cordova-Marks. The award will be used to hire a graduate student to assist Dr. Felina Cordova-Marks in her research priorities and to provide opportunities for research experiences and mentorship for the graduate student.

• Award Date: Feb 2021
• Duration: 3 years
• Status: Ongoing

The award supports the work undertaken by the Senior Vice President for Native American Advancement and Tribal Engagement office.

• Award Date: Jan 2021
• Duration: 1 year
• Status: Ongoing

As a new member institution of UC3, UA, alongside 20 other leading North American research universities, is prototyping a collaborative model designed to leverage institutional strengths to foster a robust exchange of best practices and lessons learned in pursuit of accelerating local climate solutions that reduce greenhouse gas emissions and build community resilience. 

The UC3 Fellowship Program is proposed as a three-year initial start-up pilot. Over the three-year period, three cohorts (up to ten fellows in each annual cohort) will work with UA’s UC3 liaisons, participate in workshops, activate their networks, and develop specific actionable programs and activities. Each cohort will work with community partners to create and propose projects for launch. One to three pilot projects per year will be selected for funding by the Office for Research, Innovation, & Impact, based on the advice of the UC3 liaisons.

• Award Date: Sep 2020
• Duration: 1 year
• Status: Ongoing

Graduate Student Support for Sharon Megdal, UArizona Water Resources Research Center

Recipient: Miguel Moreno, UArizona Law Student

Mr. Moreno will assist Dr. Megdal with planning for  “Indigenous Water Dialogues”, and the program for the “202X Indigenous Water Issue Conference”

Partners: Milton Bluehouse Jr., Deputy Chief of Staff, Office of the President and Vice President

• Award Date: Sep 2020
• Status: Ongoing

Pre-design is desperately needed to evaluate and connect Leupp Well 2B to the new well located in Leupp, AZ in the southwestern region of the Navajo Nation planned to supply water for the Dilkon Medical Center, currently under construction. The primary well constructed for the Dilkon Medical Center has water quality issues, and additional water source is needed. The Southwestern Navajo Rural Water Supply Program Appraisal Study has been completed by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation Native American Affairs Office for the southwestern region of the Navajo Nation, including Leupp in the southwestern portion of the U.S.  Leupp Well 2B is 1096 feet deep and yielded 745 gallons per minute.  Leupp and the immediate surrounding area receives the least amount of precipitation compared to the rest of the Navajo Nation; it is the aridest area and is susceptible to severe drought conditions. Pre-design costs are $551,314.

• Award Date: Sep 2020
• Duration: 1 year
• Status: Ongoing

Funds to support the UArizona Native American Initiative office to develop a Strategy Plan. 

• Award Date: Sep 2020
• Duration: 8 months
• Status: Ongoing

Funding support to complete the design and then launch the UArizona Native American Web Portal Research Data Base and Inventory of Resources and Programs (“Grand Challenges” pillar- identified in the overall 2019 Strategic Plan for the University of Arizona).

• Award Date: Sep 2020
• Duration: 1.5 years
• Status: Ongoing

As part of the 2019 University of Arizona Strategic Plan Native American Advancement and Tribal Engagement Initiative (UA Native American SP), the University of Arizona (UA) Provost’s Office and the Pascua Yaqui Tribe have agreed to establish the UA’s first tribal micro campus on the Pascua Yaqui Reservation (Note: this is partial funding).

Partners: Chris Shuey, Southwest Research and Information Center (SRIC), Albuquerque, New Mexico

• Award Date: Sep 2020
• Duration: 1 year
• Status: Ongoing

The award supports a part-time intern to update the Navajo Nation Department of Water Resource Water Development Strategy. The research intern will work with Dr. Tulley-Cordova from the Navajo Nation Department of Water Resources (NNDWR) and Chris Shuey from the Southwest Research and Information Center (SRIC) in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Partners: Jing Luo, Appex Applied Technology, Inc., Trent Teegerstrom, Arizona Federally Recognized Tribes Extension Program (FRTEP)

• Award Date: Jul 2020
• Duration: 10 months
• Status: Completed

The Water Bus project aims to serve as a rapid relief response effort which will provide safe drinking water to the Hopi Tribe villagers. The water bus will be deployed in Shipaulovi Village. The Water Bus's filtration system requires no external power sources as it is 100% solar powered. 

The Air to Water project aims to test a system powered by an integral combination of solar photovoltaics and high-efficiency solar thermal energy to produce water. The team will conduct a performance test of the SOURCE Hydro-Panel system to better understand the feasibility of applying “air to water” technologies in arid and semi-arid regions. The system will be deployed in the Navajo Nation. 

Partners: Northern Arizona University, Ronson Engineering, University of California, MSU, University of New Mexico, SRIC

• Award Date: Jul 2020
• Duration: 8 months
• Status: Ongoing

The project aims to identify COVID-19 high-risk areas in the Navajo Nation. Through UArizona’s collaborations regarding water, health, and environmental health, project leaders will create a map that combines water quality, water infrastructure, health, and socio-economic data to identify areas on the Navajo Nation that are most at risk for a COVID-19 spike in the fall due to lack of access to water, food, and energy.