Jamie Donatuto
Jamie Donatuto, a new clinical associate professor in the University of Washington Department of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences, began co-directing community engagement for the EDGE Center on March 1, 2025.
Ask Jamie Donatuto where she grew up and she’ll say all over—she moved about 15 times before graduating high school—but ask her where she spent her formative years, and she’ll say with the Swinomish Indian Tribal Community in Washington’s Skagit Valley.
Donatuto began working for the Swinomish Indian Tribal Community when she was 25 and continued to work for them for the next 25 years. “I grew up there,” said Donatuto. “That’s where I was really formed.” When Donatuto was first hired it was as a summer intern. “When you work at a Tribe, you wear many hats, so you might have a title, but that means nothing. You could be doing 25 different things—from teaching the preschool class to collecting samples to running the garden.”
The first job that Donatuto was assigned was applying for a grant from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to look at toxics in locally harvested subsistence foods of cultural significance to the Tribe. “I’d never written a federal grant before. I had no idea. And this is back before you e-mail any of these things, so I had a typewriter and a lot of white out.”
Not only was her proposal successful, but it resulted in what was, at the time, the largest grant ever awarded to a North American tribe. The Tribal leaders asked Donatuto to stay on and manage the grant. Further, they asked her if she’d be willing to get a Ph.D. “They said ‘We could really use a Ph.D. in the office because it’s difficult to get federal grants without one,’” said Donatuto. With support from the Tribe, Donatuto received her Ph.D. from the University of British Columbia (UBC)’s Institute for Resources, Environment, and Sustainability in 2008. She focused her dissertation on the project funded by the EPA grant and titled it “When seafood feeds the spirit, yet poisons the body: Developing health indicators for risk assessment in a Native American fishing community.”
The whole time Donatuto was learning about toxicology and public health as a graduate student at UBC, she was also learning about it from Tribal Elders. She has a story about her early work with the Swinomish. “I basically started out doing a very traditional toxicological risk assessment and I was tweaking some of the variables like exposure duration and consumption rate to be more reflective of Indigenous circumstances. But when I presented the numerical outcomes to the Senate, which is the governing body of the Tribe, there was this super awkward silence. I just thought ‘well, I screwed something up.’ And then the Chairman was like ‘this isn’t how we think about health. You can’t just give us a numerical value of the probability of an outcome when our subsistence foods might be contaminated.’”
Donatuto had to go back to the drawing board and figure out what health meant to the Swinomish. Luckily, she had a willing teacher in the office next door—Wanaseah Larry Campbell, a Swinomish Elder. “He said to me, ‘okay, you’re weird. Get in here. I’ll take you under my wing and I’ll teach you,’” said Donatuto. Eventually she came to share an office with Campbell, working closely with and learning from him until he walked on in 2023.
While western science favors dividing disciplines into subspecialties like epidemiology and toxicology, the approach that Donatuto learned from Campbell and other Elders is much more holistic. “Environmental Health is health—you can’t separate them,” said Donatuto. “Humans are part of the environment. And not only are humans part of the environment and environmental health, but so are all the living beings. And they’re all equal. Some community members call them brothers and sisters and that includes the mountains and the ocean. When you think about it that way, it’s about familial lines, not just about individual risk. And it’s about more than just a physiological impact. It’s about mental, emotional, and spiritual impacts as well.”
Donatuto said that the Swinomish view of health doesn’t just reflect her work with the Swinomish but with the many Tribal communities across North America that she and Campbell have worked with as well. “Each community is unique. They have their own worldviews–beliefs and practices. Indigenous knowledge is not the same across all communities, but there are underlying beliefs that do have very strong parallels. That health is interconnected is one of these.”
For Donatuto, having been able to learn from Indigenous leaders has been a gift, but also more than a gift. “When Tribal communities share knowledge with you it is a gift and a responsibility to steward it in the right way, to respect not only the knowledge itself, but how it was gifted, why it was gifted, who it was gifted from—all of those things. Because it's not just a way of knowing in western epistemological thought. It's also a way of doing and being, which is very different.”
In her new roles as a clinical associate professor in the University of Washington (UW) Department of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences, Director of Tribal Engagement with the Center for Disaster Resilient Communities, and as co-Director of Community Engagement for the UW Interdisciplinary Center for Exposures, Diseases, Genomics, & Environment (EDGE), Donatuto is excited to be a resource for a wide range of communities. “For me, what’s most rewarding is to be able to see through to fruition a community’s priority—whether that be the development of a plan or the implementation of an adaptation strategy,” said Donatuto.
Donatuto’s work with EDGE goes back to 2001 and the early days of her first EPA grant with the Swinomish. She credits researchers from what was then known as the Center for Ecogenetics and Environmental Health (CEEH) with teaching her about toxicology and educational tools for community engagement. Now she’s excited to take a new role with the Center, helping to mentor others, particularly in how to engage with communities.