Whose citizenship in “citizen science”?

This chapter explores the experience of the Mohawk community of Akwesasne, a Native American tribe who set out to determine the extent to which a local contaminated site was impacting community health. Akwesasne community members reached out to a research university, eventually partnering on the first large-scale environmental health community-based participatory research project (CBPR) to be conducted in a tribal community. Based on interviews with scientists, community fieldworkers, and study participants, this chapter examines the ways in which collaborating on these studies was beneficial for all parties – especially in the context of citizen science goals of education and capacity building – as well as the challenges they faced, including communicating the limits of what scientific studies could accomplish for the community. Hoover also explores how the binaries between citizen and scientist, between subject and researcher were blurred during this research process, through creating a “third space of sovereignty.” This case study in CBPR and citizen science also leads us to intentionally consider the social, cultural, and political processes that structure research in an Indigenous community, and calls on us to question what we mean by the “citizen” in citizen science.