In the United States, many private wells are used as the only source of potable water. These wells, under current federal and state regulations, are neither monitored nor checked for water purity. The purpose of qualitative case study was to gain an understanding about how the documented nitrate contamination problem in the Lower Yakima Valley River Valley is perceived by members of the community and to measure their willingness to engage in collective action for social change. Purposive samples of 6 participants were interviewed using 10 questions derived from the drinking water disparities framework by Balazs and Ray. Additional historical information and data were reviewed. While analyzing interview responses, observations, and documents to understand how the documented nitrate contamination problem, themes and patters emerged and were identified. According to the study results, the community was not actively engaged in any communication regarding the nitrate contamination. Private well owners hold beliefs about the safety of their individual water supply but had no knowledge of the water quality being used by their friends, neighbors, and families This community, if engaged in a collective action to deal with the nitrate contamination problem, could be successful in influencing larger organizations, such as state and federal governmental entities, to work toward nitrate contamination source identification and remediation.

Spatially explicit ecosystem service valuation (ESV) allows for the identification of the location and magnitude of services provided by natural ecosystems to human activities along with a measure of their significance based upon economic valuation. While ESV has been used to provide new insight into land use management, few studies have identified the connections between the values of ecosystem services and ecological sensitivity to nitrogen loading despite a growing body of ecosystem service literature. This research combines a GIS-based, value transfer approach to map ecosystem services in the Lower Yakima River Basin (LYRB), Washington, USA, along with estimates of nitrogen loading to identify how nitrogen management may affect ecosystem services in the basin. This analysis combines values of ecosystem services with estimates of nitrogen loading and identifies subwatersheds and specific parcels within a Groundwater Management Area (GWMA) most susceptible to reductions in ecosystem services due to excess nitrogen loading. Based on the benefit transfer analysis, wetlands and forested areas have disproportionately high values of ecosystem services when compared to their land area in the LYRB, while pasture and cultivated crops contribute much less to the total value of ecosystem service flows in proportion to the total area in the LYRB. Across the study area estimated nitrogen loads are strongly driven by the location of concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) and cultivated crops. Areas of particularly high nitrogen loading and high ESV may highlight specific areas for achieving immediate success in increasing or maintaining ecosystem services through appropriately focused regulatory mechanisms. The land cover analysis however, completely neglects the values and importance of subsurface processes and groundwater resources in ecosystem service assessment, and therefore an econometric model is applied to estimate willingness to pay (WTP) to maintain safe nitrate levels in private wells. Through the incorporation of WTP estimates for groundwater quality, a more complete economic and ecological perspective on the effects of landscape N loading in the study site is highlighted. The results of these estimates clearly indicate that ecosystem services from groundwater should be considered to have significant value in the LYRB. Further economic valuation data on specific land cover types and the value of groundwater quality, whether from primary studies or meta-analysis, is needed to refine relative measures of ecosystem service values and more confidently describe these values in specific dollar amounts. Additionally, limits in spatial data resolution may contribute to errors in location and magnitude of ecosystem services, and is an area in need of further development. Despite these potential limitations, this analysis highlights a promising direction for combining spatially explicit ecosystem service valuation with nutrient loading data to identify the location and potential magnitude of effects on ecosystem services from management practices. / Graduation date: 2013

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 1989. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves [287]-318).

xxiv, 505 p. : ill. A print copy of this thesis is available through the UO Libraries. Search the library catalog for the location and call number. / Yakima Ichishkíin/Sahaptin is spoken in the Yakama Nation, located in the Pacific Northwest of the United States in what is now south central Washington State. The Ichishkíin and Nez Perce languages comprise the Sahaptian Family, classified as a member of the Plateau branch of Penutian. Ichishkíin speakers of a number of related dialects, including Yakima, live in the southern plateau region along Nch'iwána , the Columbia River, and its tributaries. The dialects are mutually intelligible, with slight differences in phonology, morphology, lexical items and orthographic representation. The fieldwork supporting this work was done in and around Toppenish, Washington with elders of the Yakama Nation. There are few fluent speakers, but there is great interest in language learning, teaching, and revitalization. Sahaptin is a synthetic to polysynthetic language with rich verbal morphology. The phonemic inventory is similar to other Pacific Northwest languages and consists of a large set of consonants and small set of vowels. Stops and affricates are voiceless with a plain and glottalized series. Grammatical relations are indicated with case-marking, verb agreement, and second position enclitics. Syntactic alignment is primarily nominative-accusative but there are also ergative and absolutive patterns. Word order is flexible, serving discourse/pragmatic functions. The language has a direct/inverse alternation in which the coding of participants depends on person and topicality hierarchies. Verbs are morphologically complex. A verb stem can be fully composed of bound morphemes that include lexical prefixes, motion prefixes, and stems that indicate a change of state or a location or direction. This dissertation is intended to support speech community members and scholars in language preservation and academic goals. The second and third chapters, covering the sound system and an overview of the grammar, constitute a condensed pedagogical grammar. Subsequent chapters offer more in-depth information about major aspects of the language Appendices include texts and classroom materials as well as a case study of a college-level Ichishkíin course that uses materials collected in a language documentation project as teaching tools. This dissertation includes previously published and unpublished co-authored material. / Committee in charge: Scott DeLancey, Chairperson, Linguistics; Eric Pederson, Member, Linguistics; Spike Gildea, Member, Linguistics; Janne Underriner, Member, Linguistics; Robert Davis, Outside Member, Romance Languages

On March 10, 1957, the United States Army Corps of Engineers completed The Dalles Dam and inundated Celilo Falls, the oldest continuously inhabited site in North America and a cultural and economic hub for Indigenous people. In the negotiation of treaties between the United States, nearly one hundred years earlier, Indigenous leaders reserved access to Columbia River fishing sites as they ceded territory and retained smaller reservations. In the years before the dam's completion, leaders, many of who were the descendants of earlier treaty signatories, attempted to stop the dam and protect both fishing sites from the encroachment of state and federal regulations and archaeological sites from destruction. This study traces the work of Wilson Charley, a Native fisherman, a member of the Yakama Nation's Tribal Council, and great-grandson of one of the 1855 treaty signatories. More broadly, this study places Indigenous actors on a twentieth-century Columbia River while demonstrating that they played active roles in the protest and management of areas affected by The Dalles Dam. Using previously untapped archival sources--a substantial cache of letters--my analysis illustrates that Charley articulated multiple strategies to fight The Dalles Dam and regulations to curtail Native's treaty fishing rights. Aiming to protect the 1855 treaty and stop The Dalles Dam, Charley created Native-centered regulatory agencies. He worked directly with politicians and supported political candidates, like Richard Neuberger, that favored Native concerns. He attempted to build partnerships with archaeologists and landscape preservationists concerned about losing the area's rich cultural sites. Even after the dam's completion, he conceptualized multiple tribal economic development plans that would allow for Natives' cultural and economic survival. Given the national rise of technological optimism and the willingness for the federal government to terminate its relationship with federally recognized tribes, Charley realized that taking the 1855 treaty to court was too risky for the political climate of the 1950s. Instead, he framed his strategies in the language of twentieth-century conservation, specifically to garner support from a national audience of non-natives interested in protecting landscapes from industrial development. While many of these non-native partners ultimately failed him, his strategies are noteworthy for three reasons. First, he cast the fight to uphold Native treaty rights in terms that were relevant to non-natives, demonstrating his complex understanding of the times in which he lived. Second, his strategies continued an ongoing struggle for Natives to fish at their treaty-protected sites, thereby documenting an overlooked period between the fishing rights cases of the turn of the twentieth century and the 1960s and 1970s. Charley left a lasting legacy that scholars have not recognized because many of his visionary ideas came to fruition decades later. Finally, my analysis of Charley's letters also documents personal details that afford readers the unique perspective of one Indigenous person navigated through a tumultuous period in the Pacific Northwest and Native American history.