A One Health journey from the Amazon Rainforest in Guyana to the White Earth Nation in Minnesota

Pictured above: Jimmy Uran, Jr., Marissa Milstein and Phillip Suse
 

From the depths of the Amazon to the lakes and forests of Minnesota, a unique partnership is weaving together Indigenous knowledge and veterinary science to tackle global health challenges.

Meet Marissa Milstein, DVM, PhD, an assistant professor in the University of Minnesota’s Department of Fisheries, Wildlife and Conservation Biology (FWCB) who co-leads the Konashen Ecosystem Health Project, a long-term collaboration with the Waiwai Indigenous community of Guyana.

A wildlife veterinarian by training, Milstein works at the intersection of disease ecology and anthropology, co-developing research with the Waiwai in the Konashen Amerindian Protected Area (KAPA) in the Amazon on zoonotic disease and sustainable resource use. She extends this work to Minnesota, partnering with the White Earth Nation on protein food sovereignty and wildlife disease issues. Over Thanksgiving 2025, Milstein welcomed Waiwai partner and collaborator Phillip Suse—a biodiversity monitoring expert and KAPA manager—to Minnesota for a cultural exchange trip to White Earth.

The collaboration, co-led by Milstein and Christopher Shaffer, PhD, also an assistant professor in FWCB, began nearly a decade ago. It is a highly interdisciplinary research program, aptly named the Konashen Ecosystem Health Project, which focuses on sustainable resource use and shared human-animal health. Milstein, who joined the project in 2015, leads the health component. Specifically, her research focuses on infectious and zoonotic diseases of wildlife and domestic animals.

The science of shared health 

One of the project's most significant achievements is its ongoing hunter-based wildlife health surveillance program. This was not a program imposed by outside researchers but one co-developed in direct response to community concerns.

“For the last ten years, Chris and I have been co-leading the Konashen Ecosystem Health Project,” Milstein explains. “We started this work because community members were asking us whether they could get sick from eating certain animals.”

The solution was to empower the community. Waiwai hunters, through their everyday subsistence practices, collect tissue samples from harvested wildlife to assess the health of animal populations and identify potential pathogens that could impact human or animal health.

The relationship itself began in 2014 when the Waiwai reached out to Conservation International Guyana and Shaffer to better understand whether the community’s hunting of primates was sustainable. During Shaffer’s initial visit, community members shared concerns they were hearing from outside groups—that eating monkeys was unhealthy and should stop.

“The Waiwai and many other Amazonian Indigenous communities have been eating primates for a millennia,” said Milstein. “I joined the project in 2015 to see if we could collect some data to better understand primate health in the KAPA.”

Working with Milstein and Shaffer has been a powerful affirmation for the Waiwai. Suse emphasizes the value of the partnership. “It has been really important to help us manage our land sustainably, to find out more about what is around us from a scientific perspective, and coming up with new questions and developing questions together,” he said. 

Suse adds that the research has provided security for the community. “When Chris and Marissa started partnering with our community, people were anxious initially, because other people were saying that we were overhunting or the meat was not good to eat, the animals weren’t healthy. Now we know much more about these things.”

Guardians of the global ecosystem 

The KAPA holds immense significance, first and foremost to the Waiwai. “It is a protected area in the southernmost portion of Guyana and the only Indigenously-managed protected area in the country,” explains Suse. “It is the traditional homeland of my people, the Waiwai, and is 648,000 hectares (approximately 1.6 million acres).” 

The creation of the KAPA was the realization of a decades-long vision. “My grandparents and their grandparents had long managed this land—they had practiced sustainable use in the past and they wanted to safeguard the land by getting formal demarcation that it belonged to them,” Suse explains, tracing the effort back to the dream of their chief, Elka. The land was formally secured in 2017 when the Konashen Community Owned Conservation Area (KCOCA) was renamed the KAPA under Guyana's National Protected Area System.

“Kanashen is showing a good example for other communities in sustainable use, healthy wildlife, and maintaining biodiversity,” said Suse. “We depend on the forest for everything, food, shelter, livelihoods. And that is why the Waiwais take care of the land.”

Milstein highlights that the importance of this work is felt far beyond the Amazon. “The KAPA serves as the headwaters to one of the most important rivers in the Amazon Rainforest (the Essiquibo), and connects one of the largest tracks of undisturbed rainforest in the world,” she said. “In addition to the ecosystem services that the KAPA provides, like carbon sequestration, maintenance of biodiversity, and weather regulation, the Waiwai, through long maintained subsistence practices and traditional ecological knowledge, have effectively prevented the emergence of zoonotic disease.” She concludes that the Waiwai are conserving forest and preventing disease “in ways that affect everyone here in the U.S. as well.”

The bridge to White Earth 

Milstein approaches her research through the lens of One Health. Working in the KAPA necessitates this perspective, as it requires situating the research at the intersection of human, animal, and environmental health. Despite the vast geographic difference, Milstein noticed profound similarities between the challenges faced by the Waiwai in Guyana and the White Earth Nation in Minnesota, including the importance of land rights, the struggle to maintain traditional knowledge and cultural identity, and the need for economic opportunities for the younger generation.

This inspired the cultural exchange trip. Milstein had been working with Suse in Guyana and with James (Jimmy) Uran Jr., the Cultural Coordinator of the White Earth Natural Resources Office, in Minnesota. “I would always talk about Phillip when I was in White Earth with Jimmy, and talk about Jimmy while in the KAPA with Phillip,” said Milstein.

For Suse, the motivation was to connect with other Indigenous people and compare notes. “I wanted to listen and see the challenges that the White Earth Nation faces. To compare the native people in the states and in Guyana to see what challenges we share, how they live, what their land title situation is,” Suse explained. He was saddened to learn that the White Earth Nation owns only about 12 percent of its land. “I was sad to see that they are not benefiting more from people (non-native) farming on the reservation, owning land not owned by the tribe and the tribe not benefiting.”

Milstein’s goal for the exchange was not prescriptive. “I didn’t have a specific goal in mind, rather I wanted the relationship to develop organically on their own terms, if at all! Needless to say, they became fast friends.”

Lessons and future vision 

As a field researcher, Milstein has found that humility and consistency are paramount. “Working in a highly remote region of the world requires humility,” she said. “The research that we do is predicated upon the Indigenous peoples that own the KAPA, collect and own the data, and drive the research.” She adds that “trust is built between community and scientific partners by consistency and continuing to show up year after year.”

During his visit to Minnesota, Suse was excited to see the samples that he and the Waiwai team collect—the physical link between their forest and the science being done in the city. “I was especially excited to come to the University of Minnesota to see the specimens that we take, from the rainforest to the city, and how we analyze and get information from the samples,” he said. This transparency is crucial to Milstein. “This is extremely important because these samples belong to the Waiwai and here at the U of M, we are the custodians of them,” she said. 

Looking to the future, Suse hopes for a deeper, more formalized relationship between the nations. “I hope that we can have more exchanges in the future including traditional knowledge exchanges and especially, having people from White Earth come to the forests in Guyana,”  he said, seeing the potential for shared knowledge. “They may know medicine that we don’t know, and they may see plants that we have that may be good for medicine or we may find ones that they don’t.”

He concludes with a powerful vision: “I think there is a great opportunity to make a more formal partnership as natives, Indigenous people. Reunite as native/Indigenous connections. Like a modern version of old exchanges that Indigenous people traditionally had.”