Transdisciplinary Research Practice by, with, and for Indigenous Knowledge Holders

Abstract

A review of Johnson, Edward A., and Susan M. Arlidge, editors. 2024. Natural Science and Indigenous Knowledge: The Americas Experience. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK.

Working with Indigenous peoples, valuing Indigenous knowledge systems, and weaving together Indigenous and non-Indigenous science are critical to cultivating a healthy and just world. The book Natural Science and Indigenous Knowledge: The Americas Experience is positioned as an edited volume to introduce ecologists to the many ways scholars have collaborated with Indigenous knowledge holders and with Indigenous Peoples. The eight chapters presented in the volume can be read as a collection or as stand-alone pieces, which focus on examples from across the Americas. Chapters are authored and coauthored by practitioners, experts, elders, and academics in diverse social science, education, and science-based fields. Indigenous authorship is represented, although the book is not Indigenous-led. The chapters of varying lengths provide a set of case studies that advocate for recognizing Indigenous knowledge systems as science and share how integrating diverse knowledge systems coproduces new insights that assist with analyses of complex socioecological processes. Findings reported from the works have the potential to foster coproduced research that inform policy and management strategies to sustain ecological and human well-being.

This volume, in part, can be read as a response to the overwhelming number of international conventions, peer-reviewed articles, workshops, and other initiatives that have sought to recognize Indigenous knowledge holders and knowledge systems as part of the solution to local to global change. For example, actors at international sites of environmental governance have recently ratified what Indigenous leaders have long articulated: Indigenous peoples and their placed-based knowledge systems, inclusive of their cosmological and spiritual foundations, are critical to addressing the precarity, uncertainty, and complexity of the current planetary crisis. Furthermore, Indigenous peoples' meaningful participation within decision-making bodies (local, state, and international) around topics that directly affect their homelands and livelihoods is necessary for bioculturally diverse and self-determined futures. The United Nations Declaration of Rights for Indigenous Peoples (2007), the United Nations Framework for the Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Paris Agreement (2015), the Escazú Agreement (2018), and articles ratified in the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) and Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) all in different ways articulate recognition for, comanagement with, and transdisciplinary engagement alongside Indigenous peoples and Indigenous knowledge systems (see, e.g., Lightfoot 2016).

In the United States, the Rising Voices: Climate Resilience through Indigenous and Earth Sciences program (Maldonado and Lazrus 2019), the Indigenous Peoples Climate Change Working Group (IPCCWG), and the National Science Foundation funded Weaving Indigenous and Sustainability Sciences: Diversifying our Methods (WIS²DOM) workshop (Johnson et al. 2016) are just a few examples of how research, policy, and action have been interwoven. All of these initiatives center participatory approaches to cultivate Indigenous-led work with Indigenous scholars and Indigenous knowledge holders alongside non-Indigenous practitioners and academics.

While the volume does not directly reference these initiatives, the chapters offer specific insights of how some scholars have challenged mainstream science, leveraged partnerships, and cultivated interdisciplinary theoretical approaches with Indigenous Peoples. For example, Thorton, Deur, and Adams (Chapter 2) argue that ancestral, place-based Indigenous knowledges and their associated practices reveal how landscapes were coevolutionarily formed. Interweaving Tlingit and Athabascan knowledge-holder insights within current policy contexts, the chapter suggests that converging theoretical approaches (historical ecology, ethnoecology, and political ecology) with a diverse research team (natural scientists, social scientists, and Indigenous partners) can assist in identifying significant features of sociocultural systems and their associated feedback loops.

Stoffle, Arnold, and Van Vlack (Chapter 4) similarly argue that analyzing generational knowledge transmission and shifting adaptive strategies improves science, further reinforcing a coadaptation view of human–environmental relations. In another example, Deur and Bloom (Chapter 7) use a mixed methods approach, combining firsthand accounts and peer-reviewed articles to demonstrate the danger of considering Indigenous fire ecology in isolation from other culturally significant caretaking efforts, such as those associated with wetlands. For example, in Yosemite Natural Park, they find that evidence shows Indigenous practices historically supported wetland ecosystems, and wetlands played essential roles as natural fire breaks during different pyroecological applications. They conclude that fire suppression and negative hydrological changes in Yosemite have jointly contributed to the decreased incidence of culturally important species and increased ecological vulnerability that we see today.

Such examples and others present in the volume would best be supplemented by scholarly literature to fill in gaps and debates the case studies do not elaborate on. For example, many chapters highlight the importance of equitable research processes, the ethical imperative to follow Indigenous protocols, and the need to engage with Indigenous knowledge as science (citing Indigenous scholars such as Vine Deloria Jr., Gregory Cajete, and Robin Wall Kimmerer). While some Indigenous scholars are mentioned, the volume would be bolstered by engaging with works that go into detail on processual steps necessary to move from transactional research models to relational ones. Importantly, critical Indigenous scholars have asserted that research in this vein should be marked by (1) attentiveness to asymmetrical power relations and ongoing settler colonial systems, (2) deep work to support anticolonial forms of practice, and (3) innovative methods to destabilize normative ways of doing research so to cultivate work that focuses on repair and sovereignty (De Leeuw and Hunt 2018, Smith 2019).

Moreover, Indigenous research methodologies and other emancipatory designs carefully forged to work with Indigenous peoples and local communities formatively call for foundational ethics and principles, such as respect, relationality, reciprocity, refusal, and responsibility to shape scholars (Indigenous or non-Indigenous) engagements with Indigenous peoples (Simpson 2020, Tsosie et al. 2022). Accompanying the volume with more voices of Indigenous leaders to address power relationships, especially in the context of Indigenous self-determination, and historical trauma associated with research legacies, would be especially relevant. Arlidge's chapter in the volume, notably, does the best job of charting some of these conversations and would be a generative jumping-off point. Her chapter also provides critical insights into how to incorporate content that respects Indigenous knowledge systems into K–12 classroom spaces. Many of the suggestions Arlidge recommends easily could be applied to natural science course designs at the university level.

In summary, for ecologists or students who are looking for a collection that provides case studies on collaborating with Indigenous Peoples, and are unsure of where to start in this type of work, this volume offers a set of examples in the following arenas: (1) working and coauthoring with Indigenous knowledge holders, (2) engaging diverse methodologies and datasets, (3) centering theoretical insights that originate with Indigenous peoples and in interdisciplinary settings to improve ecological analyses and understandings of socioecological systems, (4) educating future generations to raise cultural awareness around the value and relevance of Indigenous knowledges, and (5) exposing faculty and students alike to work of Indigenous scholars. Overall, whether taken up in the classroom or in a managerial context, I hope one of the outcomes of the volume for ecologists to continue to seriously consider the charge to value and respect Indigenous knowledge holders as part of the solution to just transitions and sustainable futures.