A new, old way of thinking: Indigenous stewardship of culturally significant resources

Recent White House memos and Forest Service priorities emphasize the need to strengthen collaborations with tribes toward co-stewardship and indigenous traditional ecological knowledge (ITEK) inclusion. Forest Service Research & Development has created a Tribal Engagement Roadmap (FS-1043, 2015), which outlines a path forward for working with tribal communities on various natural resource subject areas. Since publication of the roadmap, each research station has identified points of contact for tribal relations and hired tribal relations specialists to coordinate and represent research topics relevant to tribal communities. Agency guidance and implementation plans on these issues are in active development, yet research on these topics as they relate to Forest Service priorities for ecosystem restoration and stewardship is limited.

In preparation for our deeper investigations, we will first conduct a broad review of tribal collaborative restoration, research, and co-stewardship efforts occurring throughout the West over the past 25 years. This will include consultation with research station tribal liaisons and USDA Office of Tribal Relations (OTR), as well as other researchers and practitioners working in this area. This project will include a policy review on indigenous data sovereignty and practices in order to situate subsequent research and develop guidance. During this stage we will organize a series of workshops through extant networks, working across stations and disciplines to bring in expertise from tribal relations specialists and both tribal and non-tribal natural resource managers.

The second stage of research involves case studies on key landscapes, pending tribal approval, chosen using critical case sampling techniques. Research will focus on identified areas of tribal importance in large landscape restoration plans, including conservation of cultural resources. Work will emphasize a participatory action research orientation, critical ethnography, and “two-eyed seeing,” with exact methodologies co-determined based on specific contexts and collaborator needs.

In the third stage, analysis and reporting will be conducted using methodologies agreed upon with tribal collaborators. In the spirit of collaboration and co-development through the full cycle of research, we intend to make draft results available to collaborators to give participants an opportunity to review findings, provide feedback, and make decisions around interpretation and presentation at hosted workshops.

Objectives

1. Report(s) on the history and status of extant efforts from across the region, as well as a ‘state of the field’ around indigenous data sovereignty.
2. Identification of enabling conditions, needs, and barriers to collaborative landscape-scale restoration and co-stewardship.
3. Co-development of best practices guidance around agreements and collaboration as these relate to culturally significant species and landscapes impacted by ecosystem restoration initiatives.

Expected Project Outcomes

Outcomes from this work will be beneficial to the Tribal Engagement Roadmap and provide much-needed overview and synthesis of existing collaborative efforts by tribes and within the agency. We anticipate this research will also help tribes to develop data protection plans and/or other forms of Institutional Review Board (IRB) as deemed appropriate by each community, as well as benefit tribal liaisons serving Forest Service Research Stations and/or the USDA Office of Tribal Relations. Research products will be determined based on site and collaborator needs and may include field visits, workshops, and technical sessions, as well as publicly oriented report-backs, story maps, scientific journal articles, and conference presentations based on our findings.