This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative... more This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY
Transdisciplinary collaboration offers great potential for meaningfully addressing complex proble... more Transdisciplinary collaboration offers great potential for meaningfully addressing complex problems related to climate change and social inequities. Communication shapes transdisciplinary collaboration in myriad ways, and interdisciplinary and rhetorical approaches to communication can help identify these influences as well as strategies to transform inequitable communication patterns. In this paper, we share results from an engaged and ethnographic research project focused on strategic communication in a large-scale transdisciplinary collaboration to develop environmental-DNA (eDNA) science for coastal resilience. In this context, definitions of eDNA, perspectives about communication, and constructions of audience and expertise shape the ways in which collaborators co-produce knowledge across disciplines and with diverse partners. Identifying relationships among strategic communication, knowledge co-production, and power enables the development of strategic collaborative practices,...
American Indian and Alaska Native tribes are uniquely affected by climate change. Indigenous peop... more American Indian and Alaska Native tribes are uniquely affected by climate change. Indigenous peoples have depended on a wide variety of native fungi, plant and animal species for food, medicine, ceremonies, community and economic health for count-less generations. Climate change stands to impact the species and ecosystems that constitute
Sustainability science offers an alternative space for research that challenges colonial historie... more Sustainability science offers an alternative space for research that challenges colonial histories of western science, especially in its orientation to interdisciplinarity and for addressing complex problems through equitable knowledge co-production processes. However, the justice-oriented commitments within sustainability science remain underdeveloped, in particular for centering indigenous research methods (IRM) and promoting decolonization of academic institutions. In this paper, we draw from more than 10 years of experience across three cases of conducting sustainability science in Indigenous homelands. The cases focus on (1) adaptive responses to the Emerald Ash Borer insect which threatens black ash basketmaking cultures and economies; (2) efforts to link science with decision making to protect public health and reduce shellfish bed closures; and (3) collaborative research to support dam removal and river restoration. We identify tensions in science as a discourse, including how sustainability science is uniquely shaped by practices of naming and social constructions of time. We then describe how we engage these tensions through four main commitments to critical praxis, or tailored practices that respond to emergent problems and systems of power. These commitments include centering Wabanaki diplomacy and IRMs, redesigning all stages of research for inclusivity and dialogue, attending to multiple temporalities, and supporting Wabanaki and Indigenous students as leaders and researchers. To conclude, we reflect on how these practices may be adapted to other contexts, histories, and sustainability-related issues.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2021
Archaeological and paleoecological evidence shows that by 10,000 BCE, all human societies employe... more Archaeological and paleoecological evidence shows that by 10,000 BCE, all human societies employed varying degrees of ecologically transformative land use practices, including burning, hunting, species propagation, domestication, cultivation, and others that have left long-term legacies across the terrestrial biosphere. Yet, a lingering paradigm among natural scientists, conservationists, and policymakers is that human transformation of terrestrial nature is mostly recent and inherently destructive. Here, we use the most up-to-date, spatially explicit global reconstruction of historical human populations and land use to show that this paradigm is likely wrong. Even 12,000 y ago, nearly three quarters of Earth’s land was inhabited and therefore shaped by human societies, including more than 95% of temperate and 90% of tropical woodlands. Lands now characterized as “natural,” “intact,” and “wild” generally exhibit long histories of use, as do protected areas and Indigenous lands, and ...
Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities, 2014
is well known to students of abolitionist history as the home of the Hutchinson Family Singers, o... more is well known to students of abolitionist history as the home of the Hutchinson Family Singers, often hailed as the country's first protest singers. This celebratory history shows up the state's whitewashing of its own engagement with slavery, because Milford was also the hometown of Harriet Wilson, the first African American woman to publish a novel in the United States. Our Nig (1859) was the semi-autobiographical account of a young black woman's abuse in indentured servitude. Controversial in its own time, it evidently continues to challenge a New England ideal that would prefer to ignore the racism in its own midst. Although the novel itself was recovered in the 1980s-to considerable academic fanfare-it wasn't until 2006 that Milford welcomed a modest memorial statue in honor of Wilson. As of this date, the Harriet Wilson Project is still struggling to find a permanent, local place to explore and maintain Harriet Wilson's legacy. Across the state, in Portsmouth, a 2003 city infrastructure project was halted by the discovery of the intact remains of eight women and men of African descent. According to a 1705 map, this cemetery was once swampland on the city's outskirts; ground-penetrating radar indicates that it includes as many as two hundred burials. For the past eleven years, the African Burying Ground Committee has fought to reclaim this contested space, now a residential street close to the center of modern Portsmouth, containing a black history marginalized, then
Environmental justice in the tribal context cannot be contemplated apart from a recognition of Am... more Environmental justice in the tribal context cannot be contemplated apart from a recognition of American Indian tribes' unique historical, political, and legal circumstances. American Indian tribes are sovereign governments, with inherent powers of self-government over their citizens and their territories. Their status as sovereign entities predates contact with European settlers. This separate status, nonetheless, was affirmed by the United States early on and is enshrined in the U.S. Constitution. Tribes today continue to exist as distinct sovereigns within the boundaries of the United States.
This project was a coordinated effort among the five federally recognized Tribal Nations in Maine... more This project was a coordinated effort among the five federally recognized Tribal Nations in Maine and the US EPA. It was produced under a Direct Implementation Tribal Cooperative Agreement (DITCA) awarded to the Aroostook Band of Micmac Indians on behalf of the five Tribal Nations in Maine. A DITCA is a unique funding mechanism authorized by law and developed by EPA for the purpose of awarding Cooperative Agreements to Federally Recognized Indian tribes to assist the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in implementing Federal environmental programs in Indian Territories. EPA is required by law to have sufficient information to protect designated tribal uses when reviewing or approving water quality standards applications and this funding mechanism allowed EPA to work cooperatively with the Maine tribes to collect sound scientific data documenting tribal cultural practices and resource utilization patterns in the form of tribal exposure scenarios. This project has resulted in the development of the Wabanaki Cultural Lifeways Exposure Scenario ("Scenario"), a numerical representation of the environmental contact, diet, and exposure pathways present in traditional cultural lifeways in Maine. These traditional uses are described as a single best representation of subsistence-traditional lifeways. This project report is intended to reflect the lifeways of people fully using natural resources and pursuing traditional cultural lifeways, not lifeways of people with semi-suburban or hybrid lifestyles and grocery-store diets. Present-day environmental conditions may not allow many people to fully engage in a fully traditional lifestyle until resources are restored, but this is still an "actual" and not "hypothetical" lifestyle. This project will help to ensure that exposure pathway information that is collected for the Tribes in Maine will not be biased by contemporary consumption rates. The Exposure Scenario is presented in a format typically used by regulatory agencies during development of environmental standards and evaluation of baseline environmental risks. This project enables EPA to assess the relation between traditional cultural lifeways (sometimes referred to in the report as the shorthand term "subsistence") and contemporary applications of this information (development of standards or risk assessment).
T his article examines the current regulatory models in tribal environmental programs to see if t... more T his article examines the current regulatory models in tribal environmental programs to see if the regulations meet standards of tribal sovereignty that are designed to protect tribal cultures and lifeways. In particular, I am concerned that the approaches to regulation currently available to tribes—driven by federal mandates and notions of environmental management—not only are potentially vulnerable to challenge and erosion but also do not allow for tribes to fully address their cultural needs as sovereign nations. This article aims to call attention to what many tribal lawyers and environmental managers already know—that we must be diligent defenders not only of tribes’ legal and juridical control over environmental regulations but also the forms of this control. Most contemporary environmental law in the United States is carried out through “cooperative environmental federalism,” in which the states play a prominent role. Much of the history of relations between Indian tribes an...
for Maine Bicentennial Conference Session, Panel #1: Maine Indians and the Maine State Constituti... more for Maine Bicentennial Conference Session, Panel #1: Maine Indians and the Maine State Constitution Thursday, May 30, 2019, 3:00 pm – 4:30 pm Watch this space for a more detailed abstract coming soon. 3:00-4:30 pm Welcome from Emily Haddad, Dean, College of Liberal Arts & Sciences, UMaine Panel #1: Maine Indians and the Maine State Constitution, Bodwell Lounge, CCA Accepted presenters: John Dieffenbacher-Krall (Episcopal Committee on Indian Relations), James Francis (Director, Penobscot Nation Cultural and Historic Preservation Department), Donna Loring, LHD (Penobscot Tribal Elder, Penobscot Tribal Council Member), Sherri Mitchell (Penobscot Nation Citizen, Indigenous Rights Attorney, Author, Teacher), and Darren Ranco (University of Maine)
This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative... more This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY
Transdisciplinary collaboration offers great potential for meaningfully addressing complex proble... more Transdisciplinary collaboration offers great potential for meaningfully addressing complex problems related to climate change and social inequities. Communication shapes transdisciplinary collaboration in myriad ways, and interdisciplinary and rhetorical approaches to communication can help identify these influences as well as strategies to transform inequitable communication patterns. In this paper, we share results from an engaged and ethnographic research project focused on strategic communication in a large-scale transdisciplinary collaboration to develop environmental-DNA (eDNA) science for coastal resilience. In this context, definitions of eDNA, perspectives about communication, and constructions of audience and expertise shape the ways in which collaborators co-produce knowledge across disciplines and with diverse partners. Identifying relationships among strategic communication, knowledge co-production, and power enables the development of strategic collaborative practices,...
American Indian and Alaska Native tribes are uniquely affected by climate change. Indigenous peop... more American Indian and Alaska Native tribes are uniquely affected by climate change. Indigenous peoples have depended on a wide variety of native fungi, plant and animal species for food, medicine, ceremonies, community and economic health for count-less generations. Climate change stands to impact the species and ecosystems that constitute
Sustainability science offers an alternative space for research that challenges colonial historie... more Sustainability science offers an alternative space for research that challenges colonial histories of western science, especially in its orientation to interdisciplinarity and for addressing complex problems through equitable knowledge co-production processes. However, the justice-oriented commitments within sustainability science remain underdeveloped, in particular for centering indigenous research methods (IRM) and promoting decolonization of academic institutions. In this paper, we draw from more than 10 years of experience across three cases of conducting sustainability science in Indigenous homelands. The cases focus on (1) adaptive responses to the Emerald Ash Borer insect which threatens black ash basketmaking cultures and economies; (2) efforts to link science with decision making to protect public health and reduce shellfish bed closures; and (3) collaborative research to support dam removal and river restoration. We identify tensions in science as a discourse, including how sustainability science is uniquely shaped by practices of naming and social constructions of time. We then describe how we engage these tensions through four main commitments to critical praxis, or tailored practices that respond to emergent problems and systems of power. These commitments include centering Wabanaki diplomacy and IRMs, redesigning all stages of research for inclusivity and dialogue, attending to multiple temporalities, and supporting Wabanaki and Indigenous students as leaders and researchers. To conclude, we reflect on how these practices may be adapted to other contexts, histories, and sustainability-related issues.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2021
Archaeological and paleoecological evidence shows that by 10,000 BCE, all human societies employe... more Archaeological and paleoecological evidence shows that by 10,000 BCE, all human societies employed varying degrees of ecologically transformative land use practices, including burning, hunting, species propagation, domestication, cultivation, and others that have left long-term legacies across the terrestrial biosphere. Yet, a lingering paradigm among natural scientists, conservationists, and policymakers is that human transformation of terrestrial nature is mostly recent and inherently destructive. Here, we use the most up-to-date, spatially explicit global reconstruction of historical human populations and land use to show that this paradigm is likely wrong. Even 12,000 y ago, nearly three quarters of Earth’s land was inhabited and therefore shaped by human societies, including more than 95% of temperate and 90% of tropical woodlands. Lands now characterized as “natural,” “intact,” and “wild” generally exhibit long histories of use, as do protected areas and Indigenous lands, and ...
Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities, 2014
is well known to students of abolitionist history as the home of the Hutchinson Family Singers, o... more is well known to students of abolitionist history as the home of the Hutchinson Family Singers, often hailed as the country's first protest singers. This celebratory history shows up the state's whitewashing of its own engagement with slavery, because Milford was also the hometown of Harriet Wilson, the first African American woman to publish a novel in the United States. Our Nig (1859) was the semi-autobiographical account of a young black woman's abuse in indentured servitude. Controversial in its own time, it evidently continues to challenge a New England ideal that would prefer to ignore the racism in its own midst. Although the novel itself was recovered in the 1980s-to considerable academic fanfare-it wasn't until 2006 that Milford welcomed a modest memorial statue in honor of Wilson. As of this date, the Harriet Wilson Project is still struggling to find a permanent, local place to explore and maintain Harriet Wilson's legacy. Across the state, in Portsmouth, a 2003 city infrastructure project was halted by the discovery of the intact remains of eight women and men of African descent. According to a 1705 map, this cemetery was once swampland on the city's outskirts; ground-penetrating radar indicates that it includes as many as two hundred burials. For the past eleven years, the African Burying Ground Committee has fought to reclaim this contested space, now a residential street close to the center of modern Portsmouth, containing a black history marginalized, then
Environmental justice in the tribal context cannot be contemplated apart from a recognition of Am... more Environmental justice in the tribal context cannot be contemplated apart from a recognition of American Indian tribes' unique historical, political, and legal circumstances. American Indian tribes are sovereign governments, with inherent powers of self-government over their citizens and their territories. Their status as sovereign entities predates contact with European settlers. This separate status, nonetheless, was affirmed by the United States early on and is enshrined in the U.S. Constitution. Tribes today continue to exist as distinct sovereigns within the boundaries of the United States.
This project was a coordinated effort among the five federally recognized Tribal Nations in Maine... more This project was a coordinated effort among the five federally recognized Tribal Nations in Maine and the US EPA. It was produced under a Direct Implementation Tribal Cooperative Agreement (DITCA) awarded to the Aroostook Band of Micmac Indians on behalf of the five Tribal Nations in Maine. A DITCA is a unique funding mechanism authorized by law and developed by EPA for the purpose of awarding Cooperative Agreements to Federally Recognized Indian tribes to assist the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in implementing Federal environmental programs in Indian Territories. EPA is required by law to have sufficient information to protect designated tribal uses when reviewing or approving water quality standards applications and this funding mechanism allowed EPA to work cooperatively with the Maine tribes to collect sound scientific data documenting tribal cultural practices and resource utilization patterns in the form of tribal exposure scenarios. This project has resulted in the development of the Wabanaki Cultural Lifeways Exposure Scenario ("Scenario"), a numerical representation of the environmental contact, diet, and exposure pathways present in traditional cultural lifeways in Maine. These traditional uses are described as a single best representation of subsistence-traditional lifeways. This project report is intended to reflect the lifeways of people fully using natural resources and pursuing traditional cultural lifeways, not lifeways of people with semi-suburban or hybrid lifestyles and grocery-store diets. Present-day environmental conditions may not allow many people to fully engage in a fully traditional lifestyle until resources are restored, but this is still an "actual" and not "hypothetical" lifestyle. This project will help to ensure that exposure pathway information that is collected for the Tribes in Maine will not be biased by contemporary consumption rates. The Exposure Scenario is presented in a format typically used by regulatory agencies during development of environmental standards and evaluation of baseline environmental risks. This project enables EPA to assess the relation between traditional cultural lifeways (sometimes referred to in the report as the shorthand term "subsistence") and contemporary applications of this information (development of standards or risk assessment).
T his article examines the current regulatory models in tribal environmental programs to see if t... more T his article examines the current regulatory models in tribal environmental programs to see if the regulations meet standards of tribal sovereignty that are designed to protect tribal cultures and lifeways. In particular, I am concerned that the approaches to regulation currently available to tribes—driven by federal mandates and notions of environmental management—not only are potentially vulnerable to challenge and erosion but also do not allow for tribes to fully address their cultural needs as sovereign nations. This article aims to call attention to what many tribal lawyers and environmental managers already know—that we must be diligent defenders not only of tribes’ legal and juridical control over environmental regulations but also the forms of this control. Most contemporary environmental law in the United States is carried out through “cooperative environmental federalism,” in which the states play a prominent role. Much of the history of relations between Indian tribes an...
for Maine Bicentennial Conference Session, Panel #1: Maine Indians and the Maine State Constituti... more for Maine Bicentennial Conference Session, Panel #1: Maine Indians and the Maine State Constitution Thursday, May 30, 2019, 3:00 pm – 4:30 pm Watch this space for a more detailed abstract coming soon. 3:00-4:30 pm Welcome from Emily Haddad, Dean, College of Liberal Arts & Sciences, UMaine Panel #1: Maine Indians and the Maine State Constitution, Bodwell Lounge, CCA Accepted presenters: John Dieffenbacher-Krall (Episcopal Committee on Indian Relations), James Francis (Director, Penobscot Nation Cultural and Historic Preservation Department), Donna Loring, LHD (Penobscot Tribal Elder, Penobscot Tribal Council Member), Sherri Mitchell (Penobscot Nation Citizen, Indigenous Rights Attorney, Author, Teacher), and Darren Ranco (University of Maine)
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