Episode 25: What is Native Science?
00:52:07
Hosts: Anna Reser, Leila McNeill, and Rebecca Ortenberg
Guest: Kelsey Dokis-Jansen
Producer: Leila McNeill
Music: Fall asleep under the million stars by Springtide
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In this episode, the hosts look at the Indigenous knowledge and science that produced the first Thanksgiving and the ways Indigenous knowledge has been derided and dismissed by modern Western science. Kelsey Dokis-Jansen of the Indigenous STS group at the University of Alberta joins in to talk about her research on caribou populations, which combines Indigenous knowledge and modern research methods.
Native Intelligence by Charles C. Mann
Indigenous Knowledge: Foundations for First Nations by Dr. Marie Battiste
What We Lose When We Lose Indigenous Knowledge by Chi Luu
The Turn Toward the Indigenous: Knowledge Systems and Practices in the Academy by Kerstin Knopf
Standing With and Speaking as Faith: A Feminist-Indigenous Approach to Inquiry by Kim TallBear
Transcript
Transcription by Julia Pass
Leila: Hey, y'all. This is Leila. Before we jump into the episode, I just wanted to go ahead and apologize for the wonky levels going on in the episode. Anna and I were recording under less than ideal conditions, so things might sound a little crazy, but I hope you stick with us, and thanks for listening. Let's jump into the episode.
Rebecca: Welcome to episode 25 of the Lady Science Podcast. This podcast is a monthly deep dive on topics centered on women and gender in the history and popular culture of science. With you every month are the editors of Lady Science Magazine.
Anna: I'm Anna Reser, co-founder and co-editor-in-chief of Lady Science.
Leila: And I'm Leila McNeill, the other founder and editor-in-chief of Lady Science.
Rebecca: And I'm Rebecca Ortenberg, Lady Science's managing editor.
Leila: So a bit of housekeeping before we jump into the episode. So last month we had a five-year birthday fundraiser. And we were raising $5,000 in celebration of five years, and we are very happy to say that we actually met our goal. It was a really stressful week just on our end. But we are obviously thrilled that we reached our goal, and we are extremely grateful to every single person who donated to the fundraiser or pledged to our Patreon and just in general spread the word and supported us throughout the entire week. So thank you so much. We couldn't have done it without any of you.
Anna: And if you donated to get a mug, those are happening. Apologize for the delay. We had some technical difficulties, but those should be winging their way to you hopefully by the end of the month. But yes, thank you again for donating, and you'll get your stuff soon. I promise.
Leila: It's a Lady Science promise.
Rebecca: Yes. Yes. I am very excited. My mother-in-law, who I'm going to be seeing at Christmas, is one of the recipients of a mug, and I'm excited to take it out of her cupboard and use it for coffee. But speaking of being places in the winter, guys, it is November, as the weather today in Philadelphia reminded me. And that also means that one of the most problematic of holidays is just around the corner.
Rebecca: Of course I'm talking about Thanksgiving. And some of [unclear 02:54] might even be listening to this when you're on your way to visit friends and family or coming home from the weekend away. And while the food is delicious and I deeply appreciate my four-day weekend, as a historian, it's hard not to have a complicated relationship with this holiday, right?
Leila: Definitely. I just don't even do it anymore, and I go to the Renaissance Faire.
Rebecca: Love it. That's amazing.
Leila: Yeah. So definitely as historians, a thing that we have come to understand is that Thanksgiving is a master class in historical mythmaking. And the story most of us heard as a kid probably went something like this: The Pilgrims arrived in America in 1620 and founded Plymouth Colony. They had a particularly hard first winter with very little food, and a member of a local tribe taught them how to grow corn and other crops that local Native Americans had been growing for thousands of years. And thanks to this help, the Pilgrims had a successful harvest that fall and celebrated with a three-day feast of Thanksgiving, where settlers and Native Americans came together in peace and harmony.
Leila: Now, there are many, many details that have been left out of this version of the story, and it is, in reality, a gross mischaracterization of the relationship between white colonists and the indigenous people of North America, which, of course, largely involved white people invading Native lands, spreading disease, destroying the natural environment, and all-out massacring whole communities of people. But the indigenous people to the area around Plymouth, who were part of the Wampanoag Confederation, did teach the European settlers how to grow North American crops like corn. Without them, the settlement would not have survived.
Anna: You know, but at the same time, that didn't matter all that much to the settlers. Europeans who came to North America weren't just interested in killing indigenous people and taking their land, their favorite activity. But since the time of Columbus, all kinds of explorers and settlers have also really kind of diligently engaged in destroying, suppressing, blithely ignoring indigenous knowledge.
Anna: The European settlers to North America saw indigenous people and the knowledge that indigenous people produce as essentially worthless, even when evidence to the contrary was right in front of them. Even when their lives were saved by that knowledge, like the Pilgrims were. Indigenous studies scholar Marie Battiste coined the term "cognitive imperialism" to describe this way of thinking. And it's definitely still with us today, even in the way we talk about this myth of the First Thanksgiving.
Rebecca: Even the way we talk about Squanto and his compatriots teaching Pilgrims to grow corn sort of often feels like they came with this secret, magical knowledge, or that the Pilgrims maybe could have figured it out on their own if they'd had enough time, but they were just in a pinch because it was cold. But the Wampanoag people didn't magically wake up one day knowing how to grow corn, obviously. They spent thousands of years testing, perfecting, and sharing agricultural practices that allowed their communities to thrive. And if that isn't science, I don't know what is.
Rebecca: And yet again and again, to this very day, indigenous knowledge about the natural world is treated as unscientific or primitive or lacking in the appropriate objectivity. Indigenous people around the world continue to fight cognitive imperialism in a variety of ways, and over the last few decades, indigenous studies scholars have been talking about something called Native science—essentially, methods of understanding the natural and physical world outside of European/Western Enlightenment traditions.
Rebecca: Gregory Cajete, who coined the phrase "Native science," defines it in this way: "It is a metaphor for a wide range of tribal processes of perceiving, thinking, acting, and coming to know that have evolved through human experiences with the natural world. Native science is born of a lived and storied participation with the natural landscape. It is the collective heritage of human experience with the natural world." Native science and other indigenous knowledge systems are vast and complicated and varied, of course, and they take different forms in different parts of the world. But these knowledge systems have a few key characteristics that tend to set them apart from the kind of science that we are taught in schools or as it's presented in white, Western, mainstream culture.
Leila: I know that I remember in school, when I did science projects, that we had to follow the scientific method. You had a question that you wanted to answer. You came up with a hypothesis. You identified your variables. You ran your experiment testing one of those variables. I particularly remember that you were only supposed to test one variable, right? So if I don't know—I'm doing an experiment about how often I should water my plants, I would use the same kind of plant and the same kind of flowerpot and the same kind of soil and put them all in the same place in my house. But I would vary how often I watered each plant.
Leila: Now, obviously scientific problems outside the elementary school classroom are a lot more complicated than that, but this idea of isolating a specific variable and testing one variable at a time is baked into our mainstream idea of how science should be done. If you haven't isolated your variables, you can't trust your results.
Anna: Right. But Native science is rooted in sort of a much more holistic view of the world. So instead of seeing a person who is studying something as an outsider who tweaks one thing about the environment and waits to see what happened and try to control all of the extraneous variables, Native science thinks of people as inherently part of an interconnected environment, and it can't and shouldn't be teased apart in that way that we do in a kind of controlled laboratory experiment. Native science doesn't try to sort of break a problem down into its component parts and figure out cause and effect relationships. It's more interested in understanding a web of relationships among all the parts.
Anna: And so another thing that makes Native science different from mainstream, Western science is the way that knowledge is recorded and shared. So we go back to this childhood science experiment, Leila, with plants. If you're doing your science fair project, you choose some way to quantify which plant is doing best, like the most successful plant is the one that grows the tallest or has the most leaves or whatever. And so you write those numbers down in your little lab notebook each day, and then you turn them into a graph in Publisher and print them out and glue them to your board. And, yeah, you make the science fair poster, and then you present it to the school, and you wear your little suit and make your presentation.
Anna: And, you know, a science fair project is not the same thing as a peer-reviewed paper, but it's a miniaturized version of that, a simplified version of that. So both the elementary school student doing this and in professional science, your results are taken seriously because they're presented in a very particular format.
Anna: The scientific method is the steps you do to do the experiment, but it also has to do with how you present those result. Scientists run an experiment, collect data that not always, but usually it includes a quantitative analysis or at least some kind of quantitative component. That's you making your graph of how many leafs there are. And then you write it up and you write your results and what conclusions you can then draw from those results. And then you publish it, and peer reviewers look at it, and reviewer number two drags you to hell, and you revise and resubmit. But the point is there's a whole process that is recognized, that that's how you go through science.
Rebecca: But Native science gets communicated in forms that are markedly different from this very structured process that I think we all just had this sense memory of doing science fair projects as kids.
Leila: Yeah. The trifold cardboard thing.
Rebecca: Yes. Yes.
Leila: And the shiny cutout stencil letters that you put up there for your title. Yeah.
Anna: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Glue sticks.
Rebecca: Yep. So little you, you had your hypothesis, conclusion, results. So, yeah, this idea is baked in super early in how we learn about science, that there is a correct way, a process to do these things, and it all looks the same. There are many ways that Native science does have its own kinds of structures, but those are very different from the kind of Western science that we've been talking about.
Rebecca: One big thing is that Native science relies heavily on oral tradition. In the white, Western world, things that aren't written down are often considered to be of less value than things that are written down. This is one of those things where it's like once you realize it, you see how many places that is true in the world, and it's kind of crazy. It's like it's the sea we're swimming in. That's, of course, even more true in science and other academic disciplines, where this process of publication and peer review determines whether something is significant or not. And relying on oral tradition also changes the way that we think about who has ownership over scientific knowledge.
Rebecca: So again, because you're publishing something, in Western science, knowledge is really owned by an individual or the group of individuals. This is why, especially in scientific fields, your name appearing on publications is super important, and where they appear, and the list of names is super important, cuz it's this idea of who owns this piece of knowledge. And that can even get more extreme, where knowledge is patented and stuff like that. That's a way of saying, "This piece of knowledge belongs to me."
Rebecca: In Native science, knowledge is really the set [unclear 13:53] and the sharing of the story within a community, so it really isn't owned by one particular person. Kerstin Knopf described this in her article "The Turn Toward the Indigenous: Knowledge Systems and Practices in the Academy," and she noted that this need to own knowledge can make indigenous communities sometimes skeptical of mainstream scientists because the process of taking scientific knowledge from oral tradition and turning it into a peer-reviewed article with a particular set of authors can turn knowledge into yet another thing that was once maybe collectively cared for by a community and is now owned by white people. And if that isn't the entire history of relationships between indigenous people and white people, then I don't know what is.
Leila: And indigenous knowledge doesn't always come in forms that white Westerners see as straightforward. Science and descriptions of scientific practices are often embedded in stories and myths, and those stories and myths get shared through visual art and dance and even music, what Knopf calls different "knowledge containers." Knopf says that if mainstream science really wants to learn from Native science, then scientists have to learn how to read and communicate in these different forms.
Anna: So one thing we haven't really talked about so far in this episode is gender, but it definitely plays into this. And obviously if you've been reading and listening to us for a while, you're probably already picking up on the parallels between some of these characteristics of Native science and some of the stuff that we've talked about with feminist science. Feminist science also emphasizes this kind of holistic approach to studying the world and the importance of seeking and interpreting knowledge that comes from outside of mainstream science.
Anna: One indigenous studies scholar that has looked at this connection specifically is Kim TallBear, and we'll link to some of her work in the show notes, but this idea of challenging the idea of objectivity and a single point of view, I think, is something that indigenous science and feminist science definitely have in common, like looking for a situated point of view instead of a objective view from nowhere.
Leila: We talked about that with Tina Sikka in our conservation and environmentalist episode, of feminist approaches to gender and technology and climate change, and that feminist science as it relates to issues of the environment and conservation and climate change really value an experiential science that's rooted in place. And that doesn't make it less objective at all. It really just means that it's grounded in this specific experience of this specific group of people in this specific place, which can actually give us better results than if we were looking at something that is looking at large, broad questions that they're trying to apply to everything that just kind of obscures the particular.
Rebecca: Yeah. I think one part of the definition of Native science that jumped out at me was this idea of it as "born of a lived and storied participation with the natural landscape." That really reminded me of these ideas of feminist science that we talked about with Tina and in other contexts in Lady Science where the idea of being part of a thing doesn't mean you can't study the thing, and that is this very—
Rebecca: There's this idea in Western academia as a whole that you have to be the objective observer that is not part of the thing. And it's a place where a lot of people studying or scholars of various marginalized communities are not taken seriously, and so I think the idea of having a science that is defined around the idea of "No, you're part of the thing. You're not just this separate creature from the thing that gets to see it in this idealized, careful way." I don't know. Yeah.
Leila: Right. No. I mean, I think turn of the 20th century anthropology is a really good example of this. When there was this whole movement towards recovery anthropology and archaeology, where it's like they looked around and they saw indigenous cultures disappearing because of various terrible assimilation and reeducation programs that were being targeted at Native American people. And so anthropologists came in, and they were like, "Well, we need to save all of this because it's going away."
Leila: And so it was still largely white anthropologists that were going into these Native American communities and not always wholly respecting the Native American customs that they were supposedly trying to preserve, you know? They were digging on sacred grounds, where it was prohibited by that Native American culture. And so rarely in these cases in early anthropology did you actually get Native Americans doing anthropology for Native Americans, and so they rarely got to speak for themselves.
Leila: Once Native Americans did get involved in the owned recovery or preservation of their culture that they started to ask different questions. They respected the culture of that tribe. Some of them even went so far as to give co-authorship to the people that they interviewed for stories and oral histories. And so it's a completely different perspective and a different lens of which to approach knowledge and the preservation of knowledge as well.
Anna: And I was thinking that I think we see a lot of skepticism about indigenous knowledge being incorporated into mainstream science. I'm thinking of the, of course, again, that feminist glaciology paper and just the incredible backlash to the idea that someone who lived near a glacier might have noticed how it changed over the years. Things like that. But I think there's also this—we see representations of indigenous or Native knowledge in popular culture a lot, and it's usually in the form of "Ah, yes, well, the locals say that this place is haunted."
Leila: Haunted Indian graveyard.
Anna: Yeah, exactly. And then the heroes of the story come and debunk whatever the story is about this place. And so I think we're already being culturally conditioned by the kind of media and popular culture that we consume about this that anything that non-white people have to say about the places where they live, if it sounds even just a little bit strange to Western ears, is superstitious hokum and cannot be trusted. And we're just trained to understand that as the essential kind of knowledge relationship between white people, between colonizers and the colonized.
Anna: And I think it's really hard to get out from under that because we also really like to consume indigenous myths and folktales and oral histories as entertainment with the background knowledge that it's not real or whatever. You know? That it is somehow entertaining. So I think that really plays into when we approach these discussions about what is and isn't science, all that stuff is running in the sort of cultural background radiation of how we come to these kinds of discussions.
Rebecca: Something I read about while putting together this episode was that, along the lines of what you were saying, Anna, someone will hear a story from an indigenous culture, and they'll be like, "Well, they obviously believe that literally, and so they don't know how the world works." And in this piece that I read, it pointed out that all of us here in the English-speaking, Western world talk about the sun rising and setting, and we know the sun's not going anywhere. We all know the sun's not going anywhere. But it's just a thing we say, and we've all kind of accepted as a society that sunrise and sunset have a non-literal scientific and social meaning.
Rebecca: And just the idea that there could be other metaphorical scientific and social meanings in other cultures is just like, "That's just weird Native superstition." But maybe it's just a way of talking about how stuff works that is shorthand for all of the weirdness of the world around us.
Leila: Right. And I think that there's been this trend that Native knowledge and indigenous knowledge, it becomes legitimate once Western science can prove that it's legitimate, that there needs to be some sort of—there's some sort of test that it has to come through with Western science in order for it to be true. And but when we look back historically, those things haven't necessarily been separate.
Leila: Like that mainstream science in Europe was often indigenous knowledge that was written and authored by white scientists and colonists who went to colonized land and relied on the knowledge of the indigenous people that they had enslaved in those places to provide them the knowledge they needed to write their book or to just get around the country that they were trying to go through this jungle that they'd never been through. That all of that knowledge that they relied on to write their books and take this stuff back to Europe all came from unnamed local indigenous people.
Leila: And so when we talk about Native science being separate from mainstream science, that there have oftentimes been when they have not been separate. It's just been billed to be separate under the authorship of white European or American scientists.
Anna: Mm-hmm. Right. Do you think that white people went to South America and knew what to do with cacao pods and just brought them back and spontaneously invented chocolate? Of course they didn't.
Rebecca: Seriously, though. Also if there'd been no one to say, "No, don't eat that plant," they would have all been dead in 10 seconds flat. Let's be real.
Leila: Right. Right. And I think when we talk about can Native science and mainstream science ever be reconciled or combined, they have been for centuries. It's just that it hasn't been presented that way to the Western scientific community or to the Western public.
Anna: Yeah. Yeah. And Native science has been squished into, maybe, a mainstream science box or kind of been raided for the knowledge that is most useful or understandable to mainstream scientists. But in our interview that we have coming up, we are gonna talk to someone who is doing the work right now of finding different ways of combining Western ecology practices with gathering knowledge from indigenous people. And that's, I think, gonna be another great example of how this is still happening and bearing a lot of really interesting scientific fruit.
Leila: And now we're excited to welcome Kelsey Dokis-Jansen to the podcast. Kelsey is a PhD student in indigenous studies at the University of Alberta, and she specializes in the intersections between environmental management and indigenous knowledge. She is also part of Indigenous STS, a research group dedicated to looking at science and technology settings from an indigenous perspective. Welcome to the show, Kelsey.
K. Dokis-Jansen: Thank you. Thank you so much for having me.
Leila: Great. So to start us off, can you give us kind of a quick introduction to what your research is about?
K. Dokis-Jansen: So the research that I've been interested in doing has focused on working on collaborative projects with indigenous communities. I sort of came to it by way of a background in environmental and conservation science and was always sort of interested in better understanding how decisions are made around land management and resource development.
K. Dokis-Jansen: So I grew up in a small rural community in Alberta that sort of borders on Jasper National Park. The local economy's sort of very dependent on forestry and oil and gas and coal mining, and so it's really sort of embedded in the way people live. But you're also right up next to one of the most beautiful conservation areas in Canada, and so growing up I always was interested in sort of understanding the interplay between culture and landscape and decisions we make about the land.
K. Dokis-Jansen: And so I went to study environmental science and had the opportunity to work with an indigenous community in southern Alberta and started to learn a little bit about the idea around traditional knowledge or sometimes called traditional ecological knowledge. And it was really intriguing to me. And spending time with elders and hunters and talking about their knowledge about the land, I sort of realized there's this sort of other way of understanding the landscape. And so that's what led me to the master's project that I worked on in the Northwest Territories that sought to bring together methods from Western science but also oral histories to better understand caribou movement in relation to impacts of diamond mine development in the region.
Rebecca: So, yeah, as you said, you sort of studied the scientific study of tree growth, dendroecology, which is one of those great crunchy words, with oral histories to understand those caribou populations and [unclear 29:31] brought in some archaeological literature into your work. And those are all different kinds of ways of gathering knowledge that are seen differently, especially, I think, in the academy. And so what was it like to bring together those different forms of knowledge?
K. Dokis-Jansen: So initially the project came out of a long-term collaboration between my master's supervisor, Dr. Brenda Parlee, and the community that we were working with, which is the Lutsel K'e Dene First Nation. And so Lutsel K'e is a small Dene community in the Northwest Territories, and they have a really long history of working with researchers from various backgrounds. And so they'd already essentially begun to ask a lot of the questions that formulated the premise of the project that I worked on.
K. Dokis-Jansen: And so in my initial review of a lot of the previous work that had been done in the community, we sorta identified caribou trails as one important indicator of how caribou were moving across and using the landscape, and that in past interviews elders had talked a lot about how wide or deep a trail was or what kinds of vegetation might be growing across it could really give you an indication of how long caribou had been in that area. And then I was doing other literature review, looking at sort of different methods from landscape ecology and conservation biology, looking at mapping species distribution, and came across a study that had used the analysis of tree roots that were growing across the intersection of caribou trails.
K. Dokis-Jansen: And so what these caribou biologists had done in parts of northern Quebec, which is in eastern Canada, and other parts of the Northwest Territories in and around the area that we were working in. So they had gone to a number of caribou trail sites, and they had sampled roots from black spruce trees where they were intersecting caribou trails. And then by cutting cross-sections of those roots and then identifying trample scars on annual growth rings, they were able to develop a historical growth record of caribou use in that particular area over a period of about 100 years.
K. Dokis-Jansen: Essentially what happens is barren-ground caribou are the species that we're talking about of caribou. It's a subspecies of caribou found in the northern part of Canada but also in the circumpolar north, so in other regions they're referred to as reindeer, so when people think of Santa's reindeer, that's the animals that we're talking about. And so barren-ground caribou are very migratory and exist in very large numbers, and so in the springtime they're found around the Arctic Ocean, where they have their calving grounds, and that's where they raise their young.
K. Dokis-Jansen: And then towards the end of the summer, August into September, they start making their way south towards the tree line, which is sort of the northern extent of the boreal forest before you get into the tundra landscape that sort of people might conceptualize when they think about the north and the Arctic, is that sort of barren tundra landscape where when you get to the ocean, you see polar bears. That's the sorta far Arctic extent of the barren-ground caribou habitat. And in the fall and winter, they come below the tree line, as their main food source is lichen, and it is very abundant in those areas.
K. Dokis-Jansen: So they travel in large herds. The herd that we were sort of most interested in is called the Bathurst caribou herd. And in the 1990s, the early 1990s, the population estimates were in and around 450,000 animals. So you can sort of imagine almost half a million caribou in one particular herd, and there's, depending on which biologists you talk to, there's up to nine different herds of barren-ground caribou that have particular ranges in the northern part of Canada. And so we had a really big spike in the population in the early 1990s, and then since that time, the population has sort of crashed, and the most recent estimates are in and around 10 to 20,000 animals in that herd.
Leila: Oh, my God.
Anna: Wow.
K. Dokis-Jansen: So it's [unclear 34:12]. It's part of a—in some ways it's part of a natural cycle. So caribou populations, in the same way that we understand sort of rabbit and coyote populations, you'll see a huge—they're cyclical, right? And they rise and the fall, and the predator populations sorta follow in behind those spikes in prey population. So that is, in some cases, normal to see pretty strong variation, but this is the lowest that this herd has been recorded at. And so there's been quite a bit of concern about caribou population in the Northwest Territories and the Yukon parts of Alaska for a number of years, so there's been a real desire to have biologists working more closely with indigenous peoples across the circumpolar north to combine not only Western methods to understand caribou population and migration and movement, but also to use indigenous methods to better understand what's going on.
K. Dokis-Jansen: There's some key drivers around climate and food source and the impacts of insects on caribou as well as predator relationships, primarily in wolf populations. And then there's also the influence of harvesting, which there's sort of this tension then between sort of some of the science around caribou population that's done by biologists, which in large part, especially since the mid-1990s, has involved collaring caribou with satellite collars to sort of map their movements and establish the ranges and then to also help in the surveys around population estimates. And then with population, they also do aerial surveys, so they fly over in airplanes, and they take photos, and then they count the number of caribou.
K. Dokis-Jansen: So we have data, but when we think about sort of the vast landscape that's being monitored, where caribou will migrate easily over 2,000 kilometers in a seasonal migration, trying to survey populations is highly difficult, and to try to map the movements of such large herds is very challenging, even when we're using satellite collar data. And so there's been a desire from communities in the north to be involved in the collection of new data. And so that was sort of the context within which this project was conducted.
K. Dokis-Jansen: And so, sort of circling back, we identified caribou trails as something the community is interested in talking about to understand caribou movement, found a study that looked at caribou trails and the sampling of those tree roots. And so we sort of took the long way around to get to explaining that when you have hundreds or thousands of animals moving through a particular area, that's what's causing that damage on the tree root on that annual growth ring. And so when you cross-section that root and you count the rings and establish the age of the tree, and then you can see these very visible trample scars on particular growth rings.
K. Dokis-Jansen: The biologists who had worked in our region had collected over 1,000 samples and developed a historic record of caribou use of the particular area over a hundred-year period, and so we thought it might be interesting, with the community of Lutsel K'e, to look at that method and to talk to elders about what they thought about these kinds of samples and if it would tell us anything useful and then also what their own memories were over the last 100 years, either through their own direct experience or through stories that they had been told by their parents or grandparents about caribou use at particular sites that are important to the community.
K. Dokis-Jansen: So, yeah, so we had a couple of research camps where we were out at these sites with elders and hunters and youth from the community. And we asked them how we should collect the sample, so that was another way that we sort of have indigenous knowledge and perspectives and ways of informing the research practice, is that the elders were guiding us in how to be respectful on the land and the appropriate protocol from a Dene cultural perspective was used, which includes offering and giving thanks for safe travel and for the samples being taken and that we're trying to better understand the caribou and that we leave the trails as undisturbed as possible.
K. Dokis-Jansen: So it was, yeah, it was taken up quite well by the community initially. I was the "caribou sticks girl," and people weren't entirely sure what I was talking about. "Caribou trails? Oh, like the sticks? Yeah, Kelsey and her sticks." When we brought the photos of the cross-sections and the preliminary data outputs from our analysis and sort of started talking about "Okay, Kelsey had to have these interviews, and people talked about times in the '30s when caribou were very low and there was high wolf numbers." And then we look at the data set, and we're like, "Oh, it's actually really interesting cuz it sort of looks like there's a similar pattern in times when there was relatively high numbers of caribou and relatively low numbers of caribou."
K. Dokis-Jansen: Then people sort of understood what we were talking about, and they got more excited. And then they were sort of saying, "Oh, we should go and take samples at these other places." We took 50 individual root pieces, and then we cross-sectioned them a number of times, which was quite small relative to the other study that had been done, which was over 1,000 samples. But we did see a similar pattern, which was very interesting, and it was also aligned with the stories and oral history that we had collected from the elders from the community.
Leila: I wanted to ask about what your process is for recruiting and working with First Nations elders. And then what has been their reaction to your work?
K. Dokis-Jansen: So I think it's always important to sort of remember that each community is unique, and so that's something that I always keep in mind. And I've been really grateful to work with the community of Lutsel K'e, who has a really long history of working with researchers, and they're sort of very well versed in how to train young, inexperienced master's students in the ways of ethical research with indigenous community. So I am very grateful for the guidance I received.
K. Dokis-Jansen: The particular context within Lutsel K'e is that they have a committee called the Wildlife Lands and Environment Committee, and that is locally called the Wildlife Committee. And it is comprised of elders and hunters and youth members who are responsible for discussing and supporting decision making at the community level around all land and resource management issues with the community. And so that's the place where we would go as a researcher engaged in land-based research to ask for guidance. And so the Wildlife Committee provided us with a number of names of elders that we should speak to.
K. Dokis-Jansen: Also sort of building upon the work of my master's supervisor, who has long-standing relationships in the community. She was able to help get us started, and then once we're interviewing people, then you sort of get this saturation where each elder is like, "Oh, and really you need to be talking to this person also, right?" And then you sort of check all the boxes cuz all the people are telling you who to talk to because they recognize the experts in the community and the people who know the most about particular areas. So once you get told eight times to talk to particular people, you know you've gotten the right elders.
Anna: Are there particular common things that you hear from people who are encountering your work who are maybe skeptical of the way that you're sort of bringing together these different types of knowledge? I mean, I don't know. Do you encounter that kind of skepticism about this work?
K. Dokis-Jansen: I mean, I guess on the whole I'm mostly met with people being interested and thinking that they want to understand more. But in a more formal sense, we're still currently working on a publication out of the master's work, and it's a collaborative paper between myself, my supervisor, and then some of the other folks who helped with some of the analysis. And so it's this very interdisciplinary effort to sort of provide a robust presentation of the dendroecology process and results and also the oral history information.
K. Dokis-Jansen: And so what we're sort of finding early on is that by submitting to a paper that is maybe more primarily for a science audience, essentially the issue is that there aren't a lot of experts who have experience working on both areas, and so you either have people who are reading it from a very purely ecology background or forestry background who are being quite nitpicky about the dendro data and then maybe don't have a sense of how oral history work is done.
K. Dokis-Jansen: So they're like, "Oh, maybe a survey would be better because then you would have data that you could present." And it's like, "Well, you know, elders who don't speak English generally don't survey very well, but they have very good stories to tell us." So how do we then translate that in a way that is meaningful for people who are not from those disciplinary backgrounds? So that's sort of what I'm finding is the challenge. And increasingly what I'm interested in becoming better at doing, I think, is trying to communicate to diverse audiences and also to be, I think, more clear about how robust the processes are in indigenous research practice because a lot of it is so nuanced.
K. Dokis-Jansen: And so I'm an indigenous scholar. So my ancestry is from Anishinaabe, or Ojibway, people. And so a lot of what I've been taught through my own family and community is just about the importance of sitting and listening and watching and letting things sort of unfold and sort of trying to recognize what's going on without maybe always explicitly asking direct questions all the time. And so a lot of that is what goes on in the interviews, is just sort of letting the conversation evolve as opposed to trying to sort of get at a specific question that you might have as a researcher, but to acknowledge the autonomy and the expertise of the elder to guide you. To trust that they understand what you're asking and that they're gonna tell you in a maybe more roundabout way and that you have to think a little more deeply about why they've told a particular story. So it's nuanced, and that's hard to get across in a 8,000-word paper. Which is why I'm just gonna do a PhD, so I can think about it more.
Leila: So you can have multiple thousands of words to try to get [unclear 46:33].
K. Dokis-Jansen: [Unclear 46:33]. So and I also wanted to kinda mention, too, part of our process at the community level around the oral history and sort of "traditional knowledge" was doing one-on-one interviews but also doing these sort of collaborative group mapping interviews and validation workshops. So it's always really kind of fun to just lay a map out on a table with a bunch of elders and then just listen to them talk about all of these places and these stories and sometimes get into little bit of conflict around what a particular place is called or what happened there and then see it—it's like the peer review process in indigenous communities, right?
K. Dokis-Jansen: And so also how to document that or communicate that in a way for a reader to understand is challenging, but when you watch it happen, you're like, "Oh, yeah. That's good stuff. She knows what she's talking about, and everyone else—" You know, the sort of body language and the nodding that's going on around validating who and what information is considered to be accurate.
Rebecca: Are there some things that sort of—jumping off of your comments about in the more scientific journals them not understanding oral history, are there other things that you wish Western scientists or I guess more typically trained scientists or biologists better understood about indigenous approaches to science?
K. Dokis-Jansen: I mean, I get the sense that it's changing, just in my own sort of little world and the folks that I'm connected to professionally who work in sort of land resource management. People that I went to school with in my undergrad and also professors that I know. There's sort of been a shift in the sort of dialog, I think, about the role of indigenous knowledge in the sort of ecological research areas, I guess, that I'm, at least, involved in. I can't sort of speak to other areas of scientific research. But I think there's been a shift in the openness to talk about it.
K. Dokis-Jansen: And then sort of what to better understand, given that shift, given that there's an increased interest in science and in scientists, I think, working with communities, the sort of advice, I guess, is to recognize that both approaches have something to offer, right? And there's certain questions that are really best answered by Western scientific approaches, you know, like mercury content in fish or water. You know, we definitely wanna do some lab analysis around that.
K. Dokis-Jansen: But that indigenous perspectives and working with communities can help develop, I think, really interesting and relevant research questions and can sort of provide this sort of additional sociocultural and political context within which to interpret our data. And so I think in the end you sort of get a more holistic picture of what's going on. Um, there's quite a bit written about the sort of interaction between social and ecological systems and how dependent they are upon one another and that it's sort of intertwined. And I think there's been this tendency in sort of more Western approaches to separate the two out, right? That we have sort of cultural systems, we have ecological systems.
K. Dokis-Jansen: And so sort of again, in my master's, the sort of theoretical background of the program that I was in, which is called Risk and Community Resilience, which is sort of like a subdiscipline, I think, I guess, of environmental sociology. There's a lot around socioecological theory and systems theory and how those are intertwined and work together. And so I think for folks coming from an ecology background, to sort of look to some of that theoretical knowledge if they're looking to build relationships with community to help them, I think, ask really interesting questions about the land and what's going on in the land and how indigenous perspectives can inform better stewardship.
Leila: Well, Kelsey, I'm really glad that you were able to come talk to us today, and I wanted to thank you for sharing your research with us.
K. Dokis-Jansen: Thank you so much.
Rebecca: Thank you.
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Image credit: The First Thanksgiving, 1621 by Jean Leon Gerome Ferris, ca. 1912 and 1915 (Wikimedia Commons | Public Domain)
