In a highly unusual move, the U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) has dissolved one of its expert committees, which set out to recommend ways to combine Western and Indigenous approaches to understanding the natural world. It also fired two key staffers involved in the now-aborted study.
NASEM had raised $2 million from three sponsors—the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, and NASA—to explore how best to pursue coproduction, the process by which scientists, Indigenous community members, and other scientific stakeholders jointly create and share knowledge in a way that values diverse perspectives. But a sharp disagreement between NASEM leaders and the 11-member committee, which included three Native scholars, over the extent to which external Indigenous and community leaders could help shape the study’s direction and final report led to its demise.
“[It’s] disappointing. We thought that this [study] was really going to go somewhere,” says sustainability scientist Heather Gordon, a committee member who is an Iñupiaq tribal member of the Nome Eskimo Community.
Gregory Symmes, NASEM’s chief program officer, confirmed the panel’s job was “to summarize what’s known about … coproduction,” and that he was aware of the committee’s desire to use the concept in its study early on. But, he says, “The study itself was not intended to be coproduced.” Instead, “We thought we could work through those differences” by, for example, including a discussion in the final report of the obstacles the committee faced.
But there was never such a meeting of minds. A contentious workshop at a tribal casino in Michigan in February accelerated a downward spiral that led to the dismissal of an Indigenous committee member who had been vocal about the committee’s inability to use coproduction, and the untimely disbanding of the entire panel and suspension of the study on 14 May.
“I have been on many, many of these committees, and I have not ever heard of a committee being disbanded in this manner,” says Bonnie McCay, co-chair of the former committee and a retired anthropology professor at Rutgers University. Symmes confirmed as much to Science, saying, “There are no perfectly analogous examples to the situation.”
Many committee members who spoke to Science say they believed their assignment—to explore the “challenges, needs, and opportunities associated with coproduction of environmental knowledge between scientists and local and Indigenous experts”—would require them to take a different approach given the subject matter. “At our first meeting [in August 2023], several people raised concerns that here was a project talking about coproduction of knowledge, but we weren’t allowed to use those processes to carry out the study,” says Gordon, who runs a company that advises scientists and government agencies on coproduction.
Committee members knew the approach ran counter to NASEM’s rules for what it calls a consensus study. “The traditional way in which a National Academies report works is that you go and meet with people, and they can inform you, but they can’t participate in the [committee’s] deliberations or help shape the report,” says committee member ecologist F. Stuart “Terry” Chapin, emeritus professor at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.
But the panel lobbied for its approach, saying more input from Indigenous people would improve the report’s quality and address inequities in how Western scientists and traditional knowledge practitioners interact. The study’s funders agreed with the need for a new approach in interpreting the study’s assignment, called a statement of task.
“There’s a dearth of knowledge on how to apply other ways of knowing,” said Chad English of the Packard foundation, speaking at the panel’s kickoff meeting. “And it’s not just scholarship,” English noted about the scope of the study. “It’s also about addressing the power dynamic—who is at the table, and whose voices are being heard.”
Chapin says, however, that the group “never got a clear answer” from staff or senior NASEM leadership about bending the rules.
As part of its deliberations, the committee held two public workshops that brought together Native scholars and community leaders, committee members, and NASEM staff. Participants say the first, which took place in October 2023 at Alaska Pacific University, went very smoothly. “We had a fantastic discussion,” says Gordon, who was one of the organizers.
But that high didn’t last long. Before a second workshop in February, tensions arose over the choice of its venue, which was the Kewadin casino owned by the Sault Ste. Marie tribe of Chippewa Indians in Michigan. Tribal casinos hold important meaning to Native nations as places of gathering and bastions of tribal sovereignty. Yet several sources told Science NASEM leaders saw the venue as inappropriate for a meeting the institution was sponsoring.
The tension over the venue choice added to the unresolved issues over coproducing the study. At the workshop, participants raised issues of tribal sovereignty and how their input at the workshop would be used by the committee. “If we don’t respect the need for tribal consultation and the importance of free, prior, and informed consent, we’re breaking our promise to them to be true partners in creating new knowledge,” says committee member Kyle Whyte, an environmental justice expert at the University of Michigan and a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation.
Another participant who was not a committee member, Philomena Kebec, says comments she and other Native people made about coproduction during discussions at breakout sessions weren’t brought back up during plenary sessions and felt like sidestepping. Kebec, a member of the Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa and its head of economic development, says Native representatives were hoping for a dialogue about traditional knowledge across a range of scientific topics as well as “about the power dynamics affecting the ability to share information effectively.”
Whyte also vented his frustration that the committee’s statement of task did not require that the study be coproduced. However, he told participants at the February workshop he “was willing to keep working on the project” to “figure out a way to do this right.” But in late March, he and three other committee members wrote to their colleagues and NASEM staff calling for the study to be “paused.” The four proposed instead writing an interim report on how to “allow equitable participation by Indigenous partners” that could be the basis for a new study on coproduction.
Three weeks after the proposed pause, Whyte received an email rejecting that suggestion—and telling him he was being dropped from the committee. “We believe it is in our mutual interests that you no longer serve as a member of the study committee,” wrote Symmes and Carlotta Arthur, who leads NASEM’s division that oversaw the committee’s work. In their 16 April email, Symmes and Arthur claim Whyte had laid down “conditions for [his] continued participation” that were incompatible with the committee’s charge.
Whyte denies this. “I never did anything to short-circuit our work,” he insists, adding his criticism at the Michigan workshop was “simply an expression of my professional judgment.” When asked why Whyte was removed, Symmes says “the [email] speaks for itself.”
The committee asked senior NASEM leaders for an explanation of Whyte’s dismissal but never got an answer. Instead, on 13 May the remaining members received an email saying they were being dismissed. A day later, a notice was posted on NASEM’s website saying the study “has been suspended and the committee has completed its service.”
The news came as a shock to committee members. “The committee was really quite committed to doing a report, and people were just appalled to find out that all their work is for nothing,” McCay says.
The panel’s dissolution wasn’t the final blow to the study. On 6 June, a senior staffer on the study, Daniel Kim, and his boss, Thomas Thornton, who directed NASEM’s Board on Environmental Change and Society, which was managing the project, were put on administrative leave with a termination date of 1 August. Around this time, videos of both workshops were removed from NASEM’s website.
Symmes declined to comment on why Kim and Thornton were fired as well as on why the workshop videos have been removed.
Although they currently have no official status, the committee members are still discussing how they might resume work on coproduction in ways that don’t result in a consensus study. Chapin describes it as a chance for NASEM “to think deeply and openly about how to use the best practices of science.”
National Academy of Sciences President Marcia McNutt says NASEM must now “work out whether there is another committee that will do the study that the sponsors asked for” or if the sponsors are willing to revise the goals of the study to include coproduction. A spokesperson for the Moore foundation declined comment, citing the ongoing negotiations with NASEM.
Symmes acknowledges that NASEM has struggled to find a way forward. “We have learned just how challenging it is to carry out coproduction as part of a consensus study process,” he says.
Still, Kebec isn’t optimistic about what may come next. “I don’t think that [NASEM] has the capability to carry out this project with any claim of expertise,” she says. “I feel bad for [NASEM] because they can’t do this work without the involvement of Native people.”
