For millennia, the Passamaquoddy people used their intimate understanding of the coastal waters along the Gulf of Maine to sustainably harvest the ocean’s bounty. Anthropologist Darren Ranco of the University of Maine hoped to blend their knowledge of tides, water temperatures, salinity, and more with a Western approach in a project to study the impact of coastal pollution on fish, shellfish, and beaches.
But the Passamaquoddy were never really given a seat at the table, says Ranco, a member of the Penobscot Nation, which along with the Passamaquoddy are part of the Wabanaki Confederacy of tribes in Maine and eastern Canada. The Passamaquoddy thought water quality and environmental protection should be top priority; the state emphasized forecasting models and monitoring. “There was a disconnect over who were the decision-makers, what knowledge would be used in making decisions, and what participation should look like,” Ranco says about the 3-year project, begun in 2015 and funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF).
Last month, NSF aimed to bridge such disconnects, with a 5-year, $30 million grant designed to weave together traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) and Western science. Based at the University of Massachusetts (UMass) Amherst, the Center for Braiding Indigenous Knowledges and Science (CBIKS) aims to fundamentally change the way scholars from both traditions select and carry out joint research projects and manage data.
The center will explore how climate change threatens food security and the preservation of cultural heritages through eight research hubs in the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. (Ranco co-leads the U.S. Northeast hub.) Each hub will also serve as a model for how to braid together different knowledge traditions, or what its senior investigators call “two-eyed seeing” through both Indigenous and Western lenses.
That NSF “has moved beyond the idea that science has to be only Western science is truly remarkable,” says archaeologist Joe Watkins, a past president of the Society for American Archaeology and a member of the Choctaw Nation. “NSF is saying it will continue to fund basic science but also look at other social constructs that might help us move forward to deal with the climate crisis. That’s a bold step.”
It’s also long overdue, says Sonya Atalay, a UMass anthropologist and director of the new center. “For a very long time, Indigenous science has been marginalized, and thought of as maybe quaint stories that were too local to be useful to the broader enterprise of science,” Atalay, who is of Anishinaabe-Ojibwe heritage, says. “That is beginning to change.”
Doing science differently
The center has twin goals: Conduct place-based environmental research and promote what Atalay calls “a different way of doing science.” The U.S. government is already on board. A November 2021 memorandum from the White House instructs federal agencies to incorporate TEK into research and policymaking, and to recognize that “TEK is owned by Indigenous people.”
Although both Indigenous knowledge and Western science include observations and data collection, they differ in several key dimensions, Atalay explains. Indigenous knowledge is place-specific, whereas Western science tends to seek universal rules that apply everywhere. Indigenous knowledge is rooted in the relationship between humans and their environment rather than isolating study targets from their surroundings. And the knowledge gained through Indigenous science is managed by the community, in contrast to publishing all results and using patents to restrict access to certain information.
The center’s research agenda is a work in progress because deciding what to study is a key step in the process. Only a handful of an estimated three dozen projects has been chosen. With two-thirds of the center’s 54 lead investigators identifying as Indigenous, the NSF grant’s senior investigators see the center as belated recognition that Indigenous scholars must help set the research agenda.
“My entire career I’ve faced ridicule from my [non-Indigenous] peers and from my discipline for being an Indigenous woman who has used her cultural knowledge and practices to do archaeology,” says Ora Marek-Martinez, a member of the Navajo Nation and head of Native American initiatives at Northern Arizona University. “I cried when I found out we were being funded,” she says. “To be able to do this work at this level is simply amazing.”
Seeking sustainable harvests
CBIKS is one of 17 science and technology centers (STCs) currently funded by NSF. The program provides generous funding for up to 10 years to interdisciplinary teams tackling topics that have ranged from severe storms to quantum computing. Part of a class of four new centers, CBIKS is the first in the program’s 36-year history to be supported by NSF’s social and behavioral sciences directorate.
Remarkably for a center so unlike others that NSF has funded, Atalay and her team succeeded on their first attempt at winning an STC. She attributes it to her decadeslong ties with dozens of colleagues doing similar work on a much smaller scale, as well as to reviewers willing to step outside their comfort zone. “I remember one [reviewer] saying, ‘At first I was skeptical, but as I kept reading it started to make sense to me.’”
Atalay stresses that she’s building on the work of others. “This is not some brand-new idea that I came up with on my own,” she says. “But it felt like the right time to bring all of us together.”
The climate crisis is propelling interest in coping strategies that incorporate TEK, which is the product of millennia of interactions between humans and the environment. “We don’t have the luxury of waiting 30 years for some scientific theory to trickle down to have an impact at the community level,” says Jon Woodruff, a UMass sedimentologist and co–principal investigator for the center. “We need to start right now, with the type of place-based, community-based research that the center will be supporting.”
For example, to harvest fish sustainably, the Passamaquoddy have begun to redeploy traditional fish weirs. These wooden structures have latticework that guides fish into an enclosed area during high tide, and then blocks their escape as the water ebbs. The weirs allow some fish to continue their journey upstream to spawn while yielding a harvest calibrated to the needs of the local community.
“It took a lot of traditional ecological knowledge just to place these fish weirs,” says anthropologist Natalie Michelle, a research fellow at UMass and a University of Maine postdoc who is a member of the Penobscot. “They would have to know the different currents in the ocean, the different depths at which the fish swim, the weather patterns, seasonal migration, and so on.”
The CBIKS research hubs aim to weave that kind of traditional knowledge with Western science, creating a new model for studying the natural world. The hubs will draw on work by Marek-Martinez, who col-leads the Southwest hub, following a research methodology used by Navajo—or Diné, as the Navajo call themselves—scholars.
First, tribal leaders meet and agree on the types of information that researchers hope to collect, the relationship between the project’s components, and how results will benefit the community. Those decisions are made before a research plan is drawn up. “The differences [in process] can make Indigenous methodologies unrecognizable for conventional scientists, and even conversations to plan joint research projects can be challenging,” Marek-Martinez says.
Once research is underway, another key difference is how data are managed. Scientists often put data into a common repository open to everybody, and then write papers that are part of the public literature. But many Indigenous people believe knowledge should not be separated from its cultural roots and that the community should have the authority to decide what data can be shared and what may need to be kept confidential.
In anthropology, for example, Atalay says, “Traditionally, when you would go out to interview a community elder, you’d just hit the record button, and anything they say somehow becomes your intellectual property.” But, she explains, “Indigenous ways of thinking are not about ownership but about who has responsibility for that knowledge and who cares for it.” CBIKS aims to combine the two approaches in a way that would allow the elder to retain control of the information while giving scientists access to it.
Anthropologists Jane Anderson at New York University and Maui Hudson of the University of Waikato in New Zealand have spent the past decade developing a digital tool to help that happen. Called Local Contexts, it allows Indigenous scholars to control traditional knowledge by attaching labels establishing protocols and permissions for its use. For example, a “seasonal” label informs scholars the data are only available at certain times of the year. A “consent verified” label on sequencing data means the relevant Indigenous community approved DNA collection and has protocols in place for using it, somewhat similar to Western consent forms but with the added imprimatur of the community. Anderson and Hudson, who co-direct a CBIKS working group on data sovereignty, say more researchers are incorporating the labels in publications presenting the results of collaboration with Indigenous people.
