What Conservation Efforts Miss: Indigenous Knowledges and Lessons from 2020
By: Lindsey Smaka
Tags: Indigenous People, Science Education, Indigenous Knowledge, Conservation, International

“The natural world, therefore, is not one of wonder, but of familiarity. The human niche is only one of a myriad of united niches that work together to continue the process of iwigara” (Enrique Salmón)

Photo by Lindsey Smaka — Edina High School students in the Indigenous Sani community, Ecuador

Enrique Salmón, a Rarámuri ecologist, explains that among his people, iwigara refers to viewing humans as an intricate part of the ecosystem and nature as our kin. He calls this kincentric ecology.

Among the Rarámuri of Mexico, who have lived in an exceptionally ecologically diverse environment for thousands of years, conservation is critical. Countless endemic species — species that are only found in one specific geographic area — exist here. Yet, as Indigenous populations continue to be pushed off their land for various reasons or the very lands themselves become threatened, their abilities to care for their lands are diminished. While conservationists from other places may come in with goals of preserving the land, what of the land’s original stewards, the Indigenous people?

When battling environmental problems and climate change, there are many factors to consider. For example, on the technical side, the Podcast Threshold — Impermafrost — explores predicting and calculating the emissions of carbon dioxide into our atmosphere requires considering the thawing of permafrost and the resulting release of carbon dioxide. However, we need to move beyond the idea that science is purely technical and start realizing that a human factor is involved. Humans and the natural world are simultaneously coexisting on this planet and significantly affecting one another. In this coexistence framework, one of the most important factors is the role that Indigenous communities play in conservation. Threshold also explores the Indigenous communities who are at the center of this climate change. In the episode Things I Can See on the Mountains, host Amy Martin visits the Aleksandersens, an indigenous Sámi reindeer herding family in northern Norway. The Norwegian government grants herding land permits to Sámi and are hard to come by. So when a permit came up, the Aleksandersens moved away from their families to a new part of Norway to pursue and preserve reindeer herding. Not long after, the government decided to put wind turbines on this very same land to help combat climate change. The mother of the family, Risten Turi Aleksandersen, states ”First they have build the big cities and taken the land from the Sámis like that. And then when they have this problem with the climate change and the pollution and so, then they need to solve that problem. And the way they do it is they take even more land from the Sámis, and other indigenous people as well”.

Climate change aside, 2020 has also shown us what can happen when the human world takes advantage of the natural world. COVID-19 is a zoonotic disease, and it is believed that human encroachment on animals’ habitat is what caused transmission to occur (UNEP, 2020). These developments provoke questions — have we always encroached? Why? Is there a better way? And suppose we had followed Indigenous knowledge systems that consider ecological balances from the start, would we be in this pandemic now? Perhaps 2020 is yet another reminder that science education and conservation need to learn from this mistake, do a better job of listening to Indigenous knowledge systems, and expand beyond niche academic or popular conservation social media campaigns.

From the Forests of Wisconsin to the Jungles of Ecuador

Growing up in rural Wisconsin, I had a zest for nature. I spent hours playing outside in the woods, collecting frogs, and making forts. I recall times when my classmates and I would learn about Native Americans and how they “lived off the land,” but my exposure was minimal. Looking back today, despite those knowledge gaps, I relate to what little we learned about Indigenous peoples in relation with nature to how I grew up because nature was an integral part of my life and my culture in rural Wisconsin.

I had a zest for travel but had minimal opportunities growing up. Later, I was able to participate in an exchange in Germany, which started my intercultural and international journey. I attended the University of Minnesota — even though — any school farther than Wisconsin seemed unimaginable at the time. After receiving my Chemistry and German Studies degrees, I became a high school chemistry teacher in a suburb of Minneapolis. In this time, I had put my zest for the connections between nature and international studies on the back burner, through becoming a mother and starting my career.

In 2015, after my mother’s unexpected passing, I found myself viewing life differently. I wanted to expand my horizons professionally and personally, and I came across an opportunity from a conservation research organization, Operation Wallacea, to travel with students and perform conservation research. While scared, I decided to go for it and organized an expedition, allowing me to combine my passion for teaching and the outdoors. After mustering up my courage and with a lot of support from my colleagues, I took my first group of high school students to South Africa.

What I experienced in South Africa made me realize that I have been living off a “single story” for most of my life. I distinctly remember one lecture where my students and I debated big game hunting and poaching. I was struck with a completely different viewpoint of poaching. I had never contemplated the root cause of why people would poach animals instead of judging people as terrible. What I learned is that people poach because of their socioeconomic demands, and because land-stripping and reductions have led to human-wildlife conflict.

In later years, I went on to take students to Fiji and Ecuador, and we stayed in or visited Indigenous communities. I saw students engaging with and learning from Indigenous peoples. In Ecuador, students saw firsthand how their own personal use of oil impacts this village deep in the Amazon rainforest. While these kinds of programs are viewed in a number of different ways — as voluntourism and at risk for fomenting “white saviour” tendencies, I do maintain that our goals were not to stay at nice resorts and gain a tourist’s perspective. Instead, we were interested in forming relationships with communities, and students were fully immersed in the day-to-day life, often returning to the U.S. with new perspectives and viewpoints on life and conservation.

After these experiences, I worked to change how I teach content in my own science classes. Being in a track of hard sciences for most of my life, I witnessed and subscribed to the silos that tend to emerge in academics. As a science teacher, it was always an unspoken rule that I had no place bringing social issues into my classroom. I had to teach only the content, practice the math and build chemists out of the students. However, science and specifically chemistry is a social construct. It has been developed, primarily from white males, over hundreds of years. With every standard I teach, I strive to bring in a global issue of some sort. I have taught gas laws through the lens of scuba diving, deep sea fishing and ocean conservation. I have taught stoichiometry by calculating carbon emissions from forest destruction. The next way I seek to transform my curriculum is to include traditional ecological knowledge.

Colonization, Conservation, and Indigenous Peoples

Despite widespread positive efforts undertaken by conservation, this approach to thinking about and working with nature has historically negatively impacted Indigenous communities, and it is important to ask what residues of these enactments still exist today. No matter its good intentions, science and conservation are linked with colonization, and there is no doubt that colonization had devastating impacts on Indigenous peoples across the globe. Even post liberation as colonies, Indigenous peoples living on their traditional territories in many places still struggle to maintain their knowledge systems. Moreover, modern forms of colonization through narratives of modernity come in the form of government initiatives, foreign aid, and conservation efforts and conservation scientists themselves. As Tsalagi scholar Jeff Corntassel states, “…contemporary colonization continues to disrupt Indigenous relationships with their homelands, cultures, and communities.” What we must remember is that these initiatives are rooted in western ideologies and existing colonial institutions, some with the best of intentions and that are still directly harmful to Indigenous communities.

The Podcast “Threshold”, episode Invisible Hands, explores the island of Shishmaref, a home to Indigenous Alaskans at the forefront of climate change. The island is slowly eroding into the sea, forcing Iñupiaq people to abandon their homes and move to the mainland. But this is a complicated history — When Christians colonized Alaska, they forced the semi-nomadic Iñupiaq to settle on this island instead of continuing to move according to the season, and continuing to cultivate their best survival skills. Kelly Eningowuk grew up in Shishmaref, but she lives in Anchorage now. She’s the executive director of the Inuit Circumpolar Council in Alaska, an organization that works to promote and protect indigenous rights in the Arctic. She states, “I’ve heard something to the effect of, ‘These dumb Eskimos, why did they, why did they build their community on a barrier island?’ The fact of the matter is because the church and the Bureau of Indian Affairs school was built. So I think that’s a major misconception”. Conservationists and the government are now trying to come in and fix a problem that they themselves had created for the Iñupiaq people.

Among the lower 48 States, we can also observe another classic form of conservation — America’s first National Park, Yellowstone. Today’s Yellowstone National Park sits on many different tribal nation territories. In establishing this land as a National Park, environmentalists celebrated while the government slowly but surely pushed Indians out of this territory. People were displaced, their hunting was banned. Indigenous researcher and activist, Dina Gilio-Whitaker in her Time article, the “lingering result of the Yellowstone story is that coded within the language of preservation, ‘wilderness’ landscapes — always already in need of protection — are, or should be, free from human presence. But this logic completely evades the fact of ancient Indigenous habitation and cultural use of such places”.

Growing up in rural Wisconsin, I had always dreamed of National Parks. They were a sanctuary for nature and a way to preserve our land. It was not until I visited the Indigenous community of Sani Isla in the heart of the Ecuadorian Amazon, that I learned from Sophia Wood (of Operation Wallacea), that Ecuador’s National Parks were a more recent phenomenon. These parks were carefully curated and only certain areas were selected for “protection”. Regions that are resource rich, were instead opened up to development. Perhaps similar to what happened in the U.S. so many years ago, Indigenous communities were today being pushed out. This was a jarring realization — maybe National Parks are not the Holy Grail of conservation, perhaps we need to rethink their intentions, processes, and impacts, perhaps we need to think carefully about how we live outside of the frames of these spaces.

This is an old story: as Indigenous people are pushed off their lands, they struggle. When Indigenous peoples are displaced, they become refugees in their own lands. Thus the very idea of conservation needs to be revisited as Indigenous traditional land use may be questionable — so what is there to “conserve” and why? As investigative historian and journalist Mark Dowie, writes in Conservation Refugees, “…tribal peoples like the Maasai who have seen their lands plundered for two hundred years by foreign colonizers, do regard conservationists as just another colonizer, an extension of the deadening forces of economic and cultural hegemony. Nor should conservationists be surprised to find central African communities associating plans to protect biodiversity with forced expulsion.”

Rethinking American Science Education

As I plan the next expedition with students in 2021, it is an important realization that Operation Wallacea is a colonial entity reflecting non-Indigenous scientific enterprises. 2020 has not only brought the pandemic, but also social and racial issues to the forefront. This year I have concentrated on recognizing my white privilege and have been educating myself. What I wish to do with my expeditions moving forward is to intervene in the narrative of Opwall being a modern colonial enterprise and instead focus on a mutual exchange between the students and the people we visit. The original intent of the organization was environmental, we need to remember that the lands in which this scientific work is being done belong to the original stewards.

As students engage in conservation, it is crucial to recognize that they are not superior to Indigenous people also working toward protection and care of the natural world. Formal science education brings valuable knowledge, but it is equally important for Indigenous Knowledge Systems to be sustained and respected, allowed to heal and cultivate and be cultivated, and while providing equitable opportunities for Native students to engage science methodologies and doing so critically. As Ray Barnhardt and Angayuqaq Oscar Kawagley state, “…many Indigenous and non-Indigenous people have begun to recognize the limitations of a monocultural education system… the relationship between Indigenous ways of knowing and those associated with Western society and formal education. Our challenge now is to devise a system of education for all people that respect the epistemological and pedagogical foundations by Indigenous as well as Western cultural traditions”. Indigenous communities have cared for and lived on these lands for millennia, and it has taken colonization and our current ravenous consumption lifestyle for the environment started to fall apart. As conservationists become more aware of the critical role that Indigenous and local communities play in our collective efforts, traditional Indigenous ecological knowledge is a centerpiece of a restorative relationship. It is also important to think about how exchanges such as these are beneficial to the indigenous community. As conservation-indigenous partnerships form, Indigenous communities may gain a voice in their own government or a place in the global economy. It is important that this is something that the community wishes to gain.

Miya Nadya Tom, Elizabeth Sumida Huaman, and Teresa L. McCarty highlight the meaning of the word “Indigenous” in their editorial. As they point out, the UN identifies an Indigenous person as one who “resolves to maintain and reproduce their ancestral environments and systems as distinctive peoples and communities” and therefore “sustainability characterises Indigeneity”. We can think of self-determining Indigenous peoples as the original stewards of the environment. They are the original sustainably living societies. Western science strives to research and accomplishes living sustainably, but perhaps we can instead look to Indigenous people who have been doing just that for millennia.

An example of these indigenous knowledge systems that could contribute to science comes from Enrique Salmón’s kincentric ecology. Western farming has developed best land management practices over hundreds of years, including things like covering crops, reduced tillage, and crop rotation. Salmón speaks about how horticultural and agricultural techniques have been developed over centuries. He observed a Rarámuri elder collect a medicinal plant, trekking through the forest passing plant after plant until he found an abundance of them. “He suggested that the iwigara in these low-population areas is “weak” and must, therefore, be allowed to be strengthened before the plants there are of any use. In further conversation, he explained that collecting the plants in the rincon was good because thinning them out actually helps the iwigara in the other plants to strengthen.” Listening to indigenous communities and learning from these practices developed over millennia is an important part of the relationship conservations need to form with Indigenous communities. Finding a place for Indigenous peoples in the field of science is equally as important.

Lessons from 2020

2020 has been one of the most important years in history. Not only for society but also for myself. I am an explorer at heart and greatly miss travel. However, this year I have also grounded myself and learned so much. I think back to my childhood of running through the woods, and although I did not grow up as an Indigenous person, I believe I understand this quote from Māori educator Wally Penetito: “I come from a little place in the middle of nowhere, the ‘wopwops’, the ‘boondocks’, the ‘never-nevers’ but to me it is the centre of the universe.” Ringle, Wisconsin was the center of my universe. We even called it the boondocks as well. As I grew up I started to explore the world, visit “exotic” places, and immerse myself in new cultures. This year has taught me that these new places I explore are the center of someone else’s universe. I know my hometown of Ringle inside and out. I can tell you exactly where the fallen tree was that we used as the center of our make-believe skits. I know where the best place by the pond is to collect frogs. If someone were to visit my hometown of Ringle, Wisconsin, and push for change without working with me or my neighbors first, I would be angry.

As students visit, venture, and explore the world, I want them to learn from the conservation scientists on-site and the Indigenous communities. They will learn how to do this from the people who have lived in that particular environment for thousands of years. Students will take this knowledge and apply it to their western science education to find new and creative ways to move conservation forward inclusively with Indigenous Peoples.

It is also important to think about the science of the pandemic moving forward. With my education in the hard sciences, I was told that science can’t lie. We have been trained as Americans that science is infallible. Yes, numbers do not lie. However, I have recently accepted that the interpretation of those numbers is still left up to humans — humans with biases and different worldviews and perspectives on life. I thought about this recently as I taught the development of the atom to my chemistry students. First, scientists thought the atom was just a solid sphere. Then it morphed into a pudding-like model and as electrons were discovered the atom morphed into a planetary model and now it sits at a model that is very different from the initial solid sphere. Science does this — scientists change and morph theories over time as new knowledge is gained. So we cannot say that science is completely infallible. As the American Indian social critic, Vine Deloria Jr. states, “Like any other group of priests and politicians, however, scientists lie and fudge their conclusions as much as the most distrusted professions in our society… Charles Darwin liberally borrowed the ideas of Alfred Wallace to become the father of evolution”. While we navigate a vaccine and a cure for this pandemic we must also realize that this type of pandemic can very well happen again. The issue of climate change is not going away. As conservationists and society tackle this issue, it is important to start supporting Indigenous Knowledge Systems, learn from them and include Indigenous voices moving forward.

Lindsey Smaka, Doctoral Student, Comparative and International Development Education

University of Minnesota, November 2020