I. Land Stewardship

This work presents collective scenarios co-created with Indigenous peoples considering traditional practices as a way to overcome current deforestation and socioeconomic challenges. Using participatory methods, we interviewed 53 individuals from Kaingang and Guarani Peoples in six communities (Paraná, Brazil) to co-create future scenarios. They have been facing a vulnerable socioeconomic situation, relying on government assistance, and are susceptible to external pressure, which is increasing land leasing and illegal wood sales in the indigenous land. Guided by the Ethnographic Futures Research protocol, our findings revealed a local interest in revitalizing traditional practices to manage their crops, especially concerning the maintenance of yerba-mate (Illex paraguaiensis) and pinhão (Araucaria augustifolia seed). Additionally, locals are interested in identifying alternative sustainable community-based activities that could be implemented there. The current conservation initiatives do not generate significant economic returns for communities, whereas land leasing for the agribusiness market is advancing,  exacerbating forest degradation.

The ever-growing interest from scientists and land managers in Indigenous knowledge and stewardship practices has, for many communities, resulted in increasing engagement fatigue and demands for more community-led and culturally responsive approaches. In this presentation we draw on collaborative research with Skeetchestn, a Secwépemc Nation community located in interior British Columbia, Canada, to highlight the role of Indigenous 'territorial patrol' programs in leading innovative approaches to community engagement and land stewardship. We describe Skeetchestn’s model of 'community ride alongs', in which Elders and resource users are invited to join territorial patrol staff as they drive and monitor the territory, and how this facilitates community documentation of cultural knowledge, sites and observations of landscape change; identification of community priorities for restoration; and “restorying” the territory, through inter-generational sharing of stories, memories and oral tradition. These findings demonstrate the value of community- and land-based engagement approaches, and the potential to scale up collaborative stewardship through Indigenous territorial patrols.

This paper introduces our burgeoning work to build a regional Indigenous biocultural stewardship network that will connect people across Indigenous nations and generations, with the allied support of federal, state, academic, and NGO institutions. Communities across the Northeastern Woodlands have been experiencing the effects of climate change, in particular through extensive flooding of rivers and their tributaries. We must develop adaptive stewardship strategies that will integrate ecosystem approaches, collaboration across organizations and agencies, and intergenerational knowledge transfer. Our network will organize around the Connecticut/ Kwenitekw and the St. Lawrence/ Kaniataronwanenneh watersheds and tributaries, and integrate Indigenous and allied stewards to facilitate intergenerational transmission of knowledge and skills and strengthen riverine and riparian stewardship. Indigenous stewardship practices do not separate environmental health and human health. So, the foci of our network may include cultural keystone species/ harvesting skills workshops, planting food forests, dam removal work, managing overpopulous species, cultural burning, and monitoring for contaminants.

How should we manage forests for fire? Most fire scientists and forest managers advocate more active management through thinnings, prescribed burns, etc. These fuel management practices are intended to prevent catastrophic fire and, often, resuscitate indigenous land management regimes. But another body of scholarship argues that fuel management only makes wildfires more damaging. This “dissident” scholarship has made its way into popular media and the messaging of various environmental organizations, and it has ignited a fierce debate. This debate, however, leaves out important perspectives: the perspectives of people who do land resilience work. Here I draw on new ethnographic fieldwork in the American West to share what the people who physically manage landscapes for fire (e.g. forestry technicians, US Forest Service certified sawyers, and certified indigenous land workers) think of this debate. In doing so, I foreground their ecological knowledge, forest stewardship practices, and views on fire science.

In the Jbāla hill country of northern Morocco, ḥubus (pious endowments) from the 19th century record the historical, socio-religious landscapes of the region's limestone heights. Craggy outcroppings above nucleated villages appear to be thickets of wild olive, cultivated olive, and mastic. However, ḥubus endowments – bequest or purchase deeds by which the village mosque acquired and oversaw trees – reveal the contours of a socially constituted landscape. Nested communal relations were perennially inscribed in the landscape, marked out by environmental features: a tree's shadow, a notorious wild olive, or a salient rock. 

Diana Davis traced the development and impact of French colonial environmental imaginaries of North Africa, yet local environmental imaginaries are overlooked. These never-before-used archives of pious bequests, gleaned from local ministry offices, provide an entry into these imaginaries through the religio-legal genre, illustrating how life and hope for the afterlife were reified in the dense groves of the limestone heights.

Since the concept of “cultural keystone species” has entered the conservation biology lexicon, much as been made about what qualifies a given species as such, and much work has been done as well to expand the concept to consider not only specific species, but also places and cultural practices more generally. In the following presentation, I will use the philosopher Félix Guatarri’s notion of “ecosophy” to consider another such possible dimension of the cultural keystone landscape: human subjectivity. If the environment and social relations gives rise to one’s sense of self, then what potentially is the role of other species in this process of self-fashioning, whether through identification, human-wildlife conflict, or admiration of beauty? By considering a few ways multispecies relations contribute to the critical components of human subjectification, my aim is to bring more awareness to some of the sensibilities, intelligences, and desires that might allow us to do the work of conservation biology better.

Post-wildfire restoration has been criticized by affected Interior Salish Indigenous communities in British Columbia, Canada, as lacking data-driven responses and ignoring Indigenous values such as impacts to traditional food systems. We assessed wildfire impacts on vegetation trajectories using both western scientific and Indigenous research methods. Examining percent cover of plants within 80 plots throughout the 2021 McKay Creek wildfire, we hypothesized that analyses using colonial plant classifications would not provide results which are culturally relevant. We found that colonial plant categories, such as “native”, masked impacts to culturally significant plants important to the St’át’imc Nation. Utilizing St’at’imc-determined plant classifications provided deeper insights into the recovery of mule deer forages and St’át’imc food and medicinal plants. Integration of Indigenous knowledges and values are critical for data-driven restoration planning and will provide an accurate post-wildfire recovery story needed to guide restoration planning and resource allocation.

Even long-standing and regulated forms of LEK are vulnerable to erosion as market forces spread to regions which have historically been peripheral to them. We consider changes in knowledge and use of a cultural keystone species, totora sedge (Schoenoplectus californicus subp. tatora), in the Altiplano of Bolivia and Peru around Lake Titicaca. Totora has been used for a variety of purposes and historically its cultivation and planting was regulated by village co-operative councils, called ayllus. However, recent ethnographic surveys have shown significantly reduced totora use. This decline, alongside with the disappearance of the regulatory power of ayllus have primarily been driven by the integration of the Altiplano into the global market system, which has led to the replacement of totora with industrially manufactured goods, such as plastics and concrete.