J<\/span>EAN POLFUS<\/span> had a moment of clarity sitting around a long oval table in Tul\u00edt\u2019a, a community on the Mackenzie River in central Northwest Territories. It started with confusion over a pair of Dene words.<\/p>\n Goecha gots\u2019anele<\/em>. The words refer to a process in hunting whereby a hunter will circle around downwind to head off a caribou or a moose, taking advantage of the animal\u2019s instinctual attempt to catch a predator\u2019s scent. Polfus, rolling the unfamiliar term around in her mind, began to absorb some of its meaning. Goecha gots\u2019anele. It related to wind and even to textures of snow. It related to particular places. It encompassed an entire way of thinking and the relationship between the hunter and the caribou, between the wind and the land.<\/p>\n It crystallized in her mind how language is rooted in the land. And the land, in turn, reflects the culture. \u201cIt\u2019s just absolutely beautiful how connected the words are to the land,\u201d she says, \u201cand how connected the words are to the relationships people have with the animals.\u201d<\/p>\n That moment in Tul\u00edt\u2019a in 2014 set Polfus on a course of interdisciplinary research that would never stray far from her then newfound appreciation for the knowledge around her.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s hard to really understand how people can perceive the world in a different way when they use a different language that you can\u2019t understand,\u201d she says. \u201cI just got a glimpse of it.\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s an understanding shared through generations of Dene people. As one of Polfus\u2019s community advisers, Walter Bayha, put it to her, quoting his own grandfather, \u201cOur history is written on the land. The language comes from the land.\u201d<\/p>\n T<\/span>HIS WEALTH OF<\/span> shared knowledge did not accumulate on its own. Polfus has spent the last seven years living in Tul\u00edt\u2019a, a community of less than 500 people along the Mackenzie River. She built her career studying various types of caribou\u2014mountain, boreal, and barren ground, all of which live there\u2014and how they interact with different habitats.<\/p>\n Living in the community gave her an irreplaceable edge in understanding the caribou. More importantly, it granted her the time and space to win the trust of community members. Their knowledge shaped her work. Polfus is part of a growing movement of scientists who don\u2019t just \u201cconsult\u201d with Indigenous communities\u2014they immerse themselves in them, learn from them, share knowledge with them, and return something to them in the process. The Dene call this mode of thinking \u201c\u0142egh\u00e1gots\u2019enet\u0119,\u201d translated to \u201clearning together.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s finding the questions that you have in common,\u201d says Aerin Jacob, a conservation scientist with the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative. \u201cWhere\u2019s the overlap between [questions] communities want to have answered and what is your expertise?\u201d<\/p>\n That overlap can be a place of both great opportunity and great resistance. It\u2019s the site of an ongoing convergence of vibrant traditions, a stubborn establishment, and curious minds.<\/p>\n And, in some places, in some ways, it just might be the future of science.<\/p>\n I<\/span>N 2017<\/span>, the three largest federal funding bodies for science, health, and social-science research in Canada announced a new type of grant. Indigenous Research Capacity and Reconciliation Connection Grants of up to $50,000 were awarded the following year to projects that \u201cidentify new ways of doing research with Indigenous communities.\u201d<\/p>\n The new funding was a response to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission\u2019s sixty-fifth call to action: establish a national research program to advance the understanding of reconciliation. Importantly, more than half of the grants were dedicated to Indigenous not-for-profit organizations\u2014not universities.<\/p>\n Internationally, the scientific establishment has been taking notice. Community-involved science received a strong endorsement in a June editorial in Science<\/em>cosigned by Jane Lubchenko, former administrator of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.<\/p>\n \u201cExpanding the range of effective solutions and scaling them globally requires scientists to engage actively with communities,\u201d the endorsing authors wrote. Jacob says this broader acknowledgment is an important step to legitimizing research that falls outside of the academic establishment, adding that the community-involved science movement is still finding its feet.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s increasingly recognized by funding agencies as being important,\u201d she adds. \u201cBut that doesn\u2019t translate yet into huge amounts of research funding.\u201d Still, the conversation has evolved a long way from how things were done in the not-too-distant past, when there was no guarantee that researchers would even engage with Indigenous communities more than absolutely necessary.<\/p>\n \u201cI think ten years ago it was a really progressive idea to even table your findings at a community meeting,\u201d says Megan Adams, a PhD candidate at the University of Victoria. Adams has been working out of Rivers Inlet on the central coast of British Columbia, in Wuikinuxv First Nation territory, in close collaboration with community members. From the very beginning, that collaboration has meant going much further than sharing a slideshow over coffee. In the first two weeks of Adams\u2019s graduate program\u2014when she was supposed to be starting classes at the University of Victoria\u2014her supervisor, Chris Darimont, instead sent her to Wuikinuxv to listen to community members.<\/p>\n T<\/span>HE STUNNING<\/span> rainforest inlet, 100 kilometres north of Port Hardy, is home to abundant salmon runs that power local food, social and ceremonial fishing, and a sport-fishing industry. It\u2019s also home to a large and very visible grizzly bear population. \u201cWhere I work,\u201d Adams says, \u201cbears and people live side by side.\u201d<\/p>\n The community wanted to know more about the bears\u2019 diets and how that knowledge could inform its harvesting practices. \u201cIf bears don\u2019t get enough food, not only do people have to see bears\u2014who they care about\u2014suffer, they also face increased bear-human conflict,\u201d Adams says. \u201cThis is about food security for you and food security for bears.\u201d<\/p>\n As she researched, Adams checked in with elders and community members. They directed her collaborative work with the nation. But the community wasn\u2019t simply in search of information out of a sense of objectivity, in the tradition of Western science. The goal of community members was to establish an evidentiary basis, parallel to their own traditional knowledge, to stop the grizzly bear trophy hunt, and they saw Adams\u2019s research as a means to that end.<\/p>\n \u201cWestern science was one of many tools they were using to stop the hunt,\u201d Adams says.<\/p>\n Science holds its own objectivity in high regard. But Anne Salomon, a professor at Simon Fraser University, says scientists who believe in their own objectivity are fooling themselves. Scientists are operating from an unavoidable position of bias, from the way they\u2019re trained to their values and beliefs to the ways they formulate questions and gather data, she points out.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s farcical to think that any science is unbiased,\u201d Salomon says. \u201cWe do what we can to still get an approximation of the truth we\u2019re interested in, in the least biased way possible.\u201d<\/p>\n S<\/span>ALOMON<\/span>, regarded as one of the foremost practitioners of community-involved ecology research in Canada, learned her approach early on at the Bamfield Marine Sciences Centre. All ecological research projects at Bamfield, no matter how small, are brought to the Huu-ay-aht First Nation for approval first if they involve Huu-ay-aht lands.<\/p>\n Salomon thought that was just how things were done, so when she arrived in Alaska, she approached the local Sugpiaq villages to ask for their input into her work surveying the creatures that live between high and low tide. What they told her formed the basis for her research. \u201cIt was in talking with the chief and talking with the people that they told me about the decline in this particular chiton that led to all this work,\u201d she says. The community wanted to know why the mollusc was disappearing. \u201cThat\u2019s such an interesting question ecologically and also in terms of conservation.\u201d<\/p>\n The species in decline, the leather chiton, turned out to be a keystone species in that ecosystem, a species whose presence or absence has knock-on effects for the entire food web. In picking up on that trend, the Sugpiaq had noticed something other resource managers had missed, and they noticed it because the community has an interest in the species as a resource\u2014and because it was steps from their front doors. That is often true of Indigenous communities, Salomon says, and that wellspring of local knowledge and curiosity draws her back to them again and again.<\/p>\n \u201cTheirs is a deeply marginalized voice\u2014when in reality it should be revered,\u201d she says. Today, she believes, scientists have a much more pressing duty to consult with Indigenous communities. \u1e34ii\u2019iljuus (Barbara Wilson), a member of the Haida Nation, convinced her that the duty was grounded in the principles of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. The requirement for \u201cfree, prior and informed consent\u201d applies to researchers, Salomon says, and that means accepting the answer you\u2019re given. \u201cWhen you ask for consent, you have to be prepared for \u2018no,\u2019\u201d she says.<\/p>\n The work Adams has done with First Nations along the central coast has also combined traditional knowledge from the community with modern scientific approaches. Using local knowledge has helped them establish shifts in the bears\u2019 habitats dating back well into the past, further than science alone would allow. It has led to renewed understanding of the multifaceted, deep interactions between bears and salmon, involving the communities at every stage.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen we started that habitat work, the province didn\u2019t believe the Kitasoo [Kitasoo\/Xai\u2019xais First Nation] were seeing grizzly bears on islands,\u201d Adams says. People who had spent their entire lives in close contact with grizzly and black bears would be told the obvious by a provincial scientist: that black bears can look brown. Backing up what was already well known by the local First Nations with knowledge that was more palatable to government employees was one part of building the case for that knowledge to be accepted by the government.<\/p>\n \u201cThe dialogue has really changed.\u201d<\/p>\n T<\/span>HE HEILTSUK FIRST NATION\u2019S<\/span> sprawling coastal rainforest territory borders that of the Wuikinuxv First Nation, to the northwest. It\u2019s known for its stormy waters, mysterious spirit bears, abundant marine life, and towering red cedar, Douglas fir, and hemlock trees. That rich coastline has been threatened over and over again by overfishing, diesel spills, and the prospect of unwelcome crude-oil pipelines.<\/p>\n The Heiltsuk\u2019s unceded lands overlap in the south with those of Wuikinuxv First Nation at Calvert Island\u2014home to the Hakai Institute, a relatively new research organization that focuses on coastal ecosystems. Hakai came to Calvert Island in 2014. It wanted to conduct field research across the territory, from its shallow seabed to cascading rivers high above the inlets and islands.<\/p>\n Both First Nations insisted on a collaborative approach.<\/p>\n \u201cI hear people say, \u2018We\u2019ve been studied to death,\u2019\u201d says Jess Housty, a Heiltsuk First Nation councillor in the coastal community of Bella Bella. Housty says researchers were often coming to the community and taking what they needed\u2014in the form of interviews with elders or other knowledge holders or in the form of invasive animal-based ecological research\u2014then leaving, \u201cadvancing their careers with nothing tangible left in the community.\u201d<\/p>\n That is no longer the case.<\/p>\n Researchers who want to work in Heiltsuk territory must now get approval from the Heiltsuk Integrated Resource Management Department. It\u2019s a way for the First Nation to vet projects before they begin. Housty says ultimately it\u2019s about the expression of Heiltsuk sovereignty over their lands and waters\u2014something from which the First Nation has never shied away when it comes to other pressures on its resources.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s not enough to say you\u2019re sovereign\u2014you have to act sovereign,\u201d Housty says, quoting, as she often does, the community\u2019s elders.<\/p>\n Most applications are accepted or returned to the researchers with suggestions on how to improve them. Some have been outright rejected\u2014\u201coften social-science-research questions that we felt were racist or exploitative of the community,\u201d explains Housty.<\/p>\n Those researchers who are not willing to adapt their proposals to work within the community\u2019s rules are shown the door. \u201cThat helps you weed out the people who you don\u2019t want working in your territory to begin with,\u201d Housty says.<\/p>\n O<\/span>THER BENEFITS<\/span> also arise when the community asserts control over how research is done in its territory. The Hakai Institute employs Heiltsuk members as field technicians. In the Wuikinuxv First Nation, Adams has been trying to leverage the funding and privilege that comes with her affiliation with the University of Victoria to work with youth, running a camp in a hard-to-reach part of the territory.<\/p>\n Polfus has been doing the same in Tul\u00edt\u2019a, spending time in schools and working with community members in an effort to expand local capacity. \u201cI really hope\u2026the next generation of researchers doing work on caribou in the North are from the communities,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n That\u2019s already happening in Bella Bella, where a school-based program is giving young people the chance to shadow resource officers and collect real data that will be used by their community to inform decision making. Time spent out on the land is part of their curriculum. Other First Nations are now taking notice, and the practice is starting to spread.<\/p>\n \u201cWe are visited by, I would say, about a dozen communities a year,\u201d Housty says. The visitors are looking for advice on how to assert sovereignty, the way the Heiltsuk have done, and on how to get a stewardship program up and running.<\/p>\n When the Gwich\u2019in land claim was complete, covering a large swath of northern Yukon and the Northwest Territories, one of the first steps taken by the newly empowered First Nation was to establish a board to oversee all research in Gwich\u2019in territory.<\/p>\n \u201cOnce the project takes place, if they collected any tapes, any kind of documentation, they would have to give us any kind of tapes, transcripts, photos related to the project,\u201d says Sharon Snowshoe, who heads the board. The data are used to inform local decisions and advocate for local development priorities. It\u2019s also a safeguard for the future.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s going to be available for the future generations,\u201d Snowshoe says.<\/p>\n W<\/span>HEN TWENTY-THREE-YEAR-OLD<\/span> Henry Huntington arrived in northern Alaska in the spring of 1988, straight out of Cambridge, he intended to stay a few months to round out his polar knowledge.<\/p>\n More than thirty years later, Huntington is still there. \u201cI just got hooked,\u201d he told The Narwhal<\/em>. \u201cYou had real communities, people who had been there for thousands of years doing interesting things.\u201d<\/p>\n When Huntington arrived, the subsistence whaling hunt of the l\u00f1upiat communities\u2014their way of life\u2014was under threat. The International Whaling Commission had unilaterally withdrawn its approval for Indigenous whaling, and the communities were left reeling.<\/p>\n Rather than accept the decision, however, the whalers decided to fight back with science.<\/p>\n Travelling from place to place along the coast, gathering information for the Alaska Eskimo Whaling Commission, Huntington found himself floored by the amount of local knowledge and its overlap with the whaling tradition.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was like a little spark,\u201d he recalls. \u201cPeople crowded around the table and had lots to say about where the ice was, where the whales are, what they do, where the people go, what the key features are, what their names are.\u201d<\/p>\n But when he went to publish his results, he was met with resistance from the scientific establishment, which largely believed science was meant to come from scientists, not from Indigenous whalers.<\/p>\n \u201cThey seemed to give flimsy reasons for not publishing,\u201d Huntington says. \u201cFor a lot of people, this was something new and hard to quantify. How much faith should you give in the words of some guys who\u2019s spent his life out on the land, but has he had any training? Is there any rigour associated with this? Is he saying things just for his own benefit?\u201d<\/p>\n Huntington made a conscious effort to publish his work as ecology or biology papers, rather than as anthropology, firmly asserting the place of traditional knowledge in natural science and moving the practice of consulting with communities into the mainstream.<\/p>\n C<\/span>HRIS DARIMONT<\/span>, Raincoast research chair at the University of Victoria and science director for Raincoast Conservation Foundation, has spent his entire career working in cooperation with Indigenous communities. He sent Adams to Wuikinuxv, having built trust and setting the groundwork for her arrival over many years.<\/p>\n He argues that no matter how much say a community has over the direction of research, just like any good science, it\u2019s all peer reviewed and replicable. \u201cOur responsibility is not only to that community,\u201d he says. \u201cWe have a professional responsibility as scientists to do good work and, critically\u2014here\u2019s a key part\u2014have our work subject to peer review and submit work that is reproducible.\u201d<\/p>\n Huntington says some of the resistance he met in his early days in Alaska has been overcome, opening the door to more applications for this kind of work. Some of the openness is sincere, some less so. But, overall, he says, echoing Adams, \u201cthat attitude has changed, or at least, the rhetoric has changed.\u201d<\/p>\n As it grows in acceptance, scientists may start encountering the awkward moment when their results disagree with the community\u2019s traditional knowledge.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen you have disagreements between the two types of knowledge, that\u2019s where we have the biggest opportunity to discover something new,\u201d says Polfus.<\/p>\n F<\/span>OR POLFUS<\/span>, that happened in the Mackenzie Mountains near Tul\u00edt\u2019a. Science has three categories for the caribou found there: mountain, barren ground, and boreal. The Dene have another subcategory of mountain caribou, known to them as t\u0119nat\u0142\u2019\u01dda\u2014the fast runner, a subtype the elders say comes from far away, \u201cpossibly as far away as the ocean,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n \u201cThis type hasn\u2019t been identified by Western science,\u201d she says. And it still hasn\u2019t; that will require a dedicated study involving linking DNA<\/span> in scat from caribou to community members\u2019 observations of t\u0119nat\u0142\u2019\u01dda individuals. It could have major implications for policy, since different caribou are protected in different ways by species-at-risk legislation.<\/p>\n \u201cBut there really wouldn\u2019t be another word for this in Dene language if it wasn\u2019t important for their hunting success.\u201d Sometimes, however, the implications aren\u2019t so supportive of the scientific interpretation of the world. Huntington encountered that tension as he worked on Saint Lawrence Island, in the Bering Sea.<\/p>\n Among the knowledge he gathered about whale migratory patterns and behaviours, he discovered something surprising. Whalers in the community had a word for whales coming alongside their boats on the side away from the harpooner, eyeing up the whaling crew. If the crew was found worthy, the whale would offer itself to the crew on the harpooner\u2019s side of the boat.<\/p>\n The very idea of a whale endangering itself like that\u2014let alone deciding to sacrifice itself to another species\u2014flies in the face of all biological science. Yet the word was earnestly shared with the scientists.<\/p>\n Reviewers had a hard time believing it. \u201cFair enough, from the biology point of view,\u201d Huntington concedes. But he felt that the term revealed enough about the whalers, along with their world view and their traditions, that it was a valuable observation regardless of whether it made sense to biologists.<\/p>\n \u201cThat speaks to a whole relationship with the whales that informs and motivates the way the whalers do their thing,\u201d says Huntington, who included the term\u2014angyi, related to the Yupik word for \u201cgiving something\u201d\u2014in his results.<\/p>\n Asked if he believes the biology can ever be reconciled with the traditional knowledge, Huntington insists that it doesn\u2019t matter what he believes. \u201cMaybe the two will never agree,\u201d he says. But \u201cif we go in with a filter of saying, \u2018I\u2019m only going to take seriously the things that make sense to me,\u2019 we\u2019re really closing our minds.\u201d<\/p>\n\n
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