Progress report for LNC23-485
Project Information
The North Central Region (NCR) is a grassland agroecosystem shaped by interconnected social and ecological processes or relationships. NCR sustainability has suffered because production has been prioritized over other social-ecological relationships, and Indigenous people face barriers in developing Indigenous social-ecological relationships. The quality of ecological relationships is intricately connected with the quality of social relationships and societal processes. Global research shows that Indigenous social-ecological relationships are essential for the sustainability of agroecosystems. Indigenous social-ecological relationships are ancestral interconnections between Indigenous people with agroecosystems in the pursuit of sustainability. This project will work with Lakota land-users in the NCR to assess and improve their social-ecological relationships and their impacts on sustainability through interviews, group discussions, educational programming, management-assessment research, and outreach reporting. We will explore how land-users understand, interact with, and conserve Indigenous social-ecological relationships through interviews. We will assess how they understand how social processes impact these interactions and how land-users would like societal processes to change to improve agroecosystem sustainability. Group discussions will complement the interviews to highlight how their social-ecological relationships interact with societal processes across spatial and temporal scales. The products of these activities will be used to develop Indigenous education programming with land-users to support them in connecting with ancestral social-ecological practices. We will then work with land-users to adapt Indigenous practices to their current needs, to adapt Indigenous social-ecological assessments, and to inform them jointly with Western science. The project stages' results will be employed to co-develop outreach reports focused on the barriers, priorities, and recommendations of Lakota land-users for sustainable agroecosystems. They will be shared with cross-sector Indigenous and Western communities to support Lakota perspectives, equitable solutions, research, management, and education.
- To assess how Lakota land-users interact with social-ecological relationships and societal processes in the NCR grasslands to reveal their impacts on, barriers for, and priorities for sustainable agroecosystems.
- To co-develop and facilitate culturally sensitive educational programming for Lakota land-users focused on practicing Indigenous social-ecological practices for advancing sustainable agroecosystems.
- To adapt Indigenous social-ecological relationships and assessments of their impacts on sustainable agroecosystems.
- To create reports on the social-ecological barriers and priorities of Lakota land-users for informing equitable grassland solutions and for guiding the grasslands Indigenous Kinship Circle strategy.
A key update in the proposal is the partnership with the Indigenous Kinship Circle, which allows the team to eventually expand the relevance of this project's deliverables across the NRC area.
The grasslands of the North Central Region (NCR) are social-ecological systems (SES) or agroecosystems shaped by the historical interactions between natural and human systems (Folke et al., 2016). Coevolving Indigenous people and grasslands have created the managed grazer movement and the applied shifting mosaics of fire to maintain sacred relationships and obtain sustenance from the biota (Roos, 2018; Kimmerer and Lake, 2001). Historically, grasslands have provided critical ecological services to people, fostering cultural traditions, providing forage for livestock, securing water availability, and sequestering carbon, among others (Hails et al., 2019; Sala et al., 2017; Huntsinger and Oviedo, 2014). According to Berkes and Ross (2013), the NCR's grasslands are an example of coevolving ecological and human systems. However, ever since Indigenous people were forcibly displaced from NCR grasslands, the sustainability of these agroecosystems has been degraded (Twidwell et al., 2021; Davis, 2016).
An agroecosystem is not sustainable if the wellbeing of one group advances at the expense of another group. Western settlers established policies and institutions to reinforce their society and practices, frequently ignoring the knowledge accumulated for centuries by Native Nations and jeopardizing the social and ecological balances. While systematic inequalities have impacted Indigenous people's wellbeing, land ownership, and the sustainability of grasslands, the relationship people have with their land, communities, and ancestral knowledge has survived more than five hundred years. Indigenous people have never stopped working for food sovereignty through the joint pursuit of their community wellbeing and taking care of the environments in which they coexist (Isaac et al., 2018). However, Western people and society continue to be prioritized in the NCR as Indigenous people are excluded from research, policy, and management.
On the other hand, western ranchers primarily manage grasslands to maintain production and improve soil and water health by intentionally homogenizing them and reducing their landscape variability (Twidwell et al., 2021; Fuhlendorf et al., 2018). However, these practices are still decreasing ecological health as they contribute to an increase in invasive species and woody encroachment, altering water and nutrient cycles and decreasing biodiversity in fauna and flora (Winter et al., 2014; Twidwell et al., 2021). Thus, the agroecosystems in the NCR need to change to improve social and environmental conditions.
Indigenous interactions with the environment have been adaptively developed worldwide for centuries to improve social and ecological processes (Kimmerer, 2000). They have managed feedback and interconnections across spatial and temporal scales, reflecting many innovative resilience and sustainability science concepts. Indigenous science (IS) has provided new information about environmental issues and dynamics. Scientists have often learned that Indigenous communities have greater knowledge of local ecological functions and conditions (Kimmerer, 2002). As efforts try to restore the grasslands, they need to include Indigenous people; otherwise, these agroecosystems will not achieve sustainable social-ecological conditions (Kimmerer and Lake, 2001).
Throughout the NCR, multidisciplinary research efforts focus on assessing and improving sustainability in NCR. However, only some studies have focused on how Indigenous communities participate in and benefit from these agroecosystems, as most research focuses on Western people and ranchers. There is a need for more research guided and implemented by Indigenous people as the Indigenous perspective is essential to achieve equitable sustainability that benefits Indigenous and Western people and NCR agroecosystems.
Indigenous people need to lead in research so it can advance their perspectives and priorities. It is also essential to conduct research with Indigenous people to understand better how they interact with and benefit from the NCR to support the priorities of their communities and ecosystems. For these reasons, this project was formulated alongside the Grasslands Indigenous Kinship Circle (IKC) and Buffalo Nations Grassland Alliance (BNGA) to support their goals and to advance Indigenous wellbeing, food sovereignty, and land stewardship in the NCR. IKC and BNGA are coalitions of Indigenous people working on social and environmental issues. BNGA has participants that are land users, ranchers, and farmers. This project will highlight and support the social-ecological relationships, sustainability, and priorities of Lakota land users in the NCR to reveal information that assists in advancing equitable solutions for the sustainability of their communities and agroecosystems.
Cooperators
Research
Co-designed and co-constructed educational products will contribute to reconnect people with grasslands.
The goal of this project is to collaborate with Lakota land-users in reconnecting with their Indigenous knowledge -- that emerged from centuries of collective social-ecological interactions in North America's grasslands—and to create educational programming and outreach that advance NCR sustainability. This goal will be supported by the compilation of individual and collective experiences that emerged from project steps co-developed, co-implemented, and co-analyzed by BNGA and UNL participants as follows: collection and analysis of Lakota land-user perspectives through qualitative research, educational programming and assessment, management-assessment research , and reporting. These steps will be implemented in the Lakota Rosebud and Pine Ridge Nations, located in South Dakota. The project has been approved by the Rosebud Nation and UNL's IRB.
The first project stage will involve qualitative research with interviews and group discussions to support the development of culturally sensitive educational programming and reporting. This stage will build on research that we have been co-implementing with BNGA. We designed a survey of 27 questions focused on how Lakota land-users access and prioritize social-ecological relationships in NCR agroecosystems. We will be implementing the questionnaire this spring and summer.
The interview process will be implemented remotely and through four five-day visits to the community in year one. Such visits will be arranged by one of the co-PIs and members of the Nations (Table 1). Then, we will conduct four follow-up group discussions that will complement interview questions. The group discussions will explore the collective perspectives and priorities of scale (space and time), value, and sustainability of social-ecological relationships in NCR grasslands. The group discussions will also be implemented in year one (Table 2).
Table 1. Interview questions’ synthesis (not the actual questions) approved by the Rosebud Nation and UNL’s IRB.
|
How do Lakota land-users prioritize, access, manage, and conserve social-ecological relationships? |
|
How do social-ecological relationships impact each other and the sustainability of agroecosystems? |
|
How can social-ecological relationships and societal processes change to improve sustainability and what conditions would bring these changes? |
Table 2. Group discussion questions’ synthesis (not the actual questions) approved by the Rosebud Nation and UNL’s IRB.
|
How do societal processes impact Lakota land-user social-ecological relationships across time and space? |
|
How do land-use value social-ecological relationships? How would they like societal processes to change to support sustainable agroecosystems? |
The interviews will be recorded and digitally transcribed, and the group discussions will be annotated without any identifying information connected to them (Sweet, 2019). The interviews and group discussion transcripts will be coded and common concepts will be analyzed through reviewing the transcripts (Sweet, 2019; Hannah et al., 2020). Afterwards, we will review the transcripts again and conduct focused coding that identifies themes connecting to the research questions (Sweet, 2019). We will also map the themes of responses (of connections between social and ecological systems) that emerged from the group discussions (i.e., using word counting and wording pattern recognition algorithms; see an example in Figure 2). While the individual responses will guide the forms, emphases, and scope of education and outreach materials, the collective responses will help to build a cultural, conceptual representation of the past, present, and future of NCR grasslands. It will shed light on how Lakota land-users understand the social-ecological relationships and their geographical extent and temporal context. The products created from the workshops will integrate perspectives, messages, and images from and for the Lakota Nation.
Figure 2. Prototype of the Hydraulic Parameter Estimation Tool (HydraPET) is a program that handles detailed descriptions obtained from geologists’ borehole logs. It is a pattern-recognition algorithm that translates descriptions into a standard set of terms while providing estimates of physical properties of the soil. The purpose here is to use the algorithm and architecture of software in HydraPET to identify and analyze word patterns from the surveys. This will be a mechanism that secures the individual and collective identity of participants, creating aggregations or identifying emerging patterns (Rico, Korus, and Munoz-Arriola, in preparation).
The second stage will focus on collaborating with Lakota land-users to compile their individual and collective knowledge on their traditional social-ecological relationships to co-create an educational program. Co-creating refers to the collaboration between BNGA, UNL, ANIMO, and Lakota land-users to create educational programming. We will collaborate with local groups to develop educational lessons that support Indigenous people in connecting to their Indigenous social-ecological relationships and advancing their agroecosystem sustainability through cultural revitalization. This programming will also assist Lakota land-users in further understanding their cultural conceptualization of how their social and environmental relationships interact in their agroecosystem. We aim to work with land-users from various social and ecological groups in the Rosebud and Pine Ridge Nations, so their diverse perspectives and priorities can guide the project. Collaborating with them will ensure that the educational programming is culturally sensitive and relevant and that an Indigenous perspective guides it. We will implement four five-day workshops in year two to assist the community in sharing information across generations and building an understanding of social-ecological relationships. Building community is essential for connecting land-users to their ancestral traditions of interacting with and managing their agroecosystem.
A series of surveys will be conducted before and after the workshops to assess the learning impact of educational programming. These educational surveys will be employed in creating the outreach reports in the final project stage. For the qualitative analyses, several authors, surveying and evaluating small groups of stakeholders, suggest specific statistical tools that allow a more in-depth analysis, such as Cronbach's alpha for testing internal consistency and χ2 for testing independence (Mase et al., 2017; Mayer et al., 2017; Phadermrod et al., 2019; Topooco et al., 2017). There are two types of survey questions: Likert-scale (Mattel and Jacoby, 1971) and metric. The Likert-scale questions consist of eight five-point scale questions (ranging from 1 = Strongly agree/Yes/Very important to 5 = Strongly Disagree/No/Not at all important). The metric questions measure the views and expectations of stakeholders about sustainability today and in the future. Unanswered questions will be discarded from the description of results and removed from the statistical analysis.
The third project stage will entail management-assessment research focused on re-envisioning Indigenous social-ecological relationships and assessments for evaluating their impact on agroecosystem sustainability. We will organize four five-day workshops for land-users to envision how their Indigenous relationships can be adapted to their agroecosystem's current state, potentially through seasonal rounds. Our team will work with them to co-create a plan guided by Indigenous and Western science for implementing Indigenous social-ecological relationships and monitoring their impacts on the sustainability of their agroecosystems. We will work with people who participated in qualitative research, educational programming, and their networks throughout this project stage. The results from the management-assessment research will help further refine the educational programming and inform the outreach reports.
In the final project stage, we will use the results from the qualitative research, educational programming, and management-assessment research to develop outreach reports on the social-ecological relationships, barriers, and priorities of Lakota communities for advancing the sustainability of their agroecosystems. We will make three five-day trips to finalize co-creating these materials with Lakota land-users. The reports will identify the barriers, opportunities, and priorities for improving the sustainability of Native Nations and their NCR agroecosystems. We will share these reports with Indigenous and Western communities to support the advocacy of Indigenous priorities. Special reports will be created for the Native Nations that highlight Indigenous social-ecological relationships and visions for sustaining them. The reports will also contribute to informing BNGA programs that support sustainable Indigenous agriculture, local economies, and livelihoods in the NCR. Since governmental prescriptions exist to integrate Indigenous science into projects, our team plans to develop collaboration guides based on our efforts. We will outline equitable and ethical guidelines for Western stakeholders to conduct research and support agroecosystems that advance Indigenous priorities and resilience.
The recruitment for the group discussions, educational programming, and management-assessment stages will be coordinated by working with local organizations. Co-PIs Emily Boyd-Valandra and Monica Rattling-Hawk will lead the outreach of the project and recruitment of Lakota land-users in their Nations. Emily comes from the Sicangu Lakota Oyate at Rosebud, and Monica comes from the Oglala Lakota Oyate at Pine Ridge. They are contacting local organizations and groups that can assist with sharing recruitment information with their communities and collaborating on our different project stages. We also plan to conduct recruitment for the research and collaborative project stages at public and community events and meetings and through online advertisements.
Citations
Hanna et al. 2020. Eco. Serv. 43, 101119.
Jacoby and Matell, 1971. "Three-point Likert scales are good enough.": 495-500.
Mase et al. 2017. Clim. Risk Manag. 15, 8–17.
Mayer et al. 2017. Water Resour. Manag. 31, 4731–4744.
Phadermrod et al. 2019. Int. J. Inf. Manage. 44, 194–203.
Sweet. 2019. Ame. Soc. Rev. 84, 851-875.
Topooco et al. 2017. Internet Interv. 8, 1–9.
No results to be presented yet.
No conclusions reached yet.
Education
Our project is a collaborative effort that combines the personal experiences of community members and land users with the insights revealed by scientific and technological advancements in grasslands. Our project is a collaborative effort that combines the personal experiences of community members and land users with the insights revealed by scientific and technological advancements in grasslands. This unique approach allows us to co-develop educational products that not only educate but also celebrate people's deep connections with the grasslands. We will collect people's opinions in individual and collective forms to craft products useful for achieving grassland sustainability and land connections.
Project Activities
Educational & Outreach Activities
THIS IS NOT A FINAL REPORT
Participation Summary:
One of the activities collected information about grassland indigenous knowledge and education. While this activity was not proposed in the present project, it certainly informs us of how the activities we will be launching during the summer in Rosebud could enhance the collection, discussion, analysis, and creation of expressions that reflect people's connections with land for our group activities with land users.
THIS IS NOT A FINAL REPORT
Learning Outcomes
- Scale, agronomic, and land use
Project Outcomes
At this point we have not seen a change in practices. We expect to see educational products as indicators of commitment, engagement, and change.
A gathering with colleagues from Canada, Mexico, and the US, primarily members of a Grasslands' Indigenous group, welcomes people from North America's grasslands. We exchanged ideas and experiences, invigorating and highlighting our project's needs. Education, sustainability, grasslands, and people were at the center of all the conversations and started to delineate a pathway towards integrating grassland users across North America. We looked at the past and how grasslands and traditional agriculture have always been connected from the origin of Maize to an ecosystem that integrates our future and grasslands' sustainability. We will incorporate these experiences into our field activities and analyses, expecting to reconnect our connection with Mother Earth.
(NOT ready to be published).