Looming clouds gather in the arid desert. After several minutes of lightning and crackling thunder, abundant rain begins to fall. In traditional Navajo culture, this thunderstorm with torrential, unpredictable ‘monsoon’ rain is male rain. Female rain, on the other hand, is gentle, falling softly, signaling the beginning of spring with desert wildflowers blooming and baby wildlife. More than just good storytelling, the duality between masculine and feminine energy represents harmony and balance between two forces in nature. Oral traditions are passed down generation-to-generation, connecting indigenous culture with their sacred land, while also preserving their rituals, heritage, and customs.
Storytelling and other oral traditions preserve indigenous knowledge and honors the holistic relationship between Earth and its natural living beings. Indigenous knowledge contributes to our understanding of climate change, biodiversity, medicinal plants and many other things. The reluctance of Western science to recognize and acknowledge the important contribution of indigenous knowledge is slowly changing, resulting in the combined use of technology, science, tradition and culture to learn about and sustainably manage our natural world. NASA’s Indigenous Peoples Capacity Building Initiative assists Indigenous communities with managing their natural and cultural resources using geospatial technology.
“I have always been interested in teaching people how to use remote sensing technology in different cultural contexts with different knowledge systems"
Created three years ago by NASA Ames research scientist Dr. Cindy Schmidt, the Indigenous People’s Capacity Building Initiative is a resource to assist Indigenous communities’ use of satellite remote sensing for natural and cultural resource management. Schmidt – who also works as the Associate Program Manager for NASA’s Ecological Forecasting Program – originally conceptualized the Indigenous People’s Capacity Building Initiative from her previous work teaching remote sensing technology at local colleges and universities as well as mentoring Native American students in NASA internship programs.
While forming the Indigenous People’s Capacity Building Initiative, Schmidt and her colleague, Dr. Amber McCullum -- also a NASA Ames Research Scientist -- met with Indigenous leaders and discussed challenges tribal nations faced in managing their natural resources. They also witnessed first-hand the physical and spiritual importance of land to the people of the tribes who inhabited it - and how central it was to their lives. Schmidt and McCullum attended numerous on-site meetings with tribal officials including the Navajo Nation in Arizona, Samish Indian Nation in Washington State, and the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe in Michigan. During these trips, they grew to better understand the different needs, issues, and interests that were specific for each tribal nation, such as climate change, forestry, and resource management. These experiences resulted in the development of in-person training workshops to facilitate knowledge exchange between the Indigenous communities and NASA.
In addition to her work with the Initiative, McCullum works for multiple Applied Sciences and Capacity Building programs, including the Applied Remote Sensing Training Program (ARSET) and the Western Water Application Office (WWAO). Focusing on bridging communication channels between science and indigenous cultures has tremendeous value in earth science as a whole, she says.
“There is this large and important community here in the US that we often do not work closely with, and with NASA being a federal agency we need to focus on issues facing the people here at home,” said McCullum. “It was not until recently that I started to connect with the Indigenous community and saw value for including this holistic view of how we see the world as Earth scientists; there is a lot to be gained in these relationships with Indigenous individuals.”
Training Workshops
In creating training workshops, Schmidt saw a need to co-develop trainings that were unique to each Indigenous communities’ specific needs and histories, facilitating better connections between Indigenous users to their land.
“The idea was to create courses that were similar to other trainings, but to have in-person trainings with Indigenous groups creating exercises focused on their lands and their issues,” said McCullum. “However it is evolving to include indigenous voices in the larger global geospatial community with things like the Group on Earth Observations (GEO) - bringing these groups into the conversation to discuss their land and their importance.”
The Indigenous People’s Capacity Building Initiative uses maps and data from tribal lands to make their workshops more connected to Indigenous communities. The workshops also include time for indigenous participants to tell stories about their ancestral lands and the importance of the natural resources to their peoples. For example, the decline of sea kelp is reducing the population of important fish species for the Samish Indian Nation in the Pacific Northwest. The Samish Tribal Elders also noted that they could no longer find kelp leaves to wrap their salmon for ceremonial cooking. The workshops were then developed to meet the Samish Nation’s needs while also performing valuable research.
Group of participants who attended Samish Indian Nation remote sensing training (Dr. Cindy Schmidt third from right).
Credits: Amber McCullum
“Building the capacity of Indigenous Peoples to use remote sensing technology requires a different level of effort than just a standard remote sensing training or webinar that can be attended by anyone in the world. We try to be very flexible in terms of our training and match it to the tribe’s needs,” Schmidt noted.
In the case of the Sault Ste. Marie Chippewa Nation in northern Michigan, the tribe requested drone training. The tribe already employed a drone forest monitoring purpose - but lacked the skills to turn the data into relevant information. Through the Indigenous People’s Capacity Building Initiative, Schmidt brought in a professor from the University of Michigan to spend a day of drone training for members of the tribe.
“Establishing trust is key to working successfully with Indigenous communities,” said Schmidt. “We heard many stories about how researchers from universities or other organizations would claim to want to work with tribes but would conduct research on tribal lands and then leave without providing any information or benefit to those communities. Over time, the trust for working with non-Indigenous organizations eroded. That’s why it is absolutely necessary for us to co-develop trainings.”
“Having these relationships are so valuable, and there is real value in continuing them,” said McCullum. “Often times in Earth science there is a specific set of time to complete a project. When working with Indigenous communities, especially as someone from a federal agency, there needs to be a lot of time for setting up relationships and building trust and listening to the community. What we have tried to do is keep these connections through multiple projects. For the future what we want to achieve is to continue these projects.”
In addition to developing remote sensing trainings for the Indigenous Peoples Capacity Building Initiative, Amber McCullum leads an effort to develop a web-based drought reporting tool for the Navajo Nation.
Listen to the podcast with Dr. McCullum speaking about "Community-based Science and Capacity Building with NASA and the Navajo Nation"
The Drought Severity Evaluation Tool (DSET), is co-developed with the Navajo Nation Department of Water Resources, the Desert Research Institute, and NASA as part of the Western Water Applications Office (WWAO). This began as a NASA DEVELOP internship project, where the needs of the Navajo Nation for drought monitoring were discussed, and the relationships were established. The DSET is a user-friendly webtool designed to evaluate drought patterns using information collected from NASA satellites as well as ground-based precipitation totals collected by the Navajo Nation.
“We are co-developing this tool for the Navajo Nation and including them in the development stages: land data, land boundaries, and their feedback to what they need and want. This is a good lesson for how we can continue to work with Indigenous communities and engage with them during the feedback process. It is important for us as scientists to contextualize our work and understand how our work is important to the whole Earth system,” McCullum adds.
“During these times, we have to reflect on what we do not know - including our biases that we have collected throughout our life. This includes where we came from and how we speak to others. This engagement has led me to learning and listening experiences; growth. Going to these communities I am unfamiliar with - I have to recognize that. Spending time on the relationships is so valuable, as is visiting the tribal lands and their scientists and community members and how they view their issues and the world.”
One benefit the DSET aims to provide is the ability for the Navajo Nation to identify fast developing droughts. The DSET includes multiple drought indices such as the Evaporative Demand Drought Index (EDDI), which includes evaporative demand in addition to precipitation anomalies, which is a potential improvement over the currently used Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI). Therefore, with the addition of multiple drought metrics that are specific to the Navajo Nation’s boundaries, these rapidly developing droughts may be identified sooner in order to provide relief resources.
Capacity Building in a Post-COVID World
The DSET webtool is scheduled to be complete by August 2020. However, McCullum is hoping to continue working with the Navajo Nation through a focus on agricultural applications and consumptive water use using a newly developed tool called OpenET. Interpersonal relationships are key to the past and future success NASA’s work with Indigenous Peoples. Since the beginning of the COVID-19 epidemic, the Indigenous Peoples Capacity Building Initiative has been unable to hold in-person training workshops, adding an additional difficulty for an effort that relies on personal connections. However, Schmidt and McCullum are working on publishing the courses online in the form of remote lectures and hands-on exercises. All training materials, exercises, and related topics will be posted on their website for easy access.
“Engaging with the Navajo Nation and other Indigenous communities allows us (NASA) to see all the aspects of our Earth system as connected. To more appropriately include Indigenous Knowledge Systems into our understanding of science is really invaluable to all Earth scientists, especially at NASA. NASA has a lot to gain by including Indigenous scholars in the conversation of science and how we do our work,” McCullum states.
Schmidt also plans to offer these in-person trainings through the United Tribes Technical College in North Dakota where participants can earn continuing education credits (CEUs). These classes are unique in that each course will focus on Indigenous lands from a different part of the country - the Samish from the Pacific Northwest, the Navajo in the southwest, and the Sault Ste. Marie in northern Michigan. For these trainings, Schmidt also hopes to open each session with words from a tribal member from that region to discuss the importance of the natural resources on their land - and how remote sensing can allow them to manage those resources.
Schmidt notes that it ties more to the tribes, as opposed to being generic, making it directly relatable to the tribes, communicating in their language and honoring their customs. Providing these training workshops in person or online is important but there are several challenges to overcome. Unreliable access to the internet and/or computer technology is common, particularly outside the United States. It is also important for us to understand Indigenous data privacy and data sovereignty issues based on their inherent rights to govern their own peoples, lands and resources.
“In the future my hope is Indigenous peoples will have equal access to technology as well as the capabilities to utilize and control their own data,” said Schmidt. “Our job now is to provide the knowledge and skills needed for Indigenous communities to turn freely available NASA data to information that is important to those communities.”
Authors: Luke Gezovich and Kassie Perlongo
Last Updated: July 23, 2020
Editor: Kassie Perlongo
No hay comentarios:
Publicar un comentario