Karuk Tribe and SW CASC Fellows Share Successes of Collaborative Research Process

New research from the Karuk Tribe Department of Natural Resources (DNR) and Southwest Climate Adaptation Science Center fellows and investigators explores Indigenous research sovereignty and lessons learned in the creation of the collaborative podcast Intentional Fire. Recently published in Environment and Planning F: Philosophy, Theory, Models, Methods and Practice, “Stories as data: Indigenous research sovereignty and the “Intentional Fire” podcast” discusses the collaborators’ process of creating a collaborative product which presents stories as data in a way that respects and upholds Indigenous research sovereignty. 

The collaboration between the SW CASC 2020-2021 Natural Resource Workforce Development (NRWD) Fellows and the Karuk Tribe DNR was built on an agreed-upon ethical framework and, “a research process that reflected lessons from Indigenous Storywork, institutional research protocols, and principles of ethical and collaborative research.” The authors illustrate the research process as a campfire with each element representing a different aspect of the collaboration, such as a fire ring foundation representing research governance and the logs representing the collaborative research process. This campfire model resulted in amplified knowledge and growth in relationships with partners and fire. The stories shared, also known as Indigenous Storywork, are important data for climate adaptation planning and the collaborators aim “to contribute to knowledge about Indigenous research sovereignty by providing an example of how collaborative processes between universities and Tribal Nations can amplify knowledge production by Indigenous people in their own words.”