University of Washington doctoral candidate Joyce LeCompte-Mastenbrook, supervised by Dr. Stevan Harrell, will undertake research on the relationship between indigenous traditional food movements using public lands and external management of those lands. Advocates for increasing use of traditional foods recognize a strong link between cultural disruption, alienation from the land, contemporary dietary practices, and high rates of metabolic diseases in Native communities. Devolution of decision-making within land management agencies appears to have fostered increasing collaborative and co-management agreements between tribes and public land managers on lands comprising treaty-reserved food gathering areas. The goal of this project is to understand the effects of cross-cultural collaborations between Native communities and land management agencies on the paradigms, policies, and practices of each.
The researcher will undertake 12 months of research among the Coast Salish tribes of Washington State and the federal land managers responsible for the lands being used by those tribes. The researcher will gather data with a mix of social science methods including participant observation; documentation of Coast Salish indigenous environmental knowledge; formal and informal interviewing; cultural domain analysis; Thematic Apperception Tests; and analysis of archival records. The research is important because it will contribute to theories of under what circumstances policies that promote cultural diversity are compatible with policies that promote biological diversity. Findings also will fill gaps in the ethnography of the Pacific Northwest Coast peoples. This award also supports cross-cultural collaborations and communication, and the education of a graduate student.
For ~4,000 years before the coming of white settlers, big huckleberry (Vaccinium membranaceum) was an important reason for Coast Salish people’s journeys to the mountains in late summer and early fall when the berries ripen. Today, the harvest and consumption of traditional plant foods like big huckleberry are increasingly recognized as crucial to addressing the many contemporary health problems facing Native communities. Public lands including those managed by the United States Forest Service (USFS) play an increasingly important role in providing these foods, yet throughout the plant’s range in the Pacific Northwest, forest policy is such that current land management strategies are focused on one kind of biodiversity at the expense of another ("old-growth" v. "early seral"), within the context of a poorly understood historical ecological dynamic and limited funding. Thus, tribal members are concerned about the effects of current land management practices on the productivity and accessibility of big huckleberry. I conducted field work with two federally recognized tribes and USFS staff in Washington State to better understand factors contributing to tribal members concerns about big huckleberry management, as well as the structural, institutional and epistemological factors that influence the outcomes of projects between each tribe and the USFS. My study focused particularly on barriers to the reintroduction of prescribed burning. While tribal members and some agency staff recognize that intentional burning of huckleberry habitats is a form of "traditional resource management" (TRM) historically practiced by tribes that is essential to the well-being of big huckleberry, prescribed burning for this purpose is rarely realized on public lands, even when there is a stated desire to do so. My data set includes field notes from ~70 participant-observation events related to tribal traditional foods, USFS-tribal interactions, and USFS sponsored events. I also conducted ~60 semi-structured interviews over the life of the project. Analytically, a political ecology lens through examines broader structural factors and power relations that may influence the outcomes of environmental decision-making and access to resources, while an ethnoecological lens offers insights into the ways in which different groups of people understand, value, and interact with non-human nature. The preliminary results of this project point to three broad categories of factors that influenced the outcomes of the two case studies: 1) shifting power dynamics between the USFS and tribes, 2) Specific histories of interaction between the USFS and tribes, and 3) mental models of the historical role of anthropogenic fire as a form of disturbance in west side forests. A combination of shrinking federal budgets and shifting societal values regarding the role of public lands have resulted in declines in forest management revenues, and thus an increasing interest on the part of federal land management agencies to seek out collaborative partnerships to achieve management goals. With the success both of tribal economic enterprises and landmark court cases such as the 1974 "Boldt" Decision, federally recognized tribes in the state of Washington have concurrently experienced a period of increasing political and economic power. This has led to an unprecedented openness on the part of land management agencies to collaborate with tribes on issues of mutual interest. In one of my case studies, these dynamics contributed to a strong collaborative partnership to address tribal concerns over big huckleberry. Although it was not ultimately utilized as a management tool (mechanical thinning of trees was used instead), the potential for prescribed burning was integrated into the planning process and ultimately the project’s implementation plan. In the other case study, the history of animosity and mistrust between some USFS staff and tribal members and staff contributed to the opposite outcome. Prescribed burning was not included in the project plan. Furthermore, no aspect of that plan has been implemented. Mental models on the west side of the Cascades tend to focus on the role of infrequent, catastrophic fires. There is little understanding or appreciation of the effects of smaller scale fires on the ecological composition and function of west side forests on the part of the majority of land managers and forest ecologists in the region. This is particularly true when it comes to the historical role of indigenous burning. In my first case study, USFS staff involved with these projects generally recognized the potential cultural and ecological benefits of reintroducing fire as a form of TRM to care for big huckleberry. In the latter project, more often than not, USFS staff tended to use the catastrophic fire model as a tool of power against the tribe, for instance by delegitimizing TRM and claims to deep-time connections to place. Ultimately the results of this project will make broader contributions to our understanding of cross-cultural collaborations in the context of natural resources management, food sovereignty, and processes of devolution more generally, as well as making a substantive contribution to Coast Salish ethnographies of the present.
