Toward a Sovereignty-Driven Paradigm for Transdisciplinary Research on Social-Ecological Systems

Summary

In addition to substantive findings about changing relations between Jemez communities and forest ecologies, our multidisciplinary project is suggesting some promising strategies for enhancing research engagements with American Indian tribes. In spite of due diligence in consulting with Jemez Pueblo leaders in the course of project planning and in engaging Jemez people and interests in project processes, we are concerned that the project’s scientific contributions outweigh its beneficial effects on Jemez Pueblo and the forests it depends on. Because science seems less imperiled than Jemez Pueblo and Jemez forests, we are proposing a sovereignty-driven research paradigm as an alternative to science- or discipline-driven research. Investigative programs tailored to understand and fortify the five ‘pillars’ of sovereignty—self-sufficiency, self-determination, self-governance, self-representation, and peer-recognition—offer constructive and locally grounded complements to science in the extractive-consumptive colonialist tradition as well as to decolonizing reactions to that tradition. Sovereignty-driven research entails, first, the identification of a tribe’s (or other Native nation’s) sovereignty interests and goals then the formulation of research questions, methods, practices, and outcomes crafted specifically to advance those goals. Sovereignty-driven initiatives to understand and perpetuate vital and definitive links among people, territory, and cultural traditions define and require transdisciplinary research programs.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• Fire and Humans in Resilient Ecosystems in the American Southwest

Keywords

Spatial Coverage