Outcomes of scientific studies such as Marks-Block’s often affirm what Native people already know from tradition and experience, but that doesn’t mean the studies aren’t useful, Tripp says.
“We knew what the outcome was going to be,” he says. “But nobody listens if it isn’t written down like that.”
Being able to cite scientific literature may be especially important as Indigenous groups push for more rights, especially on “ceded territories” they still claim but no longer own. For example, Karuks want more burning rights on Forest Service land, while neighboring Yuroks are pushing to co-manage and conduct controlled burns in Redwood National Park.
FTA: “After more than a century on their own, Indigenous-created forest gardens of the Pacific Northwest support more pollinators, more seed-eating animals and more plant species than the supposedly “natural” conifer forests surrounding them.
“When we look at forest gardens, they’re actually enhancing what nature does, making it much more resilient, much more biodiverse—and, oh yeah, they feed people too,” says Armstrong.
The paper may be the first to quantify how Indigenous land stewardship can enhance what ecologists call functional diversity—a measure of how many goods an ecosystem provides. It joins a growing scientific literature revealing that Indigenous people—both historically and today—often outperform government agencies and conservation organizations at supporting biodiversity, sequestering carbon, and generating other ecological benefits on their land. Leaving nature alone is not always the right course, scientists are finding—and the original land stewards often do it best.”
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“Western science for too long has embraced the idea of primordial wilderness,” says Jesse Miller, an ecologist at Stanford and Armstrong’s coauthor. “We’re seeing this paradigm shift to recognizing how much of what was thought of as primordial wilderness were actually landscapes shaped by humans.”
The forest gardens Armstrong studied once supplied Indigenous villages with food and medicine, including plants that had been imported from elsewhere. “Historically it was really important to have all the resources here,” says Willie Charlie, a former chief and current employee of the Sts’ailes Nation of the Coast Salish people. “If you had all that in your family, you were pretty self-sustaining.”
“People outside the tribal community tend to … think a lot of our positions are culturally based. But I would argue they tend to align much more with science than the non-tribal worldview,” says Peter David, a wildlife biologist for the Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission, which represents 11 Midwestern Ojibwe tribes.
Peter David, a wildlife biologist with the Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission, hanging out with some wild rice
“The tribal worldview says wolves ought to be able to establish their own population levels, and they do that at very low levels…it aligns much better with the science.”
Despite an increasing convergence between science and Indigenous knowledge, the academy still has work to do, too, says Waller. “I would like to see forestry schools routinely sending forestry students, for example, to Menominee Tribal Enterprises,” he says. “I would like to see ecologists have an option to take an ethnobotany or traditional ecological knowledge course.”“
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