A northern flicker alert within some foliage. Ubiquitous throughout most of North America, much of the public is unfamiliar with this feathered neighbor – a relation waiting to be tended to. Photo credit: Jonathan Fisk

By Jonathan James Fisk, Richard E.W. Berl, Jonathan Long, Lara Jacobs, Lily van Eeden, Melinda M. Adams, Álvaro Fernández-Llamazares, Jazmin Murphy, Michael Gavin, Christopher K. Williams, Jonathan Salerno, Bas Verschuuren, Nathan Bennett, Rodrigue Idohou, and Alexander Mawyer.

Read the full paper here.

There is increasing interest in meaningfully engaging with Indigenous Knowledges and supporting Indigenous lifeways within natural resource management, but efforts are often limited by cultural frictions and incompatibilities between natural resource management institutional cultures and Indigenous cultures.

In this paper we draw from our professional and lived experiences as natural resource management scholars and practitioners, some of whom are Indigenous, and bring together scholarship from a variety of disciplines, particularly works by Indigenous scholars. In doing so, we explore the cultural foundations and dynamics of natural resource management institutions in North America and how certain actions can be taken to better support Indigenous Knowledges and practices.

In North America, histories of colonialism, views that people rightfully dominate over nature, and values that prioritize extraction of natural resources and capitalistic economic growth highly shape the cultures of natural resource management institutions.

This sharply contrasts many Indigenous cultures that emphasize genealogical interconnectedness and interdependence with the environment and a communal responsibility to care for the land and sea for the well-being of the full social-ecological system, for present and future generations.

In addition to contributing to the criminalization of Indigenous practices, the invalidation of Indigenous Knowledges, and the disruption of Indigenous relations with place, these cultural frictions have also fostered natural resource management approaches that are less effective at ensuring the abundance and resilience of social-ecological systems as well as management processes and policies that frequently lead to conflicts and feelings of distrust and disenfranchisement by communities.

Some key steps natural resource management institutions can take to work toward transforming internal cultures are: 1) increasing the degree to which communities, especially Indigenous Peoples, have power within management processes and the ability to shape local levels of institutions to better align culturally; 2) improve how institutions do research, centering community priorities and expertise often undervalued by institutions, such as Indigenous cultural practitioners, to build reciprocal relations and work for the shared benefit of all; 3) facilitate the assessment and alignment of institutional cultures with Indigenous cultures through cultural evaluations that can be conducted internally as acts of reflection and through community-guided efforts.