Abstract

This chapter tells the story of our project, Transdisciplinary Engagements with Contemporary Indigenous Thinkers. It shares the work of an interdisciplinary team of faculty, assembled across three campuses in the University of Minnesota (UMN) system, united by a desire to see our work better informed by the work of Indigenous thinkers. The team included David Syring (Professor of Anthropology, Dept. of Studies in Justice, Culture, & Social Change) and Jennifer Liang (Professor, Dept. of Biology), both from the University of Minnesota Duluth (UMD); Peter Murdock Levin (a then doctoral student affiliated with the Institute on the Environment) from the University of Minnesota Twin Cities (UMTC); and Katy Chapman (Associate Professor, Math, Science & Technology Department and Sustainability Coordinator) from the University of Minnesota Crookston (UMC). Together, the team represented the largest campus in the system (a campus of more than 49,000 students, in Minneapolis) and one of the smallest (a campus of roughly 2,000 students, in Crookston). It included social scientists, humanities scholars, environmental scientists, and environmental educators – each of whom discovered the important possibilities of Indigenous thought for their own work in unique ways. The project served the entire UMN system, which is composed of five campuses and approximately 68,000 students.

 A working definition of Indigenous science is that body of traditional environmental and cultural knowledge that is unique to a group of people and that has served to sustain those people through generations of living within a distinct bio-region. This is founded on a body of practical environmental knowledge learned and transferred through generations through a form of environmental education unique to them … communication and exchange of Native science occurred through ceremonies, customs, oral histories, traditions, and stories; classifications and nomenclature; knowledge of landscape; knowledge of animals, plants, climates, and seasons; everyday discourse and oratory; dreams and visions; trade.

–Gregory Cajete, Native Science: Natural Laws of Interdependence, pp. 268–69 (2000 )

A person seems so small, while outside them is the river, the mountain, the forest of fern and tree, the desert with its lizards, the glacial melting and freezing and the movement of all life. All this defines our own place in this world. The cure for soul loss is in the mist of morning, the grass that grew a little through the night, the first warmth of this morning’s sunlight, and the human walking in a world infused with intelligence and spirit.

–Linda Hogan, The Radiant Life of Animals, p. xii (2020)

Introduction

This project was an act of catalytic listening. Our team members are united by a commitment to addressing a fundamental problem in the university today: over the last several decades, it has become clear that compartmentalized thinking has created numerous global problems — including racism, climate change, inequality, environmental destruction, and more — and cannot serve us in creating positive change to address pressing issues (Russell 2011).

By engaging Indigenous knowledge experts across a range of disciplines, we hope to transform the ways in which we do natural science, social science, engineering, arts, and humanities work in university contexts. Through constellating a Learning Community and engagements with Indigenous thinkers, we seek to move educational and disciplinary practices to embrace the profound knowledge and work of Indigenous scholars, artists, and researchers whose contributions are often ignored in academic disciplines. We think we succeeded, and we were thrilled, too, to see some concrete changes in the practices of our departments and campuses.

Our intention is to learn from Indigenous thinkers who have never followed the boundary setting that has largely defined academic study. The holistic thinking of the Indigenous writers/thinkers we engaged is essential to addressing the fragmentation that has led our local, national, and global communities into the interlocked environmental, social, and political dilemmas of the 21st century. In initiating this collaborative, we created an invitational space not confined by traditional academic disciplinary concerns, nor accepting of conventional definitions of who has institutional authority.

We would like to share each of our “origin stories” for initiating this collaboration, then discuss what we have done thus far. We will conclude by pointing to future directions for opening our work at the university to ongoing engagement with the work of Indigenous thinkers.

David’s Origin Story for Pursuing This Project

In mid-November 2020, I lay by the fireplace of a borrowed cabin exhausted by a semester leading virtual classes. Sharing the process of critical and creative thinking with students fuels my teaching and brings me professional focus and joy. But that had all wavered, just as focus and joy wavered for the entire world caught in the suffering and uncertainty wrought by the pandemic.

I sought solace in favorite poems in Linda Hogan’s Dark. Sweet.: New & Selected Poems (2014). I have read Hogan’s stunning work for decades. Her novel, Solar Storms (1997), was a staple in my Landscapes and Environments course, and a student once told me, “I could not stop reading this book. It’s the first book I’ve read to the end since sixth grade.”

I read Hogan’s poetry out loud, and said to the quiet room, “If the whole world is now on video calls, maybe Linda is participating in virtual events?” I located an email address that I assumed was her agent’s and wrote about wanting to invite her to a semester-long virtual engagement with our campus community.

Thinking a response would take weeks, I was stunned when, within half an hour, I received a welcoming message from Linda herself. She was, indeed, doing virtual events, and said that the timing was excellent for conversations about Indigenous perspectives on science and environmental knowledge. She had recently published a poetry collection (A History of Kindness, 2020) and a collection of poems and essays (The Radiant Lives of Animals, 2020) focused on insights from her deep dwelling in a Colorado wildlife corridor. She was working on an article challenging conventional thinking about John Muir, often lauded as an originator of the modern environmental movement, but considered by Indigenous thinkers to have rejected Indigenous presence on the land.

Determined to make meaningful connections in the face of the pandemic’s isolation, I rallied resources from the Institute for Advanced Study; UMD’s University for Seniors; the Campus Research, Scholarship, and Creative Activities (RSCA) Committee; and my home department. I organized a series of meetings with Linda that included students, staff, and faculty. Linda capped these engagements with a public online reading and a conversation facilitated by UMD Professor of American Indian Studies, Dr. Linda LeGarde Grover, an accomplished Anishinaabe poet, novelist, and essayist. More than 200 people tuned in.

This virtual engagement kept my energy and passion for ideas alive in the darkest times of the pandemic, and I realized that this could be a model to shift how my academic community engages with the work of Indigenous thinkers. I reached out to Dr. Jennifer Liang, who served on the RSCA committee and had enthusiastically engaged with Linda and her work. I also reached out to Dr. Katy Chapman, a fellow Sustainability Educator for the Institute on the Environment (IonE). We had worked together on a UMN system-wide Sustainability Summit using virtual tools, even before they became a lifeline during the pandemic.

The three of us, along with Peter Murdock Levin, who, as a graduate assistant for IonE, had been essential in creating that summit, formed the nucleus of a group to organize the year-long Transdisciplinary Engagements with Indigenous Thinkers series described below.

Katy’s Origin Story for Pursuing This Project

During COVID, the Crookston campus was responsible for hosting the Student Engagement Leadership Forum, or SELF-Sustain. Through my connections with the Sustainability group across the five UMN campuses, I had learned about the memo sent to UMN from the Minnesota Indian Affairs Council, seeking action to address exploitation of American Indian Nations and People. Since equity is at the center of sustainability thinking, but had not yet been a focus of the forum, we decided to use SELF-Sustain to explore the relationship between Sustainability and Indigeneity.

We broke the event into two smaller Zoom sessions. The first was led by three graduate students who had worked as interns with the Minnesota Indian Affairs Council when the memo was drafted. These students led us in learning about treaties, thinking about how native nations were stewards of the land prior to colonization, and exploring how land grant universities like UMN had acquired their wealth.

Dr. Anton Treuer, an Ojibwe scholar and author, hosted the second Zoom session. We read one of his books in preparation for his lecture, “Everything You Wanted to Know about Indians But Were Afraid to Ask” (Treuer 2012). Together, the book and lecture revealed many concepts previously unknown to me, and had me deeply reflecting on the intersection between Indigeneity and Sustainability. There was so much to learn! We made these Zoom sessions open to the UMN system, and David Syring, one of my co-authors and an IonE educator-colleague, reached out with the idea of engaging with Indigenous thinkers across a range of disciples to transform the ways in which we think about and do natural sciences, social sciences, engineering, arts and humanities. This idea was exciting, and I couldn’t wait to explore and learn more from Indigenous thinkers. This also led to me to co-teaching a special topics course on my campus entitled Indigeneity and Sustainability.

Jennifer’s Origin Story for Pursuing This Project

When this project began, I was Director of UMN’s Integrated Biosciences Graduate Program (IBS). In this program, students working in diverse fields of biology, from those designing new cancer drugs to those working on global change, share the same classroom, which challenges them to find a common ground and common language. I was inspired by the IBS graduate students and their commitment to breaking down barriers. In particular, they are committed to finding ways to share the importance of their science not only with one another, but with their community and the world. The miscommunication about the COVID-19 virus and the subsequent vaccines underlined the importance of scientists being able to explain their work to anyone, not just those with expertise in the field.

This project offered the opportunity to take to a new level the goal of breaking down barriers. Along with most science graduate programs, IBS works from a point of view that is centered in Western science and rooted in the scientific method, with little or no acknowledgment that there are other ways to learn about the natural world. From what little I knew about Indigenous knowledge, it was very different, with humans integrated into the natural world instead of seeing ourselves as outside observers. I was excited to learn more about Indigenous perspectives and how they could be brought into our graduate programs. And I thought it could be particularly impactful, given that the region of northern Minnesota where we live has many Indigenous people as well as Tribal lands belonging to the Ojibwe/Chippewa people. Bringing Indigenous ideas into our graduate program would give us an even stronger connection to this special place, challenge us to view our science from new perspectives, and proide new ways to connect to and communicate with the people in our community.

My chance to participate in this project was pure luck. I was fortunate to be on the RSCA committee with David, where he heard me bragging about our graduate students. He thoughtfully included me in Linda Hogan’s virtual visits and ultimately in this larger project, bringing in Indigenous thinkers whose work defies the existence of boundaries.

Contexts of the Transdisciplinary Engagements Project

I think about the word, animism, and what this newly accepted area of study means to those of us whose cognitive and spiritual worlds are already created by our rivers, mountains and forests. For those who have always prayed with, to, and for the waters, and known our intimate relatives, the plant people, the animals, insects, and all our special relations, the field of animism is a belated study. It has not gone unnoticed that without these relationships, a great pain and absence has been suffered by humanity, an absence and loss we ourselves have felt as a result of the determinations of the Western mind to separate us from our homelands, and which has created great destruction to the living body of the continent.

–Linda Hogan, “We Call It Tradition” (2013)

In the past decade, scientific studies have repeatedly affirmed the knowledges of Indigenous cultures. From understanding forest fire dynamics (Greshko 2018), to oral histories that accurately convey information about earthquakes and tsunamis occurring hundreds of years ago (“Native American Stories Overview,” n.d.), to stories that reference understanding of land formations tens of thousands of years in the past when sea levels were far different than they are now (Upton 2015), and much more, Indigenous communities and individuals know things about which contemporary science, with its slow and methodical ways, is only now learning.

Indigenous community members and knowledge keepers have been speaking generously, firmly, and knowledgeably, unheeded by settler-colonial societies, for generations.

The Anishinaabe creation story identifies humans as the younger siblings of many other realms of being (Geniusz 2015). According to this story, humans were created last and are most vulnerable compared to our relatives, including minerals, plants, and animals. Refusing to acknowledge this vulnerability creates peril for our collective existence, as long emphasized in the stories and knowledge of many Indigenous nations and indicated by recent scientific findings related to climate change, cascading extinctions, social malaise grounded in economic inequality, and more. Dominant cultures have ignored the feedback loops to which Indigenous communities have long paid heed. It is long past time for people and institutions in dominant positions in the current global system to pay attention.

In The End of the Cognitive Empire: The Coming Age of Epistemologies of the South (2018), Boaventura de Sousa Santos argues that knowledge systems rooted primarily in a dominant U.S./Eurocentric epistemic vision fuel much academic work and modern life. Santos describes what he calls epistemologies of the South, ways of knowing that emerge from locations away from centers of intellectual and geopolitical dominance, and which trace their origins to struggles of resistance against oppression. Our project attempts to contribute to the heavy lift of shifting our epistemologies, our ways of knowing, away from dominant approaches that have wrought so much devastation on the world.

The Mechanics of the Transdisciplinary Engagements Project

The Transdisciplinary Engagements with Contemporary Indigenous Thinkers project was funded by the UMN’s Institute for Advanced Study (IAS). As a University-wide interdisciplinary center, the IAS is a resource for scholars, artists, professionals, and students who are engaged in a wide variety of study and practice. As a place where people meet and ideas are exchanged, the IAS also serves as a bridge between the University and the wider community.

The IAS offers funding for interdisciplinary collaboration. Our budget devoted $10,000 for honoraria for 4–8 speakers/engaged experts, who gave public presentations and connected with small groups (including classes and a Learning Community we created). Additionally, we budgeted $2,000 for books by our featured speakers to distribute to participants, for posters and ads announcing public events, and for technology support (see References for reading ideas).

We secured additional funding from numerous university offices, including the UMC Office of Sustainability, the UMD Overman Lecture Fund, the UMD University for Seniors Program, the UMD Department of American Indian Studies, the UMD Department of Biology, the UMN Integrated Biosciences Graduate Program (IBS), and the UMD Department of Studies in Justice, Culture, & Social Change.

The project included engagements with the work of the following thinkers:

• Linda Hogan (Chickasaw poet, novelist, and essayist)
• Vern Northrup (Northern Minnesota Anishinaabe artist and wildlands firefighter)
• Melissa Nelson (Anishinaabe (Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians)/Metis/Norwegian ecologist)
• Rowen White (Mohawk/Akwesasne activist and seedkeeper)
• Gwen Westerman (Sisseton Wahpeton Dakota Oyate and Cherokee Nation poet, artist, and historian)
• Robin Wall Kimmerer (Potawatami botanist and writer)

We focused on engaging contemporary Indigenous thinkers to explore how Indigenous thought can be made more central to education and research. Our goal was to make this approach inclusive of diverse perspectives, and to influence thinking on a wide range of topics, from how research and education are carried out to who benefits and participates.

Accounts of the Transdisciplinary Engagements

Our collaborative hosted five Indigenous speakers through virtual events. In addition, David served as the chief campus host for a virtual visit by Robin Wall Kimmerer that was funded by the UMD Overman Lecture Fund. We briefly discuss each below.

Linda Hogan: A Semester-Long Conversation

Sixteen faculty met with Linda in small groups via Zoom to hear about her work, connect with one another, and discuss readings.  Virtual visits with small groups by Linda Hogan were followed by a public reading and conversation with Linda LeGarde Grover.  200+ people attended the virtual public reading and conversation.

As David describes above, Linda Hogan’s generous wisdom started this collaboration. One of our intentions has been adequately to compensate our featured speakers for their time. Too often, the university expects community members to contribute their knowledge for little to no compensation, continuing exactly the kind of colonial appropriation we are seeking to challenge. After the initial email exchange with Linda, David connected with members of the UMD Research, Scholarship, and Creative Activity committee to secure funding. Dr. Erik Brown (Associate Vice Chancellor for Graduate Education and Research) provided steadfast encouragement for the project, and also suggested several other sources for funding.

Our meetings with Linda focused on hearing about her recent publications, especially her essay/poetry collection The Radiant Lives of Animals (2020) and poetry collection A History of Kindness (2020). We purchased copies of each of these books for participants in the small group discussions, and each session provided a lively exchange of ideas.

The topics we covered in these conversations included:

• How archaeological research frequently ignores Indigenous stories and knowledge in the analysis of objects. Linda gave the example of archeologists observing an artistic motif of a person carrying a head in their hands, and interpreting it as evidence of a practice of beheading. She suggested that paying attention to stories told by the communities from which such art comes might lead archeologists to instead understand that motif as a symbol of going in search of a father or a father’s knowledge to replant him so that his knowledge would grow again.
• How ecosystems science constructs its subject matter and approaches its topics of study, especially how scientists are trained not to acknowledge the beauty they observe in the organisms and systems they study. Linda’s work inspires possibilities for understanding how storytelling can be integrated into scientific knowledge. This conversation examined how the tendency in Settler-Colonial societies to prioritize human models of intelligence as “better than” other kinds of intelligence in nature reinforces an epistemological error. The ranking of types of beings in a hierarchical structure, with humans at the top, creates poor policies related to the ecosystems we are part of, to the peril of all. Linda’s work has always centered the understanding that while different beings (plants, animals, humans) have different consciousnesses, we are all bound together. We discussed ways in which integrated bioscience has begun to shift towards seeing connections and commonalities across species rather than seeking always to isolate and separate organisms.
• The structural barriers in education that can discourage Indigenous young people from pursuing learning and careers in the sciences. This conversation revolved around how to cultivate imagination that transcends conventional boundaries between scientific and artistically driven inquiry. One key concept was the idea of building educational experiences that pose questions that cannot be answered with simple reference to single disciplines.
• The idea, highlighted by Linda, that in many Indigenous communities knowledge is based on careful observation of the beauty and the destruction that unfolds in complex ways as natural systems develop and change, and as humans intercede. Linda discussed the example of John Muir, whose work in Settler-Colonial contexts is held up as an example of conservation. She highlighted how his work actually led to the destruction of ecosystems, in part due to his advocacy for the removal of Indigenous communities from lands they had lived on and managed for millennia. Linda’s discussion stemmed from her own research, described in her essay “On John Muir,” written at the invitation of Muir College at the University of California San Diego. In it, she observes, “Romanticizing forests, perhaps even the animal inhabitants of his valued California, he failed to see the people as having an equal place. To him they were not true inhabitants, were ugly, and not a part of the forest, as if the people were trespassers in what had been their homes” (n.d., personal document). This separation of wilderness and humans continues to dominate modern conservation practices.

Linda’s insights left members of our university community with much to think about regarding how we must break out of the conventional silos of our disciplines to build transdisciplinary knowledge on important topics such as water, environmental stewardship, community engagement, and inequality.

During the public reading and conversation between Linda Hogan and Linda LeGarde Grover, a broader audience heard her read from The Radiant Lives of Animals (2020) as well as her poetry.

Vern Northrup: “Akinomaage: Learning from the Earth” (January 20, 2022)

Our collaborative sponsored a virtual talk by Vern Northrup with follow-up small group discussions.140 people pre-registered for the event, 91 attended day of event, 20 additional video views following.

As a result of the IAS collaborative, we invited Vern Northrop (as well as Gabe Desrosiers, Lecturer of Anishinaabe Language and Culture, UMM) to share with SELF-Sustain students his perspectives on the deep relationship between language and the changing of seasons. Students then participated in an outdoor event on their respective campuses, and in discussions reflected on what they heard during the virtual events.

As part of the Learning Communities Initiative following Vern’s talk, we distributed copies of his book, Akinomaage: Teachings from the Earth (2020), and Vern joined groups totaling about 15 faculty, staff, and students from across the UMN system for virtual conversations.

After our engagement with Linda Hogan, we opened our expanded series with Vern Northrup to squarely center our work of engagement with a Minnesota Indigenous artist and thinker. Vern, a member of the Fond du Lac Band of Anishinaabe people, is an artist, visual storyteller, and community leader, and has served the Anishinaabe community and beyond in many profound ways.

Vern served in the U.S. Marines, enlisting at age 17. He later worked as a letter carrier and began seasonal work as a firefighter, which led to a firefighting career of more than two decades. As a wildlands firefighter he organized and led teams of firefighters throughout the United States; trained firefighters throughout Indian Country, including on the Seminole, Zuni, and Blackfeet reservations; and taught hundreds of firefighters in Minnesota.

Vern retired from firefighting in 2011. He began taking photographs on his smartphone as a way to document what he identifies as “what the Creator lets us see,” and has exhibited his photographs throughout the state and internationally. In 2019, the Duluth Art Institute published its first book, a collection of Vern’s photos and insights titled Akinomaage: Teachings from the Earth. In the book’s introduction, Dr. Linda LeGarde Grover — Bois Forte Anishinaabe citizen, Minnesota Book Award winning essayist, poet, and novelist, and retired professor of American Indian Studies from UMD — writes:

Northrup’s photos draw the viewer into the visual beauty of plants and medicines, and water, stones and fire. Then the timelessness and life presence integral to Anishinaabe spirituality emerge…human interactions with the natural world demonstrate the gaining of knowledge through hands-on, physical activity such as wild ricing, maple sugaring, and care for resources through harvesting and management that is grounded in that philosophy and knowledge.

A podcast interview (2020) with Northrup is available on the Ampers independent radio network website.

Vern gave a virtual public talk and slide show in January 2022. We followed this event with two smaller virtual meetups where faculty and staff who had received copies of Akinomaage and heard Vern speak had the opportunity to talk with him about firelands management, photography, and how Vern approaches his art.

Two Events Featuring Melissa Nelson

Dr. Melissa Nelson is Anishinaabe/Metis/Norwegian and a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians. She is a Professor of Indigenous Sustainability at Arizona State University, and has published widely on traditional ecological thinking and Indigenous language, culture, and women’s role in our landscapes. She has also edited a number of books, including What Kind of Ancestor Do You Want to Be? (Hausdoerffer et al. 2021), Traditional Ecological Knowledge (Nelson and Shilling 2018), and Original Instructions: Indigenous Teachings for a Sustainable Future (Nelson 2008). In addition to her written contributions, there are many online videos of Dr. Nelson giving talks related to her work.

“Medicine Lines & Polycultures: Re-animating Science through Biocultural Restoration” (February 3, 2022)

We hosted a virtual talk by Melissa Nelson.  Exact numbers of attendees are unavailable, though preregistration was about 70, and in-person attendees on the Crookston campus participated as part of the campus’ regular semester seminar series. The recorded video had 21 additional views on our Canvas learning community site.

In her first talk, designed for a broad audience, Dr. Nelson introduced the idea of biocultural diversity, and looked at how culture, landscapes, and ecology are intertwined. A central theme was boundaries — how they can keep things apart but also be permeable, allowing ideas and items to cross and be shared. Among many examples was the Medicine Line, which lies on the 49th parallel and divides the northern United States and Canada. The Medicine Line was often ignored by Indigenous people, who saw it as an artificial divide introduced by colonists. The Medicine Line could, however, provide a refuge, as Indigenous people could evade authorities by moving to the other side of this boundary.

Dr. Nelson advocated for boundaries being crossed or eroded. She gave many examples of how breaking boundaries could enrich our lives and help us create a more sustainable system of preserving the earth’s ecosystems, discussing, for example, replacing the prominent agricultural practices of monocultures with polycultures. Monocultures have caused many disturbances to ecosystems, including loss of pollinators and biodiversity. In Minnesota, and example of polycultural agriculture is the common Indigenous practice of growing squash, climbing beans, and corn/maize — the three sisters — together. Squash covers the ground with broad leaf cover, providing a barrier to evaporation and predators (deer, especially, do not like to walk through the vines), while beans fix nitrogen, enhancing the quality of the soil, and corn provides a natural trellis for the beans to climb.

Dr. Nelson also suggested that we broaden the definition of science. She introduced the idea of “seeing with two eyes,” in which the natural world is understood and explored by taking the best from both Western and Indigenous science. Mi’kmaq elders Albert and Murdena Marshall from Eskasoni First Nation first proposed the “Two-Eyed Seeing” model as they worked with biology professor Cheryl Bartlett (Wright, et al. 2019). While the central ideas of Western approaches to science are relatively easy to define, and include the use of the scientific method and emphasis on a detached, neutral approach, Indigenous science is rooted in many different cultures. In spite of this complexity, a group of Indigenous thinkers came together to write an “Indigenous Science Statement” in support of the inaugural March for Science in 2017. Dr. Nelson signed this statement, which reinforces a central idea that permeated her talk. She expressed this idea with the Anishinaabe word “Mino-bomaadaziwin.” While there is no direct English translation, Dr. Nelson defined Mino-bomaadaziwin as “living a life that is good for all living things.”

“Indigenous Peoples, Environmental Justice, and Planetary Health: Restoring our Waters and Lands” (February 4, 2022)

Dr. Nelson gave her second talk to the UMD Departments of Biology and Chemistry & Biochemistry as part of their regular seminar series. This was presented virtually as a webinar. 184 people preregistered. In addition, an unknown number attended the webinar in person in a classroom on the UMD campus.

This talk, aimed at scientists trained in the Western tradition, was both a call to action and a discussion of how scientists with different points of view and backgrounds can work together to solve ecological problems. Dr. Nelson discussed the key example of the reclamation of land damaged by toxic chemicals and the need for Environmental Justice (Welch 2021) — issues especially important for those living on tribal lands. She shared that while Indigenous people comprise approximately 5% of the world’s population, the lands they steward contain 80% of the world’s biodiversity. because governments and corporations have exported their toxic waste disproportionately to these lands, reclamation of Indigenous lands is of critical importance.

As an  example of how people from different scientific cultures can work together, Nelson described efforts to use sunflowers to remove uranium from the lands of the Naabeehó Bináhásdzo/Navaho Nation (Webber et al. 2021). The biology and biochemistry of living things is complex, and although sunflowers and their associated organisms effectively remove uranium when grown hydroponically in laboratory experiments (Dhiman et al. 2017; Lee and Yang 2010), collaborative experiments done by Diné high school students, undergraduate students, and senior scientists at nearby universities, using plants grown on Diné lands, failed to significantly affect uranium levels (Webber et al. 2021). More work is needed to continue these challenging, high-potential experiments.

After both talks, the question period generated rich discussions, and many attendees at the second talk asked Dr. Nelson for advice. Her answers continued the theme of breaking down barriers and boundaries that wove through both of her presentations. She encouraged everyone to develop collaborations with local Indigenous people, and to begin integrating Indigenous knowledge into their scholarship and broadening their scientific perspectives. In response to a graduate student’s question about how to contribute to a more sustainable future, Dr. Nelson answered in part, “It’s a slow process, which can be frustrating because the house is on fire … There are a lot of issues at hand so it’s a complex issue that has urgency, but I would say, find something that you’re passionate about where you can make a difference in transitioning at least one chemical or one process … It is really important, so keep the faith, stay hopeful, and know that you can make a difference. It takes just one person, one invention, one chemical at a time.”

Rowen White: “Rematriation: Re-storying the Land and Centering Indigenous Relationships and Leadership” (April 22, 2022)

We hosted a virtual talk by Rowen White, with additional discussion with Rebecca Webster (Oneida Seedkeeper and UMD Associate Professor of American Indian Studies).  195 people pre-registered for the event, 102 attended day of event, 15 additional video views following the live event.

This event offered a rich introduction to the work of Rowen White, founder of Sierra Seeds and the Indigenous Seedkeepers Network. Rowen writes a regular blog, “Seed Songs,” focused on “weaving stories of seeds, food, culture and sacred Earth stewardship.”

Dr. Becky Webster, a UMD faculty member in American Indian Studies, served as facilitator of the conversation. Dr. Webster is herself a seedkeeper, and she and Rowan White have worked together in many different capacities, some of which they discussed during the event.

The wide-ranging discussion included critical commentary on the problematic nature of Land Acknowledgements, which some institutions think are sufficient in themselves for addressing the harms to Native communities that have resulted from biased educational systems and the taking of land.

Rowen discussed the necessity for “rematriation” of Indigenous culture, land, knowledge, and more. Rematriation refers to work led by Indigenous women to restore relationships between Indigenous peoples and their ancestral lands. Rowen’s work has centered on seed and land rematriation, and she emphasized that this work also includes rematriation of ancestral remains, water, access to routes of kinship connections, resources, and wealth, all of which have been disrupted by Settler-Colonial societies. She pointed out that rematriation work is rooted in both collective and individual healing from the historical traumas of colonialism and diaspora.

She discussed how the “cultural insanity” that shapes grief and anger in the contemporary moment is driven by forces of diaspora that have severed and continue to sever people’s connections to their lands and cultural knowledge. Rowen’s parents and grandparents were all victims of the assimilation policies of the past centuries, including being taken away from their home communities to be forced into residential schools. She calls rematriation work, “A love poem to our ancestors.” She said:

I say to them, your hands planted seeds and you harvested foods and you prepared meals from what was on hand and you swaddled babies and you fixed fences and you delighted in births and wept at passings, and so I am thankful as a descendant for all the memories that have been passed down into my rivers of time that run generously through my blood in my bones. And so I say to those ancestors, your hands are my hands and your song is my song. And your story is woven into my story, and so much of the motivation and the impetus to return and rehydrate and reconnect to this dignified way of living, this indigenous way of living in in reciprocity with the land comes from the tenacity and resilience of my ancestors, who, despite so much of what they went through continued to uphold their agreements.

Robin Kimmerer: “The Fortress, the River and the Garden: A New Metaphor for Knowledge Symbiosis” (April 28, 2022)

Virtual talk by Robin Kimmerer as the annual Overman Lecture, organized on the UMD campus every other year by the Research, Scholarship, and Creative Activities Committee. More than 200 participants from across the state and beyond tuned in for the talk. Dr. Kimmerer also met virtually in two separate events for smaller groups of faculty, staff, and students, each of which included about 25 participants. The substance of her talk is contained in an article of the same title published in Contemporary Studies in Environmental and Indigenous Pedagogies: A Curricula of Stories and Place (Kulnieks, Longboat, and Young 2013).

Robin Kimmerer’s book, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants (2013) slowly found its way to the bestseller lists in the years following its first edition. Kimmerer’s  work catalyzed a cultural moment, focusing broader attention on Indigenous ways of knowing, and she has become a sought-after speaker on various topics. Kimmerer is a citizen of the Potawatami nation and founder of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment at the State University of New York. Her earlier book, Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses (2003), won the John Burroughs Medal for distinguished work in the field of natural history. Kimmerer received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2022.

During the smaller meetings with Dr. Kimmerer, we discussed the need for understanding that science — including Indigenous science — has many forms. Kimmerer shared thoughts on her work coordinating the letter of support (mentioned above, and signed by 1,800 Indigenous scientists, tribal leaders, and allies) for the 2017 March for Science (“Indigenous Science Statement for the March for Science” ). That letter asserted: “As Indigenous scientists and allies, we endorse the March for Science and recognize that while Western Science is a powerful approach, it is not the only one. We need to engage the power of both Western and Indigenous Science on behalf of the living Earth.”

Kimmerer observed that at the time of creating this letter, there was resistance to such a statement, as some feared that acknowledging multiple ways of knowing might open pathways to claims that Indigenous science is akin to pseudosciences. Kimmerer observed, “The approach that I’ve taken in my own scientific community is that this is not an ‘or.’ I’m not trying to undermine science, but it’s a matter of ‘and.’ Let’s use all of our available tools to see what we might learn.” She underscored that Indigenous sciences are grounded in critical thinking, and pointed out that scientific tools are not the exclusive domain of what she identifies as “scientism,” a belief that only the Western science approach to the scientific method can accurately know and communicate the truth about the world and reality.

With her Indigenous students Kimmerer explores how to use the tools of Western science within an Indigenous worldview in aid of community. “I think there is fabulous power in being able to say I am going to make inquiries of the world, and learn from the world, but couple it to values. Couple it to responsibility and agency.” Kimmerer demonstrates in her work and writing that it is possible to do science without tying the work to scientism. She pointed out that this requires a kind of bilingual approach — being sufficiently conversant in the methods and results of science to both critique it and draw out the aspects that work in various contexts. This concept parallels the idea of “Two-Eyed Seeing” mentioned above.

Gwen Westerman: “Why the Land Matters” (October 13, 2022)

The virtual talk by Dr. Gwen Westerman was the final in our series. Like the others, this talk was well-attended, and many have watched the recording since the event.

Dr. Westerman is the co-author of Mni Sota Makoce: The Land of the Dakota (Westerman and White 2012), which won a 2013 Minnesota Book Award and a 2014 Hognander Minnesota History Award, and is a three-time recipient of an Artist Initiative Grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board. In 2021, she was named Poet Laureate of Minnesota. She is also a fiber artist who creates incredible textile art influenced by her life and Indigenous culture. Her work has won numerous awards and is on permanent display in several museums, including the Minnesota Historical Society in St. Paul, Minnesota. She is a professor at Minnesota State University, Mankato, where she teaches American and Native Nations literatures, technical communications, and humanities to undergraduate and graduate students. She holds a BA and MA in English from Oklahoma State University and a PhD in English from the University of Kansas. She has received the Douglas R. Moore Faculty Research Award and the Distinguished Faculty Scholar award.

Westerman has published numerous poems, essays, and short stories that appear in a number of publications, including the Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry (Harjo, Howe, and Foerster 2020), the Minnesota issue of Quiltfolk (January 2020), and New Poets of Native Nations (Erdrich 2018). Her poetry collection Follow the Blackbirds (2013) was published by Michigan State University Press, and her most recent book of poetry, Songs Blood Deep (2023), was published by Holy Cow! Press.

Dr. Westerman’s presentation was titled “Why the Land Matters.” She shared poems that connected with the land, both from her past and in our current landscape. She connected us to the land and rivers using a combination of her poems and history lessons that many people in our society never hear. The poems she shared with us included “This is My Explaining Ceremony”(2013), “Where the Buffalo Roam” (2011), and a special poem, “Genetic Code” (2013), written after the discovery of a species of mussel thought to be extinct. Westerman asked listeners to reflect on their own connections to land and on how these connections have been interrupted in our modern world of highways, interstates, and other travel.

The Transdisciplinary Learning Community

As part of our project, we created a Learning Community of faculty, staff, students (at the undergraduate and graduate levels), and community members to explore ideas from contemporary Indigenous thinkers about how the world is arranged, and what the human place is within larger spheres of existence. Members had the opportunity for virtual conversations in smaller groups with some of our guest speakers.
We used Canvas to organize our Learning Community, creating a platform on which 60 people from throughout the UMN system and our surrounding communities could connect with the work of our featured thinkers. Members of this community also engaged in readings and conversations on our own to build our own capacities without requesting extra labor from our guests.

Our collaborative received campus communications coverage from both the UMN-Crookston Office of Community Relations and the UMD Office of Community Relations, and was also featured in the 2021–22 Annual Report on Sustainability to the Regents:

• “UMN transdisciplinary collaboration receives a $12,000 grant to create spaces, events and activities to showcase Indigenous culture and the environment”(University of Minnesota Crookston,” n.d.)
• “An Opportune Moment: Transdisciplinary Engagements with Contemporary Indigenous Thinkers Seeks to Transform the Work of the University”(College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences | UMN Duluth,” n.d.)
• 2021–22 Regent’s Report on Sustainability Progress (see page 5)

Action Steps: Rethinking Land Acknowledgements

We introduced the reading of Land Acknowledgements  at the beginning of events where this had not previously been done (such as the seminar series of the UMD Biology and Chemistry & Biochemistry Departments). In addition, we challenged the University to do more than simply acknowledge Indigenous communities — to also bring material resources to Indigenous thinkers, and point large audiences to information on treaties and the importance of considering the legacies of colonialism in funding land grant universities. Recent scholarship (Sobo, Lambert, and Lambert 2023) argues that Land Acknowledgements must become more than empty performances.

We began events with the land acknowledgment of the host institution:

UMD’s Land Acknowledgement Statement

We collectively acknowledge that the University of Minnesota Duluth is located on the traditional, ancestral, and contemporary lands of Indigenous people. The University resides on land that was cared for and called home by the Ojibwe people, before them the Dakota and Northern Cheyenne people, and other Native peoples from time immemorial. Ceded by the Ojibwe in an 1854 treaty, this land holds great historical, spiritual, and personal significance for its original stewards, the Native nations and peoples of this region. We recognize and continually support and advocate for the sovereignty of the Native nations in this territory and beyond. By offering this land acknowledgment, we affirm tribal sovereignty and will work to hold the University of Minnesota Duluth accountable to American Indian peoples and nations.

UMC’s Land Acknowledgement Statement (at the time of these events)

 The University of Minnesota Crookston is situated on the lands of Native Nations and carries the legacy of their struggle for survival and identity. As part of our core value to embrace the richness and value of differences, ideas, cultures, and communities, we acknowledge these Native Nations to learn from their ways of knowing and being, and to work with them to create a more equitable and inclusive future for this region.

Having shared that statement, we added the following comments before turning the event over to the speakers:

UMD: Our collaborative certainly shares the intention stated in UMD’s land acknowledgment to remember that our institution exists in a society that has, through colonialism and unequal power relations, sought to make Indigenous peoples invisible, and, worse, to take away sovereignty and life of Anishinaabe, Dakota, Mohawk, and other peoples. The University of Minnesota and numerous other public universities received some of their most important financial support through the taking and sale of Indigenous lands. You can find information on the history of treaties and why they matter by visiting the website treatiesmatter.org/exhibit.

UMC: Our collaborative grows out of the conviction that land acknowledgments without action are hollow symbols. We are taking action to invite Indigenous thinkers to share with the university community and beyond because we want to transform the work of the university to do more than acknowledge — we want the material and intellectual activities of the university to benefit and include Indigenous individuals and communities.

Action Step: Rethinking Campus Murals and Land Acknowledgements in Light of Our Indigenous Communities

The effects of the discussions sparked by our series continue. Discussions on the UMC campus around Indigenous issues, for example, advanced during our project. There has been much more conversation about how we should address problematic campus murals (“Kiehle Auditorium Murals | University of Minnesota Crookston,” n.d.), with many more people acknowledging that the murals are racist. The campus engaged in conversations about what could be done so that Native Americans coming onto campus do not feel unsafe, and ultimately decided to cover the murals. We also had conversations about how our land acknowledgment should be improved, and decided to re-write it in collaboration with our newly created Native American Advisory Committee. The new UMC land acknowledgement is as follows:

We acknowledge that we gather as the University of Minnesota Crookston on the traditional land and water of the Anishinaabe and Dakota people, past and present, and we honor with gratitude the land itself and the people who have served as caretakers of Mother Earth throughout the generations.

We acknowledge the genocide and systems of oppression that have deprived Indigenous people of their lands and we honor and respect the diverse and beautiful peoples still connected to this land. We recognize the many contributions Native Nations have made as the spiritual and physical caretakers of this land. We acknowledge the histories and cultural traditions that make this ceded and treaty lands special, and celebrate the talents and gifts of Indigenous populations of our region.

With this land acknowledgement we affirm the inherent sovereignty of Native nations. We strive to hold our university accountable to Indigenous peoples and pledge to support and advocate for their welfare. The University of Minnesota Crookston stands with the community members of Native nations and commits to building relationships with the American Indian communities through partnerships, academic pursuits, historical recognitions, and recruitment efforts to further our commitment to promoting diversity, and to create an equitable and inclusive future for this region.

While we acknowledge that land acknowledgments without action are hollow symbols, rewriting the land acknowledgment and covering the murals were the first of the action steps that need to be taken on the Crookston campus to create the equitable and inclusive future we desire. We have since had a flag-raising ceremony celebrating the flags of Native Nations (White Earth and Leech Lake) and commemorating partnerships with these tribal nations. This ceremony included Maanomin singers, who drummed and performed a variety of songs, and remarks by White Earth Tribal Council members and the UMC Chancellor. After the ceremony, the flags of the nations were added to UMC’s collection of international flags. The Native American Advisory Committee continues to meet and discuss ways to identify areas for improvement and collaboration so that our land acknowledgment statement moves beyond being a mere symbol. Faculty and staff are beginning to include Indigenous individuals and communities in the daily work of our campus, from the curriculum we teach (e.g., Indigeneity and Sustainability) to the activities (e.g., a Dreamcatcher history and creation event) we host on campus.

Action Step: Curriculum Development

As evidenced by the recommended bibliography below, this project generated a wealth of ideas and pointed us and our readers to many relevant materials. These will be the basis of continuing efforts to integrate Indigenous perspectives into our undergraduate and graduate curricula. The Integrated Biosciences graduate program, for example, will be developing new units on Indigenous perspectives on science for the program’s core courses. One of the Learning Outcomes for the UMD graduate school is “Cultural Competence and Global Context Formation of the Field.” And since the IBS program aims to break down barriers between biological disciplines and find ways to share a common language, there are already many themes within this Indigenous Thinkers project that will add richness and new ways of thinking to the research done by program participants.

Action Step: Creation of the University of Minnesota Guidelines for Indigenous Research

In fall 2022, as our speaker series was coming to an end, the University of Minnesota developed guidelines for collaborative work between members of the UMN system and members of Tribal Nations (Nelsen, n.d.). This document emphasizes the data sovereignty and intellectual sovereignty of Indigenous people, including the statement, “All Indigenous research topics should be considered subject to acquiring Tribal consent.” While not part of the team that drafted them, our collaborative enthusiastically endorses these guidelines.

Conclusion

The pursuit of academic knowledge has resulted in many kinds of advancement across disciplines. We know so much about basic biological processes, we have structurally analyzed mythologies, we have mastered material sciences to create a wide array of engineered materials, we have created art and literature that powerfully evokes human understandings of the cosmos. And yet, our world stands on the brink of loss and devastation. As modern science, social science, humanities, and arts have moved continuously towards specialization, we have increasingly lost sight of the patterns that connect (Bateson 2002). Sometimes, however, disciplinary leaders have seen the need to cross-pollinate our ways of knowing (Nabhan 2004). For those of us immersed in the daily flow of our disciplines, this project energized practices with the transdisciplinary knowing embodied in Indigenous knowledge. In conversations across campuses, across disciplines, and with our Indigenous guests, we encouraged ourselves to more openly question how we know, and to incorporate the holistic lessons embodied in Indigenous approaches to understanding the world. We attempted to make better science, better social science, and better arts and humanities by humbly listening to what Indigenous thinkers are saying. We believe this collaborative was a good first step, and would like to see this kind of work continue into the future.

References

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Bateson, Gregory. 2002 [First published 1979]. Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity. Hampton Press.

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