Enhancing Indigenous Food Sovereignty and Community Health Through the Karuk Agroecosystem Resilience Initiative: We Are Caring for It: xúus nu'éethti.

Indigenous communities in the United States experience some of the highest rates of food insecurity and diet-related diseases despite an abundance of food assistance programs and other public health interventions. New approaches that center Indigenous perspectives and solutions are emerging and urgently needed to better understand and address these challenges. This Practice Note shares lessons learned from ongoing collaboration between the Karuk Tribe and University of California, Berkeley researchers and other partners to assess and enhance food sovereignty among Tribes and Tribal communities in the Klamath River Basin. Through two participatory research and extension projects, we demonstrate the importance of centering Indigenous knowledge to strengthen research findings and identify more culturally appropriate solutions to community identified food access, health, and ecosystem challenges. Key findings suggest that approaches to food sovereignty and community health must emanate from the community, be approached holistically, reflect community values and priorities, and center Indigenous land stewardship.

Transforming Restoration Science: Multiple Knowledges and Community Research Cogeneration in the Klamath and Duwamish Rivers.

AbstractRacism and colonialism within restoration science continue to perpetuate exclusionary and oppressive paradigms in ecosystem restoration and in wider societal contexts, from setting scientific agendas to translating findings into policy. These paradigms impair progress and cause harm by (1) tokenizing epistemic diversity, (2) perpetuating injustice in frontline communities by ignoring power dynamics and other local contexts, and (3) rejecting "unconventional" methods for connecting knowledge to action. To challenge exclusion, biological scientists must listen to path-making conversations in Native American and Indigenous studies on grounded normativity, an ethical framework informed by place-based practices that make respectful, nonexploitative coexistence between human and nonhuman communities possible. Rather than treat Western science as the objective arbiter of truth, Indigenous and feminist science approaches can draw on multiple sciences to design restoration interventions and unsettle power dynamics and historical legacies in the biological sciences. We put these approaches into practice and discuss the methodologies and outcomes of two restoration projects, one on the Duwamish River and one on the Klamath River. We use the lessons learned to discuss how scientists in all biological fields can prevent harmful inequities in restoration work while building capacity in and supporting crucial work by frontline communities.