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.

Framing an Indigenous Food Sovereignty Research Agenda.

Access to healthy and appealing food is essential for individuals to be able to live a healthy and quality life. For decades, food security has been a priority issue for public health professionals. Food sovereignty expands upon the concept of food insecurity (i.e., having access to nutritious and culturally relevant food) by incorporating people's rights to define their own food system. The expanded focus of food sovereignty on food systems prioritizes public health professionals' role in supporting environmental- and systems-level initiatives and evaluating their implications for health, economics, and the natural environment. Food sovereignty is of particular importance for Indigenous peoples (i.e., American Indian, Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander communities). Colonization had demonstrable consequences, with many Indigenous communities being forcibly relocated from traditional lands, alongside the destruction of traditional food sources. Indigenous food sovereignty aligns with the sovereign nation status that American Indian tribes and Alaska Native communities have with the United States. Furthermore, the worldviews that incorporate Indigenous communities' relational responsibilities to care for their food systems, according to their traditional practices and beliefs (Coté, 2016; Morrison, 2011), uniquely positions Indigenous peoples to lead food sovereignty initiatives. In this article, we explore what is currently known regarding food sovereignty and health. We then discuss opportunities to expand the evidence on Indigenous food sovereignty's relationships with (1) health and well being, (2) economics, (3) the natural environment, and (4) programming facilitators and barriers.

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.