Kimberly Marion Suiseeya
Eric Greenlee
Josiah Hester
As global grand challenges like climate change and biodiversity loss have grown more pressing, so too have the interdisciplinary environmental research endeavors seeking to understand and address these problems. At the same time, policymakers and scientists increasingly acknowledge the contributions that Indigenous Peoples make in global environmental governance and have begun recognizing a broader societal reliance on Indigenous stewardship. Indigenous-stewarded lands hold more than 85% of the world’s remaining linguistic diversity, biodiversity, and lithium reserves. Yet science and research remain primarily extractive and colonial enterprises that largely fail to reciprocate benefits with these Indigenous communities. In this paper, we describe our approach to attempt to transform environmental research from an interdisciplinary to transdisciplinary practice by integrating and operationalizing commitments to Indigenous data sovereignty and governance, and applying CARE principles throughout our work. Drawing on more than five years of collaboration with Native Nations through the STRONG Manoomin Collective, we assess the challenges, opportunities, progress, and risks of this work to consider the limits of the CARE framework within our team, between our academic institutions and Indigenous partners, and among the broader research community. For research and researchers to truly transform and “tell stories in a good way,” we argue for a much broader effort within the academy to drive change from the ground up.