On February 16, 1863, the United States Congress unilaterally “abrogated and annulled” all treaties with the four bands of Indigenous people known as the Dakota Oyate (nation). These acts allowed for the seizure of ancestral Dakota land and paved the way for the forced removal of Dakota people from MniSotaMakoce (now known as Minnesota). The legal justification for these acts remains contested (Vogel, 2012. See Appendix One: References) but they, and subsequent acts, are representative of the global project of settler colonialism that ushered in the modern world. Settler colonialism continues to operate by disrupting and devaluing Indigenous relationships to, and knowledge of, the natural environment or Traditional Ecological Knowledge (hereafter TEK) through profound epistemic, ontological and cosmological violence, including the willed extermination of indigenous people by genocide or removal (Wolfe, 2006). Settler colonial history naturalizes the supposed supremacy of Western culture and posits Indigenous societies as antithetical to modern ideas of progress, science and technology. We think differently, not that there aren’t profound differences between science and indigenous knowledge systems, nor deep and vexing dilemmas and ethical challenges to efforts at engaging them simultaneously (Whyte 2018a).

Premised on the notion that indigenous peoples possess legitimate forms of knowledge, about the social and natural worlds, that rival those of modern, scientific culture in significance and depth, and bearing witness to a time of rapid change, we believe that there is mutual benefit to be had from embracing and deploying a research project forged in purposeful and respectful relationship to contemporary efforts by indigenous peoples to rebuild and advance their individual and collective selves through cultural revitalization under the guidance of TEK (Whyte 2018b). To help contextualize our research we return briefly to the damaging changes wrought by storm of settler colonialism, and present-day efforts by contemporary Dakota and other displaced indigenous migrants, to batten down against further destruction.

Settler colonialism has been disastrous but not complete for the Dakota in MniSotaMakoce. For them, MniSota continues to be “an ancient and familiar place, a world with myths and beginnings and cycles — reasons why life [was and continues to be] lived in a certain way…. [with] names of places that told what happened here” (Cavendar in Durand, n.d.) despite that many indigenous names have been replaced, along with their telling meanings. Uprooted too are indigenous trees, plants, waterways and animal populations: less than 1% of the original tallgrass prairie exists (CFANS, n.d) while more recent Dakota bear witness to increasingly warming temperatures and increasing rainfalls (DNR, 2018). These changes are registered and archived, experienced and evaluated, in the minds, bodies and spirits of the Dakota people and other indigenous people from around the world, like Pacific Islanders from Romanum island in the Federated States of Micronesia, who suffer the induced devastation through migration and exile, as economic and climate refugees. Re Romanum/people of Romanum suffer drastic disparities in social, economic, and physical wellbeing while also being sold the notion that their future exists in wholesale assimilation to a Western monoculture that appears increasingly unsustainable: over the past century, the earth has experienced significant losses in biodiversity (Forester, 1996), growing food insecurity, and deeper economic inequality (Milanovic, 2006). Re Romanum from Micronesia, who now comprise over half of the population of Milan, are a small part of over 24 million people displaced by catastrophic weather disasters (McDonnell, 2018). They are part of change-related human migration that will result in an estimated 28% increase in asylum applications in the European Union alone (Missirian & Shenkler, (2017)).

Addressing the Grand Challenges of Enhancing Individual and Community Capacity for a Changing World and of Fostering Just & Equitable Societies, our project is an experimental, critically-self reflexive, culturally-informed form of community-engaged research that combines theory and practice from interdisciplinary American Indian and Global Indigenous studies in collaboration with STE(A)M colleagues in Computer Engineering and Art and Architecture on the academic side (See Appendix Two: Team Profiles), in purposeful, action-oriented partnership with Dakota and Micronesian communities that are themselves involved in collaborative projects of cultural revitalization and shared learning of their TEK systems. Committed to and informed by the principles of indigenously-ordered decolonization, social justice, and equitable relations in the context of Dakota and Pacific Islander cultural traditions, we employ a Participatory Action Research (PAR) framework with our partners in search of ways to inform and transform cultures of academic knowledge production and model new forms of university-community engagement through designed collaboration on the ground (Whyte 2013). Working with and informed in part by Natives who are working with each other (Whyte 2018b), we seek to design, build, and model new forms of collaborative research in an era of increasing and profound change (Whyte et al, 2017). It is through this critically conceived, designed, and built confluence of academic collaboration upon indigenous partnerships of cultural revitalization, that we seek to model and build new relations and new sites of shared knowledge production between socially aware STE(A)M and indigenous TEK.

Such designed relationality has affinity to kinship relations of reciprocity found in TEK. This profound relationality is also mirrored in the shared learning and desire for harmonious relationship that has developed between host Dakota and displaced Micronesians, and in our desire to build new interdisciplinary and intercultural knowledge practices with both communities as they/we engage each other’s cultural traditions such as watercraft building and the TEK knowledge of interdependence and reciprocity among land, water, and sky. Given the hostility of settler colonialism toward indigenous peoples and their cultural and knowledge systems, indigenous efforts at cultural revitalization are at once potent expressions of cultural alterity, of decolonization, and of the healing of bodies, minds, and spirits. For this reason we employ a decolonization framework (Denzin, Lincoln & Smith, 2008; Johnston-Goodstar, 2014; Reason & Bradbury, 2001) that calls for the “resuscitation of practices and intellectual life outside of settler ontologies” and the “repatriation of Indigenous land and life” (Tuck and Yang, 2009) that Meyer (2001) and Wilson (2004) connect to traditional knowledge and places. Tuck and McKenzie (2014) coin the phrase “critical place inquiry” to specifically locate new forms of critical scholarship for decolonization and social transformation in relation to indigenous claims to specific lands, waters, and skies. What Co-PI Gould and Co-I Rock (2016, 2017, and 2018) argue to be physical sites of deep indigenous time and sacred cosmology of a Dakota feminine maternal power to create (and destroy), Co-I DeLisle (2015) identifies as a historical process of indigenous “placental politics,” a potent cultural practice of women burying the placenta of their children to properly affix them to their specific place of birth. For DeLisle, an indigenous placental politics connects birthing to land through custodial stewardship as political acts of decolonization led by Indigenous women.

The signature contribution of this study to the Grand Challenge goal of advancing UMN’s reputation as an institution of higher learning in the 21st century is the prospect of modeling new forms of engaged research by combining nuanced theoretical and interdisciplinary approaches with on-the-ground indigenous projects of cultural revitalization through shared learning of indigenously ordered TEK. Indeed, we believe we have the potential to carry, or better yet, firmly root, the University of Minnesota into national and international leadership in the area of indigenous community-based research through the specificity of the home-grown “data” and “ceremony”, following Kimmerer’s epigraph, as well as with homegrown and home cultivated skills and talent in historically unprecedented ways.

Akin to the coming together of two distinct (academic and indigenous) river-like bodies of flowing knowledge, our project “meets” interdisciplinary academic culture and TEK at the confluence of Dakota and Micronesian projects of shared cultural revitalization. Those transindigenous partnerships feature the learning of male-centered activities, like building traditional indigenous water craft and associated traditional knowledge of rivers, lakes, oceans, lands, and skies, and traditionally female-oriented water-based traditions, often sacred inasmuch as they involve the power of welcoming, creation and sustenance, food harvesting and preparation, childbirth, and other forms of women’s labor. On the academic side, our interdisciplinary design also features the fluidic swirling between two complementary “streams”, summarized below, that draw, respectively, from “traditions” in American Indian and Indigenous Studies and from equally evolving STE(A)M paradigms, in a shared effort to design and build new laboratory and studio-based projects and practices also contoured by the customized terms of research engagement with our indigenous neighbors. Our two-year project proposes a program of mutually informing activities in indigenous cultural revitalization and STE(A)M lab and studio work designed to also mutually inform and model new forms of interdisciplinary and intercultural learning and research.

Through mutually informed engagement between historians, designers, computer scientists and indigenous communities:

• Community building through cultural revitalization, intercultural relations, and shared Traditional Ecological Knowledge learning

• Transform relations between academic and indigenous communities in an equitable and just ways

• Explore new forms of interdisciplinary and intercultural knowledge production practices, relations, and sites, in both academic and non-academic community contexts

• Develop new STE(A)M frameworks and new forms of indigenous-oriented research frameworks

Partnered design and implementation of engaged cultural activities for facilitating the understanding and advancement of reciprocal relations between indigenous TEK and academic research in grounded, material practice

Identification and analyses of social, cultural, and political hotspots and triggers that contribute to and/or impede good, just, and equitable relations between academic and indigenous communities by tracking and discussing trouble areas, contradictions, paradoxes, dilemmas in the application of community-engaged interdisciplinary research

Implementation and feedback looping of preliminary findings into project design and administration. Partnered design and implementation of engaged cultural activities for facilitating the understanding and advancement of reciprocal relations between indigenous TEK and academic research in grounded, material practice

Generation and transmission of preliminary and/or final findings via panel presentations and papers in academic and non-academic; and the production of grant proposals for further exploration or implementation.