Indigenous Observing Meeting 2020
Inception of the Indigenous Observing Meeting - Arctic Science Summit Week 2019
Forming the Arctic Indigenous Observing Meeting
After months of organizing and reaching out to Indigenous scholars and community members across the Arctic, the Indigenous Observing Meeting finally came together, albeit in an unintended form though entirely in the spirit of our first secret, impromptu meeting in Russia.
Our originally ambitious format to bring together Indigenous scholars, consultants, community members, and allies in research to discuss priorities, challenges, and opportunities for Indigenous-led research and highlight the contributions of Indigenous Peoples to Arctic research over three days was of course affected by the outbreak of COVID-19, as many networks, projects, and forum thus far have also been. As the Arctic Science Summit Week 2020 was forced into an online-only format and borders across the world closed to travel, myself and the other meeting organizers decided that an informal, open, and honest meeting would be a better use of our time. I would like to thank the three other organizers of this session for their dedication! Megan Sheremata, Tayana Arakchaa, and Stanislav Ksenofontov.
We opened the meeting with five minutes of Sakha khomus (mouth harp music) that brought us virtually to the Sakha homelands where we could hear the nature and animals of the region. We weren’t sure how many would be able to attend, but we were so happy to be joined by 46 members of our Arctic community in this moment. I then opened the meeting with an explanation of our inception at the Arctic Science Summit Week in 2019, where we were forced to meet in secret defiance when the Indigenous Peoples Day was last-minute cancelled under no uncertain political willpower. To have our in-person meeting thwarted again felt a symbolic testament to how much Indigenous peoples must fight adversity to be recognized.
We used the first half of the meeting to discuss priorities, challenges, and opportunities for Indigenous-led Arctic research, and the second half of the meeting to discuss the development of an Arctic Indigenous Peoples Research Summit to take control of a conference for ourselves.
Developing an Arctic Indigenous Peoples Research Summit
Prior to this meeting, many Indigenous scholars, professionals, and community members have voiced that an Indigenous-led and driven conference format would be hugely beneficial to sharing research and organizing priorities, challenges, and opportunities in the Arctic in non-’conventional’ ways that are based in part on our cultural means of sharing knowledge. Since Spring 2019, I’ve been exploring financial support for the creation of such a ‘summit’ to bring these hopes into being. A central discussion during this recent meeting revolved around identify potential locations, themes, funding, and partnerships to make this a reality.
While in Russia in 2019, attendees suggested Russia as a potential location for the summit as few Russia Indigenous scholars or knowledge holders are able to travel outside of Russia for these purposes and thus are disadvantaged in opportunities to participate across the circumpolar north. Others have raised freedom of speech concerns and recommended Canada or Iceland as alternatives.
Collecting Voices and Contributions
Additional comments and considerations were shared by the attendees of our meeting. I’ve captured some of these points here. Please acknowledge that the comments themselves belong to those who spoke them and should not be widely used.
Many researchers fail to respect ethical guidelines for engagement with Indigenous communities or knowledge, even in countries where formal principles and protocols exist. Some countries could learn from guidelines and research review processes already established in other Arctic countries.
The mechanism for reviewing research projects and engagement should stay in the hands of the Indigenous organizations and governments.
Some researchers fail to bring anything back to the communities they work in - we serve them and they may do nothing for us.
Researchers need to learn to behave in relation to Indigenous communities.
Indigenous values should be recognized by research communities. It is the researchers’ responsibility to know the communities they are working in.
The co-production of knowledge is still not the norm, but there are values like trust and respect for Indigenous knowledge that can help researchers understand and approach the process.
Indigenous scholars are needed in the sciences. Many allies in research in the environmental sciences put a lot of time into understanding concepts that are strongly tied to knowledge co-production - learning about Indigenous rights, studying the nature of science in society, dealing with institutional funding constraints, co-presenting and co-authoring with community collaborators, and reporting back to communities. This leaves little time for science and take so much time, and is partly why the inequities in education are critical.
