New paper titled: Incorporate Indigenous perspectives for impactful research and effective management, by Ban et. al. (2018)
This paper provides a good summary of some key points where Indigenous knowledge and ecological science can complement one another. The points that stood out for me are that:
1. Indigenous knowledge often applies to a local scale, over a long time period, while ecological studies strive to occur over larger, regional scales, but cannot capture the long timeframe.
2. Ecology is based on quantitative predictions grounded in theory, while Indigenous knowledge makes qualitative predictions grounded in traditional laws and oral history.
The paper concludes by offering practical advice to researchers – know whose territory you are on and reach out, build a relationship and this takes time, seek consent before conducting experiments, agree on who owns the data generated, add your Indigenous study partners as co-authors on papers, generate better hypotheses by asking Indigenous people what these should be.
The paper was written out of the University of Victoria, here in Canada. A link to the article is here…
