Doctoral Dissertation Research: Bridging Knowledge Systems to Improve Ecosystem Management Along the Yukon River, Alaska

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This award supports a dissertation project focused on traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) held by people who live and work along the Yukon River in Alaska. The researcher is interested in how the knowledge held by local people can improve the decision of fisheries managers. The project will explore how Federal and State water managers could make better-informed, more relevant management decisions if they included the traditional ecological knowledge held by people who live and subsist along the Yukon River. The researcher makes a strong argument that this research is an investigation of one of the leading Tribal priorities in the State of Alaska and that research on indigenous knowledge of fisheries and fish resources could be critical an understanding of the sustainability of livelihoods and lives of not only indigenous populations but all peoples in Alaska.The CoPI, student researcher, will do ethnographic research through interviews, participant observations, and open-ended survey methods to gather data on traditional ecological knowledge and local environmental knowledge in three Yukon River Communities. In addition to exploring the TEK aspect of the research, the project will collect data that will feed into the development of a decision-based support tool and mobile cell phone application (App) that can be used to communicate information among fishers and to resource managers. In addition, as an indigenous person from a non-Alaskan Tribe, the student researcher has the potential to provide non-local indigenous insight into the issue of fisheries management along the Yukon, and as such, the project not only adds to our understanding of the application of TEK to environmental management but has the potential to add a decolonized methodology for social science.