SCC-CIVIC-PG Track B: Strengthening Resilience of Ojibwe Nations across Generations (STRONG): Sovereignty, Food, Water, and Cultural (in)Security

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Practicing resilience has always been vital to Ojibwe lifeways. Grounded in the importance of place, Ojibwe worldviews recognize the hierarchically dependent Four Orders (physical, plant, animal, human) and the importance of cultural security for maintaining these relationships. When any of these orders is threatened, resilience and sustainability are also threatened. Environmentally destructive development and climate change, alongside cultural decline, for example, impact communities’ abilities to respond to climate change and natural disasters. This project aims to address the resilience challenges faced by Indigenous communities by bringing together scientific and traditional ecological knowledge and utilizing data science and advanced sensing technologies to strengthen data sovereignty, resource sustainability, and climate resilience in Ojibwe communities. Understanding Indigenous resilience is a complex endeavor. Most resilience science generally develops in isolation from the communities experiencing climate change, natural disasters, and extreme weather events and focuses primarily on cities, large-scale food and energy production, water resources, and industrial systems. Integrating scientific and traditional ecological knowledge to strengthen resilience requires collaborative, sovereignty-affirming, tribally-driven research to address many fundamental questions: (1) How can transdisciplinary research best foster resilience in the face of long-term declines in environmental quality and short-term extreme events?; (2) How can scientific and traditional ecological knowledge be synergized to improve resilience in Indigenous communities?; (3) What mechanisms, tools, and technologies best support collection and synthesis of scientific and traditional ecological knowledge?; and, (4) What indicators can most effectively translate synthesized knowledge into improved resilience capabilities in Indigenous communities? This planning project brings together a core group of scientists in engineering, natural resource management, computer science, and social sciences with community leaders and knowledge holders to identify culturally relevant indicators for monitoring resilience and co-produce decision-support tools to strengthen community resilience. This will be achieved by: (1) developing a fundamental and respectful understanding of traditional ecological knowledge, systems, and co-production; (2) developing understanding of the threats to Ojibwe resilience; (3) establishing new methodologies incorporating the relationships of the Ojibwe Four Orders with state-of-the-art environmental sensing and data science to help identify and evaluate resilience solutions; and, (4) developing a framework to identify and analyze pathways to adaptation and/or increased resilience for Ojibwe nations/ The proposed plan will offer a resilience framework to develop monitoring, prediction, and response systems and decision-making tools that can be extended to other Native Nations and communities to advance cultural, food, and water security.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.