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

该奖项支持阿拉斯加育空河沿岸生活和工作的人们举办的一个专注于传统生态知识(TEK)的学位论文项目。这位研究人员感兴趣的是，当地人掌握的知识如何改善渔业管理者的决策。该项目将探索联邦和州水资源管理人员如何能够做出更知情、更相关的管理决定，如果这些决定包括育空河沿岸居民持有的传统生态知识。研究人员提出了强有力的论点，认为这项研究是对阿拉斯加州主要部落优先事项之一的调查，关于渔业和鱼类资源的土著知识的研究对于了解不仅是土著居民，而且是阿拉斯加所有民族的生计和生活的可持续性至关重要。学生研究员COPI将通过访谈、参与者观察和开放式调查方法进行人种学研究，以收集育空河三个社区的传统生态知识和当地环境知识的数据。除了探索研究的TEK方面，该项目还将收集数据，这些数据将用于开发基于决策的支持工具和移动手机应用程序(App)，可用于在渔民和资源管理人员之间交流信息。此外，作为一名来自非阿拉斯加部落的原住民，这位学生研究员有可能为非当地原住民提供对育空地区渔业管理问题的见解，因此，该项目不仅增加了我们对TEK在环境管理中的应用的了解，而且有可能为社会科学增加一种非殖民化的方法论。

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.