Doctoral Dissertation Research: Coast Salish Foods and Landscapes: Restoration Paradigms and Practices

University Of Washington, Seattle WA

Investigators

Abstract

University of Washington doctoral candidate Joyce LeCompte-Mastenbrook, supervised by Dr. Stevan Harrell, will undertake research on the relationship between indigenous traditional food movements using public lands and external management of those lands. Advocates for increasing use of traditional foods recognize a strong link between cultural disruption, alienation from the land, contemporary dietary practices, and high rates of metabolic diseases in Native communities. Devolution of decision-making within land management agencies appears to have fostered increasing collaborative and co-management agreements between tribes and public land managers on lands comprising treaty-reserved food gathering areas. The goal of this project is to understand the effects of cross-cultural collaborations between Native communities and land management agencies on the paradigms, policies, and practices of each. The researcher will undertake 12 months of research among the Coast Salish tribes of Washington State and the federal land managers responsible for the lands being used by those tribes. The researcher will gather data with a mix of social science methods including participant observation; documentation of Coast Salish indigenous environmental knowledge; formal and informal interviewing; cultural domain analysis; Thematic Apperception Tests; and analysis of archival records. The research is important because it will contribute to theories of under what circumstances policies that promote cultural diversity are compatible with policies that promote biological diversity. Findings also will fill gaps in the ethnography of the Pacific Northwest Coast peoples. This award also supports cross-cultural collaborations and communication, and the education of a graduate student.