Presenter/s: Lindsey Crofoot
Symposium Session: 2024 - 04 Restoring Riverscapes as Complex Habitats that Include Humans
Topics covered: community involvement, lessons learned, and traditional ecological knowledge
ABSTRACT
For countless generations the Indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest have practiced biocultural land management that shaped their traditional lands to meet the needs of the people and promoted healthy resilient ecosystems. Traditional harvesters have long played a role in tending the landscape to produce a diversity of forest related products. They are inherent land managers and were historically agro-foresters, silviculturists, wetland ecologists, prairie and shrub-step specialists, habitat managers, wildlife biologists and more.
Traditional Native inter-generational and community land management centered in place has been shown to produce an extremely accurate historical data set that informs management practices that are highly adaptable, meet the needs of the people, and are sustainable. Traditional Native land management practices and values of reciprocity recognize that people are an ingrained part of the biodiversity and structure of the native ecosystems and when people can fulfill their traditional roles in the landscape there is a direct positive impact on the functioning and resilience of the ecosystem.
With this knowledge modern land management practices can be supported and enhanced through the thoughtful and deliberate inclusion of traditional Native land management practices and TEK. A small-scale biocultural restoration project planted in Spring of 2022 provides a model for the integration of TEK within restoration, monitoring, and long-term management plans that has the potential to be scaled and implemented across a diversity of ecological landscapes. The urban forest restoration project located in Bothell, WA aims to restore the natural structure and function of a highly invaded pasture in the lower reaches of the Sammamish River watershed while creating a forest garden composed of native vegetation that will provide produce and forest products intergenerationally for members of the co-housing community that live surrounding the restoration site.
Being the first NRCS Cultural Planting Enhancement (E612E) through the Conservation Stewardship Program in Washington State, this enhancement required that native vegetation be selected for both their cultural importance and adaptability to site conditions. Stakeholders include the landowners, community members, University of Washington Bothell Restoration Ecology professor and interns, and Northwest Indian College Natural Resources professor and intern. Together this group developed restoration goals and plans that were inclusive of TEK and Native land management values and techniques. Long term project management goals that are rooted in TEK include harvesting and traditional land tending as a means of controlling aggressive or invasive species, increasing native plant diversity, limiting competitive coexistence, and increasing facilitation, which is expected to increase soil health, increase water quality coming from the site, restore the natural function of the ecosystem, and promote resilience and resistance to climate change. While small, this model of biocultural restoration has the potential to make significant impacts on how ecological restoration is approached as culture and a people’s role within the ecosystem become a larger part of restoration efforts and projects.