Partnering with communities for reciprocal research LAUREN BELL: My name is Lauren Bell, I am here in Sitka, Alaska, where I’ve lived for the last 10 years. I was born and raised in Homer, Alaska, in the northern Gulf. I am currently 36 years old if I remember correctly and I’m very excited to be in conversation with Sabena Allen, who I’ve known really for just a little over a year, have known of her for much longer, but have been really excited to get to know her more in the last year. AANDAX̱JOON SABENA ALLEN: My name is Aandaxjoonn Sabena Allen. I am 25 years old here in Sheetʼká, which is where I was born and where I live now. Yeah, I met Lauren through the science center. My dad, Rob Allen, used to be on the board, so I think he was the one who maybe got us into contact and- LAUREN BELL: I believe so. AANDAX̱JOON SABENA ALLEN: Introduced us. Yeah. So really excited to be here chatting with Lauren. LAUREN BELL: We just wrapped in the last month a three-day workshop that was really meant to be for researchers, scientists, who were interested in coming into Southeast Alaska to individual communities and doing research. When I stepped in, this project had been designed to think about, how can we better train scientists to better communicate the work that they’re interested in doing with communities? Which is great, and a lot of scientists need communication training on how to move away from technical language to being able to talk to communities and the general public. And I think that there is an additional element that in conversation with a lot of folks around the region became pretty apparent. After working here a while, and knowing my own journey with science and being a scientist here, recognizing that it’s not just about one-way communication for scientists. In fact, thinking that the problem that needs to be solved is just how scientists better communicate the science they’re trying do is really harkening back to some maybe more harmful practices in the past. So this project really became one of, what does it mean to be a scientist doing work in this region in ongoing reciprocal relationship with communities? It started with a ton of conversations across the region, with as many people, honestly, that I could talk to that wanted to talk to me about what it had looked like in the past to work with scientists? What had worked well? What hadn’t worked well? What other information could be useful for those scientists to know, what trainings, maybe, they could have or education they could have? AANDAX̱JOON SABENA ALLEN: Yeah, I think that was exactly right where I came in, where it sounds like the advisory group had maybe already, a few members had already been in conversation together, and then you brought in a few new people and I was one of those people. For me personally, I’m a social scientist. I’m an anthropologist. So the way I come at these questions and the type of research that I do is obviously in a lot of ways similar and can relate to the types of things that the more STEM-focused, hard sciences people are doing, but also in a lot of ways looks very different. There’s a lot of things that social scientists do well and a lot of things that social scientists really do not do well—and have a lot of times contributed to many of these same problems and replicated a lot of colonial power dynamics and really problematic uses of science and scientific racism, that sort of thing. So it was really interesting to be able to come in with that background and be able to just be in conversation with a lot of different people on these topics. LAUREN BELL: Is it correct to say you already had been thinking about these themes in general? AANDAX̱JOON SABENA ALLEN: It’s definitely something that I’ve thought about in my work, it’s something that’s coming up in my dissertation, looking at how researchers are engaging in Alaska and in Southeast Alaska. It can be a bit of a joke of like, “More researchers, outside researchers coming in, and telling us how to do things in our community,” like that sort of thing. So it’s something that you hear people discuss and talk about. LAUREN BELL: Little bit of tension, though, that I remember right off the bat in the advisory group meetings that I was really grateful to have raised, which was, great that we’re thinking about common principles for this regional idea, and each of our communities across Southeast Alaska is so unique. So we want to be careful about not applying general principles too broadly or trying to sell or communicate this idea to researchers that, “Once you’ve got these principles down or once you have these specific ways of doing things, then you’re covered for any community you go to in Southeast Alaska.” That is not true. The advisory group was really clear about that. And I heard your voice in that, too, Sabena, and I really appreciate that because it helped frame what is possible when you’re thinking about regional-scale ideas, and then what do we really need to honor on a community-level basis? AANDAX̱JOON SABENA ALLEN: Yeah, and I think it ended up being a very Sitka-focused workshop, where we had community leaders who are from Sitka and who know Sitka really well, and were giving even the background of longer Tlingit histories and more recent colonial histories, but specifically about things that had happened here in Sheetʼká. So it sounded like that really resonated, I think, with a lot of the participants, just getting that background information and having it so place-based and so specific. I know for me, in my research, that’s something that I’m very interested in, this need to focus on place-based research. It seems as if a lot of the scientists hadn’t necessarily thought of things in that way before just because that’s not really the way that they were trained or the way that they were being shown how to do scientific research. But I think for Indigenous communities, that is just so important, where just because something worked in Hoonah or Kake, doesn’t mean that it’s going to work in Sitka, and vice versa. So just really needing to ground ourselves in place and in those histories, was, at least from my perspective, just like a very important first step and it seemed to really help people ground themselves in the conversations that we needed to be having. LAUREN BELL: I feel like in academia — this is also my background as a coastal ecologist, as a researcher thinking about climate change and our impacts on coastal ecosystems. I feel like what I was told by my advisors was, “Okay, we see that you love Southeast Alaska and working and focusing your research here but it's really important for funding and for communicating your research out to the broader research community that you pull the themes that apply elsewhere to other ecosystems in the world, to other places in the world. That’s what’s going to really make your research robust and groundbreaking and impactful on a broad scale.” Which is not untrue, but just as you said, that tension of that’s the way we’re pulled in Western science to take the place-based information and extrapolate out, versus what’s useful for our communities, which is very much staying within the place-based and honoring that, and being mindful not to generalize out, because that can be harmful. That was such a big lesson for me in going through this process that I have appreciated a lot. AANDAX̱JOON SABENA ALLEN: Something that I’m hoping can continue in whatever form this takes is the fact that a lot of the presenters were more junior academics. So I am a PhD candidate. There was a master’s student, a post-doc. So people who within your traditional academic setting would not really be considered experts in any way. It was really cool to be in that space and be able to share things that we have a lot of knowledge about that some of the other participants maybe didn’t, and to be able to be held up for that knowledge that we do possess. I think that was really powerful and I think that relates to this both place-based and in-person component where I think you need to almost be in the room to subvert some of those dynamics. Even also as an Indigenous scholar, the community dynamics, as well, where a lot of times, scientists are coming in and then they’re acting in the expert position, but in this case a lot of times it people who don’t necessarily have a PhD but are still being considered as these knowledge bearers and knowledge keepers and experts and everything. It feels like that dynamic really needed to be set up in person. Where it’s like, we all enter the room and enter this shared understanding. So also thinking about how that type of knowledge transfer, how would you replicate that outside of an in-person communication? LAUREN BELL: Yeah, I really like you naming that, Sabena, because I feel like that’s getting back to one of the principles or ideas that came up again and again with folks was this frustration that even when working with researchers who were well-intentioned in wanting to come into the community and share and wanted to maybe come in for a potluck or a meeting or something with the community, it still felt like it always ended up with that person at the front of a room lecturing. Even if they were trying to use nontechnical language and everything like that, it just still set up those same dynamics of, “Who is being put up as the expert in this space?” I think that obviously there’s this history of research happening disregarding those pieces and I’m really excited about this as a mechanism to shine a light on that, and ask those questions. Doe s this work really need to be done? Are you willing to invest in the relationships with the community to ensure that your work is meaningful to the people who live here and if not, then maybe we need to think twice about it. Yeah, and I think those are hard discussions but I’m really grateful to have a space or starting to build a space where those conversations can happen.