Read the Archive First: How Alaska's Parks Are Easing Research Fatigue for Tribes

"A lot of times, Tribes end up with [research] fatigue because federal agencies — the Park Service, Fish and Wildlife, [Bureau of Land Management] — we all come and ask the same question to a single Tribe, and they just don't have the capacity we have in terms of human capital," says Maija Katak Lukin (Iñupiaq), manager of the National Park Service's Alaska Native Tribal Affairs Program.

Federal land agencies are increasingly required — by Executive Order 13175, a 2021 Joint Secretarial Order and a November 2021 presidential memo — to bring Indigenous knowledge into managing public lands, making policy and making decisions. But asking Tribes over and over wears them out. The Park Service's Alaska Region is trying something else, writes Lisa Fink in Park Science: using archival research and other humanities methods to find the Indigenous knowledge agencies already hold.

Denali National Park curator Kim Arthur (Diné) and archaeologist Crista Cummings in the wolf section of the Denali Visitor Center, where the initiative is finding archive material to expand stories about Indigenous knowledge of wolves. Credit: Blog Root, National Park Service.

Do your homework first

Over decades, Tribal communities have shared a great deal with national parks — oral histories, interview transcripts, ethnographic surveys and more. In 2023, interpretation leaders, working with Alaska Natives, cultural anthropologists and other scientists, launched an initiative to find those collections — in regional and park archives and at the University of Alaska Fairbanks — and weave them into the region's storytelling.

• Know what's already been asked. Find what your agency, and other agencies, have already asked Tribes, Lukin advises, "because realistically it's somewhere."
• Respect people's time. Doing your homework first "shows…that you're respecting people's time," says Aaron Leggett (Dena'ina), president of the Native Village of Eklutna and senior curator of Alaska history at the Anchorage Museum. A full inventory should include those no longer living, so no "segment of the community" is missed.
• Keep Tribes informed. Archival research is not a way around consultation. Tribes — not agencies — decide what counts as a "tribal implication," so the initiative tells them about its research through consultation letters, meetings and conversation.
• Pay for knowledge. If the answer isn't in the archive, Lukin says, "you should have funding to find someone to answer questions for you." Reciprocity means paying knowledge holders for labor, time and travel as one would any expert — or funding Tribes to carry out whole projects. It also means respecting community calendars: no meetings in Kotzebue in August, when families are picking berries for winter.

Reading between the lines

Records can hide what they contain. Katmai National Park's archive holds about 60 oral history tapes collected since 1961 — on the 1912 Novarupta-Katmai eruption, trapping, subsistence living and the first rangers at Brooks Camp. But record-keepers often failed to identify Indigenous information as deep knowledge built on thousands of years of observation, framing it as "anecdotal."

Humanities methods help recover it:

• The "hermeneutics of suspicion" — reading "against the grain and between the lines," in literary theorist Rita Felski's phrase — sets documents in the context of why they were made, such as legitimizing federal control of park lands or countering Native land claims, and reads past that framing to restore the knowledge and name its holders.
• Close reading finds Indigenous knowledge in stories, songs, ceremonies and images. Iñupiaq writer Lily Tuzroyluke's 2023 novel Sivulliq: Ancestor opens with a young woman easing her sister's smallpox with a salve of rosehips, black spruce sap and coltsfoot — a reminder of the Iñupiat's deep knowledge of plant medicine. Such works also preserve place names and Alaska Native languages that exhibits, maps and signs can help keep alive.

Processing archivist Rosemary Austin (right) and Lisa Fink reviewing maps of harvesting locations at the Alaska Regional Curatorial Center. Credit: Nicole Peters, National Park Service.

Fink's early research for Kenai Fjords National Park on Sugpiaq (Alutiiq) knowledge of Sitka spruce found uses for medicine, food storage, and trapping and fishing gear — every part of the tree, even rotting wood. Napag, as it is called in Sugcestun, is seen as the most important plant in the subsistence economy, not a resource to be cut for profit.

Tribes telling their own stories

Working with Tribes on interpretive materials builds relationships and shares stewardship: villages can help choose research topics for a park film, elders can review an exhibit or a webpage (such as Kenai Fjords' page on harbor seals), and Tribal members can make sure place names and wildlife are named, spelled and pronounced correctly in publications like junior ranger booklets.

It also asks for a culture change — away from valuing Western knowledge over Indigenous knowledge, or one's own discipline over others. "When we neglect to recognize the depth of [Indigenous] knowledge and the significance of its representation in culture, we cannot truly know and understand these places," says Megan Richotte, who leads the region's interpretation, education and partnerships team and spearheaded the initiative with Lake Clark cultural anthropologist Karen Evanoff (Dena'ina). "Thousands of years before parks were established and the term 'conservation' and all of that," Evanoff says, "Indigenous cultures had an entire system of stewardship."

Evanoff calls for "Inside Voices" — "the representation of cultural groups who do not always get to sit at the table." For too long, rules for subsistence users were written by people who had "no idea what it's like in rural Alaska hunting and fishing and living from the land," and the burden fell on those users to translate their knowledge for scientists and policymakers. The initiative pairs this with Mi'kmaw elder Albert Marshall's Two-Eyed Seeing, presenting Indigenous and Western knowledge side by side, on equal footing; Lake Clark's work on the Native and Western science of brown bears is one example.

Ending erasure

In Co-Stewardship Talking Circles across Alaska, Alaska Natives asked federal agencies to recognize the knowledge they hold about park lands — their homelands. How lands, waters and wildlife are interpreted shapes how people value them, and so decisions about resources, power and control. Humanities research, Fink argues, helps parks meet their obligations and their challenges without overburdening Tribes. "The NPS is in a period of change," Richotte says, "that I'm very happy to be part of."

Sources

Based on Lisa Fink, "Powerful Humanities Research Methods Can Help Us Avoid Overburdening Tribes," Park Science 38, no. 1 (Summer 2024), "Perspectives," National Park Service; a work of the United States government in the public domain.