A GEOSCIENCE RESEARCH OPPORTUNITY THAT IS FOCUSED ON COMMUNITY-BASED PARTICIPATORY RESEARCH ON NATIVE RESERVATIONS--THE REU ON SUSTAINABLE LAND AND WATER RESOURCES

The NSF Research Experience for Undergraduates Site on Sustainable Land and Water Resources incorporates community-inspired research projects in collaboration with two Native reservations, the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes in Montana and the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa. A major focus of program evaluation is discovering the way these place-based and participatory research projects impact undergraduate students as they complete their summer research opportunities. Projects are developed in several different ways. At Salish Kootenai College, students work directly with the reservation to explore potential projects, and then student propose and develop their own rsearch questions. On the Fond du Lac reservation, in collaboration with University of Minnesota faculty, students join an ongoing, research study of wild rice. The research on this important Ojibwe traditional food was developed in a collaboration between reservation natural resource managers and University of Minnesota, Duluth researchers. A third team conducts research out of the University of Minnesota's St. Anthony Falls Laboratory (SAFL). These students are working on ongoing SAFL projects. We discuss how these teams interact, and how these various approaches are providing students with a solid conceptual understanding of scientist-inspired research, community-inspired research, and co-created science.