WHAT IS DIVERSITY AND INCLUSION WITHOUT DECOLONIZATION?: ADDRESSING HISTORICAL LEGACIES HINDERING GROWTH IN THE SCIENCES THROUGH INDIGENOUS AND COMMUNITY-BASED RESEARCH MODELS (Invited Presentation)

One of our most pressing issues in the scientific community—underrepresentation and marginalization of diverse cultural peoples and knowledge systems—remains rooted in a settler-colonial past. Historical legacies including centuries of oppression, extractive research practices, assimilation-based education, and misrepresentation continue to inhibit diverse knowledge exchange, hindering innovation and growth in all fields of learning including geosciences. Meanwhile scientific forums, such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services are calling for inclusion of Indigenous and local knowledges (e.g., traditional ecological knowledge) to improve our scientific understandings and future outlook of life on Earth. The recent push for “diversity and inclusion” in the sciences and in academia is in response to issues such as these, yet few discussions on the topic of diversity and inclusion reach deeper into the systemic roots underlying these issues. Critically assessing our research process and how we engage communities in science offers a pathway for addressing them.

In this presentation we will overview the historical colonial context, including discussion on contemporary civil and human rights movements, such as the Black Lives Matter movement, and Indigenous rights with regard to the geosciences. The presenter draws from her experiences as an Indigenous research scientist and educator assessing research practices in relation to Indigenous and human rights ethics frameworks, such as the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. These include key findings from a global systematic review on Indigenous community engagement in climate research with guidelines for responsible research practices and preliminary findings from a related content analysis study analyzing Indigenous governance standards in U.S. federal research guidelines. These studies map out opportunities for reconciliation and more balanced knowledge exchange that the geoscience community is both implicated in and can learn from.