Why Gender Matters in Integrated Water Resource Management, (2006), and Honouring Indigenous Treaty Rights for Climate Justice (Mantyka-Pringle, Westman, Kythreotis, and Schindler 2015) are a few recent publications framing contemporary conversations in interdisciplinary and cross-cultural research in the field of natural resources management, global climate change, and social–ecological systems research. Words like resiliency, transdisciplinary, and community-based land/water management increasingly appear in the discourse of cutting edge social–ecological systems research, against the alarming backdrop of ecosystem degradation of ecosystems, global climate change, wealth inequalities, and human conflict (Brandt, Ernst, Gralla, Luederitz, Lang, Newig, Reinert, Abson, and Wehrden 2013). While these efforts attempt to permeate disciplinary boundaries and bring the dynamics of social, cultural, political, and economic variables into Western scientific research processes, they often fail to wrestle with the entrenched operations of power and asymmetrical treatment of epistemological diversity in the “science” of Western research paradigms (Manathunga 2009). Science, like all human activities, is conducted through cultural frameworks (Lemke 2001) and is situated in the social–historical context of our times (Bang, Marin and Medin 2018).

In the field of science, the hegemony of Western conceptual frameworks positions Indigenous ways of knowing “as outside the boundaries or incompatible with the positivistic scientific paradigm used in STEM education at historically white institutions and workplace contexts” (Page-Reeves, Marin, Moffett, DeerInWater, and Medin 2019, p. 179). This counter positioning naturalizes Eurocentric, settler colonial histories, and erases other ways of knowing from academic conversation. Given the colonizing role of science in Western colonial knowledge production (Smith 2012), researchers who seek to cross-Western/non-Western boundaries, whether Indigenous or non-Indigenous, occupy the front lines of contestation between oppressive histories of colonization and divergent ways of understanding complex problems. Simultaneously, climate change research increasingly evidences the value of non-Western ways of knowing, such as Indigenous knowledge and traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) (McGregor 2004), to provide insight into changing ecosystems and broader intersecting qualitative and quantitative variables at work in dynamic environments (Berkes and Berkes 2009). This integration is not new to Indigenous scholars, scientists, and community members; however, the field of scientific research frequently classifies Indigenous knowledges as only empirical, not “hard science,” a stance which undercuts the legitimacy of Indigenous ways of knowing in academic spaces (Medin and Bang 2014). This paper engages these contested intersections to explore Indigenous ways of knowing as foundational in the preparation of social–ecological researchers.

In this space of tension, we, an education anthropologist (non-Indigenous) and an ecological scientist (Indigenous) working in the Columbia River basin of the Inland Northwest, USA—home to diverse Indigenous peoples since time immemorial—approached inquiry into the graduate preparation of predominately White interdisciplinary STEM researchers at a public university known for research in the natural resource sciences. Our interests were fueled by an ever-present phenomenon: Indigenous lands are increasingly the focus of natural resource management and climate science (Reo, Whyte, McGregor, Smith, and Jenkins 2017); yet Indigenous knowledge continues to be marginalized in STEM and in settings of higher education. Problematically, universities, as settler colonial institutions, continue to occupy the role of well-intentioned post-colonial saviors, preparing new scientists to broker land management research which impacts Indigenous communities through asymmetrical power relationships. Within this, power differential is the irony that most Indigenous communities did not create the social–ecological degradation impacting their land, referred to as a “tsunami” of development dismissing treaty obligations (Mantyka-Pringle, Westman, Kythreotis, and Schindler 2015). Indigenous communities continue to be rarely consulted as co-partners in environmental management or are met with top-down prescriptive directives (O’Flaherty, Davidson-Hunt, and Manseau 2008). As co-authors concerned with Indigenous sovereignty and Indigenous self-determination, this paper reports on an effort to problematize the limited study of power in the social and cultural processes within STEM fields (Bang and Medin 2010) and to examine the experience of mainstream STEM students as they studied Indigenous methodologies alongside Western science methodologies in a course on interdisciplinary water resource management.

To situate our study, we build on Indigenous scholarship that illuminates the intersections of Indigenous and Western science research paradigms. Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s (2012) seminal work Decolonizing Methodologies stated research is a significant site of struggle between the interests and ways of knowing of the West and the interests and ways of resisting of the Other (p. 2). We believe exposure to Indigenous methodologies and scholarship to be vital for broadly transforming “the colonial project” of the academy (Leonard and Mercier 2016) while unsettling the settled expectations of science (Bang and Marin 2015). More specifically, in the settler colonial context of the USA, we believe it impossible for STEM researchers to work with/for Indigenous communities without critically grappling within the significant site of colonial struggle between the West and the Other (Smith 2012), in non-deficit and relational ways. Given the void of graduate STEM programs to include attention to culture or culturally responsive methodologies (McGinty and Bang 2016) and the importance of preparing social–ecological systems researchers to navigate epistemological variation, our research inquiry was guided by the following questions:

(1) How do mainstream interdisciplinary graduate students incorporate the concepts and theories presented in the “Ways of Knowing” module into their own understandings of research methodologies? (2) In what ways do they embrace or reject the study of “Ways of Knowing” as useful for effective interdisciplinary research?

First: the land we write from

This study was conducted in the Inland Northwest, USA, at a public land-grant institution on the homelands of Indigenous peoples.Footnote 1 The Columbia River basin drains a watershed of roughly 258,000 square miles, passing through dozens of Indigenous peoples lands, two provinces in Canada, and seven states in the USA. Inter-tribal collaborations have created cooperative organizations based on culture and science, such as Upper Columbia United Tribes (UCUT), Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fisheries Commission (CRITFC), and Upper Snake River Tribes (USRT). Yet, not all tribes and First Nations in the region are part of these organizations. Many of these tribal compacts formed following the damming of the river, as enforcements of sovereign authority to uphold treaty rights as “a grant of rights from them [the Indians]” (Bell 2015, p. 288) connected to the cultural ecology of salmon and steelhead, and to counter the destruction of the habitat relied upon since time immemorial.

We acknowledge the continuity of the land we speak from to denaturalize the cultural foundations of place and to contextualize our research within messy processes of human knowledge production. We also recognize that we are acting within a context of ongoing settler colonialism. To situate the importance of this work, we will review the relevant literature and present the methods of our study.

Indigenous ways of knowing as a decolonial stance

The field of Indigenous science education puts forth a variety of frameworks to problematize “Science” as a single entity, free of cultural influences, and value-neutral in principle (Bang, Marin and Medin 2018) and offers holistic, place-based, and integrated approaches to address and attain sustainable, long-term solutions to socio-ecological problems such as global climate change (Newberry and Trujillo 2018). Indigenous scholarship maps social and ecological relationality (Cajete 2014) and is inherently transdisciplinary—that is, it engages inquiry across disciplines and communities to address power inequities and complex social–ecological problems (Newberry and Trujillo 2018). Decades of Indigenous scholarship and decolonizing methodologies advocate for research to denaturalize the notion of the scientific method as the only legitimate form of knowledge production (Smith 2012). However, such progressive scholarship lives amidst centuries of academic knowledge production “based on a hierarchy of knowledge wherein Indigenous knowledges are framed as deficit” (Brayboy and Maughan 2009, p. 3). This power imbalance remains entrenched in the academy, manifesting in the ways future researchers are formally prepared to identify and reproduce legitimate methodologies for generating new knowledge. To interrupt colonialism in scientific research, Critical Indigenous Research Methodologies (CIRM) scholars suggest:

“…the challenge is for scholars and institutions that prepare researcher–scholars to move away from such limited definitions of what kinds of knowledge systems and research processes can be labeled scientific and to consider the ways in which Indigenous peoples and methodologies inform and frame scientific scholarly inquiry.” (Brayboy, Gough, Leonard, Roehl, and Solyom 2012, p. 424)

For institutions preparing researchers and scholars, this challenge can be most immediately undertaken by faculty through the restructuring of conceptual frameworks, coursework, internships, and program outcomes.

Our concern for equity between Western colonial paradigms and Indigenous paradigms is in response to the many ways settler colonial cultural superiority is maintained through orthodox STEM research methodologies (Bang, Marin, and Medin 2018). We are not the first to voice such concerns, and our efforts to equitably involve Indigenous knowledge in the academy are one of many occurring globally (Battiste, Bell, and Findlay 2002). While innovations in research methodologies, such as Indigenous Knowledge and Western Knowledge collaboratives (Whyte, Brewer, and Johnson 2016), transdisciplinary Indigenous science (Newberry and Trujillo 2018), and mainstream efforts to “Indigenize” the academy, such as in Canada (Gaudry and Lorenz 2018), offer new possibilities for embracing epistemological variation; many of these programs take place in the specialized space of Indigenous Studies, Indigenous-led institutions of higher education, and/or are predominately not part of core curriculum for STEM students.

Ways of knowing, inter/transdisciplinary methods, and settler colonialism

The cultural processes by which humans and communities come to know and make meaning in the world—ways of knowing—are a crucial entry point for introducing equity and interdisciplinarity across knowledge systems and methodologies. Anthropologist Clifford Geertz noted that knowledge production is a social activity which occurs in a social world (1983); as such “the various disciplines…that make up the arts and sciences, are for those caught up in them, far more than a set of technical tasks and vocational obligations; they are cultural frames in terms of which attitudes are formed and lives are conducted” (p. 14). Cultural frames are produced and reproduced through the discourses, meaningful symbolic behavior (Blommaert 2005), enacted between people/communities to denote a way of perceiving the world. French social theorist, Michel Foucault (1979), described the social constitution of realities as constructed through discourses, e.g., processes of meaning making which create and/or reproduce shared ideologies. Discourse studies are often concerned with the nature of power in social interactions; however, sociolinguists Jan Blommaert (2005) stated that analysis of discourse should focus on powers effects on society, not just its nature. We agree with this notion. From the ways “language is an ingredient of power processes resulting in, and sustained by, forms of inequality, and how discourses can be or become a justifiable object of analysis” (ibid, p. 2) are specific ways we can examine scientific discourses to uncover not only the frames of meaning used to by researchers to interpret realities, but also to shine light on what power does to people, groups, and societies. Examination of the power inequities among different ways of knowing in the academy could lead “to a move from science on/about society toward science for/with society” (Steirner and Porch 2006, p. 880) and requires specific grappling with settler colonialism—e.g., the continued occupation, appropriation, and expropriation of Indigenous lands by settler societies (Tuck and Yang 2012)—as a structure which maintains and invisibilizes injustice in STEM research through discourse. We use scholars Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang (2012) articulation of settler colonial “moves to innocence,” that is “strategies or positionings that attempt to relieve the settler of feelings of guilt or responsibility without giving up land or power or privilege, without having to change much at all” (p. 10), as a discursive process in need of interruption in STEM. The complex internal/external avoidance of our settler colonial context obfuscates the role of science in the ongoing project of settler occupation of Indigenous lands, erasure of Indigenous peoples, and the genocide of Indigenous beings.

As Leonard and Mercier (2016) pointed out, study of the social, philosophical, and epistemological roots of knowledge systems, power, and coloniality are rarely engaged in STEM research preparation, so as not to disrupt settled expectations. Social–ecological systems research would appear a prime space to engage epistemological variation, as its premise encourages inter/transdisciplinary study. Yet, current social–ecological systems research is dominated by science-based methods/knowledge (Brandt, Ernst, Gralla, Luederitz, Lang, Newig, Reinert, Abson, and Wehrden 2013), leaving little space for different ways of knowing and accompanying research methodologies (O’Flaherty, Hunt, and Manseau 2008).

Experiences addressing the issues we have laid out invite considerable contestation, including institutional and ideological resistance. Even as more mainstream STEM researchers recognize conflict and uncertainty as necessary in the promotion and negotiation of deep learning and interdisciplinary interactions (Sillitoe 2004), critical conversations among interdisciplinary and settler colonial researchers are minimally cultivated or encouraged in STEM and the academy at large.

Storying knowledge production

We now turn to our efforts to cultivate dialog in the intercultural contact zone through the design and instruction of a STEM course module titled “Ways of Knowing.” To situate the data, we tell our own stories as critical for engaging in decolonial research (Brayboy, Gough, Leonard, Roehl and Solyom 2012). Mvskoke/Creek scholar K. T. Lomawaima stated, “the personal, is professional, is political” (Personal communication 2013). This stance highlights the relationship we have with our work and calls scholars to “restory” academic methods as a decolonial acts (Corntassel 2009) that decenter the constant reaffirmation of theory as objectively decontextualized from the situated and subjective human experience (Blodgett, Schinke, Smith, Peltier, and Pheasant 2011). As co-authors from different disciplines and positionalities, storying our coming to this research centers Indigenous experiences and methodologies as intellectually rigorous and legitimate (Sium and Ritskes 2014), even as the academy rarely recognizes them as such. Sammy is an Indigenous graduate student in the research program where this study took place, and Vanessa is a non-Indigenous faculty collaborator in a different program of study at the same university. This research was the result of traumatic experiences had by Sammy in a prestigious STEM focused interdisciplinary graduate fellowship program, Integrated ResearchFootnote 2 (IR).

Sammy’s story

My name is Sammy Matsaw. I am a husband, father, a member of an extended family, an enrolled member of the Shoshone-Bannock, my father’s tribe, and I maintain connections with my mother’s tribe the Oglala Lakota. My main attraction to the interdisciplinary program, Integrated Research (IR), a program that spans STEM and social sciences was inspired by my commitment to cultural change in academy. Culture was of interest to me, and I wanted to be involved in projects in the Columbia River basin and expanding to other places and peoples. In the summer of 2015, I moved with my family to begin my studies as an IR fellow with a cohort less than a dozen graduate students. After a summer internship, I begin to experience a jarring level of conflict as I began coursework in fall 2015.

In the fall semester, my cohort took a required course in interdisciplinary water resources exposing us to different views on water issues from many disciplines. Our class assignment was to work with local watershed conflict involving an off-reservation town, Tribal land, and various county, state, federal, and private interests. Beyond the interdisciplinary academic aspects of this project, I saw significant intersectionality between race, class, educated, gendered societies, and cultures in decision making about watershed management. As my colleagues and I balanced provocative wording in our research questions such as, “ecosystem services,” “stakeholders,” and “resilience,” with discussion of treaty rights, Indigenous sovereignty, or the power imbalance which frames tribes’ legal struggles over water, I raised concerns to the sensitivity of the subject matter of tribal sovereignty only to be disregarded by my peers. These experiences were amplified over the winter break when IR required students to travel to South America to complete coursework with colleagues, where we developed another interdisciplinary project. Again, I experienced lateral and hierarchical violence from both peers and non-Indigenous faculty when I called out issues of colonization, power imbalance, and voiced Indigenous knowledges.

In spring 2016, I worked to develop an Indigenous centered research proposal. In so many words, I was given the impression that Indigenous centered research was pushing against the norm, and outside the scope of my program of study. The delegitimization of my experiences and research commitments caused me significant internal and external tension. Escalating micro-aggressions directed toward me in small group peer work and in-class comments eventually required outside mediation. At the time, I was struggling to bring the discussion back to the professional sphere. I reached out to faculty members in my program, in hopes of finding support to navigate the complex terrain without reducing the conflict to singularly “personal” issues. Although no comprehensive meeting materialized, some headway was made with my program’s lead faculty where a small handful of faculty members acknowledged that the conflicts of perspective, epistemology, and accountability brought to the surface with my focus on Indigenous knowledge required deeper attention.

After months of turmoil, I reached out to Vanessa hoping that she could act as a cultural broker. New to my doctoral studies and managing balance between family and fulltime studies, I realized that on my own I could not communicate the damaging disconnects that were occurring, although I knew they were real. Understanding how to address issues that were deeply conflicting my identity, while providing recourses to current and future interdisciplinary researchers, seemed the best route to encourage growth and provide me with some respite in the difficult space of my interdisciplinary STEM graduate program.

Vanessa’s story

I had been aware of Sammy’s work and research interests since 2015 through faculty colleagues who celebrated his acceptance into a top graduate fellowship. I was excited by the prospects of expanding space for Indigenous science in the academy. My research area is Indigenous education. I am Euro-American, and my work and family are connected to Indigenous communities in the USA (through marriage and children) and Latin America (through work). When Sammy approached me in the spring of 2016 to discuss the turmoil, he was dealing with in the IR fellowship program, I was somewhat unsurprised. I was unsurprised because my research centers on power in knowledge production, specifically Indigeneity and colonialism; thus, the silencing of Indigenous realities in STEM fields was known to me. The conflict he described was textbook in its phenomenon, mirroring the micro- and macro-interactions of symbolic violence and Western hegemony well documented through histories of Indigenous education, policy studies, and critical social theory. Yet, as Sammy recounted being told his ideas and methodologies were “not science”, the personal and reverberating nature of the injustice was appalling. Over coffee, Sammy asked me to become involved with the IR program and laid out his ideas for how to do so.

As an untenured professor specializing in educational anthropology in a College of Education, I was hesitant to become involved in programming outside my immediate scope of work. I additionally felt a certain reluctance to take on the “messy” work of convincing privileged scientists of the fallacy of objectivity, after all many philosophers and social scientists have written volumes on the topic, most handily disregarded by the sciences. At Sammy’s orchestrating, I entered into dialog with IR program faculty principal investigators, a faculty ally who taught the core water resource research course in which this study took place was receptive to addressing the concerns brought forth by Sammy. Following multiple discussions, it was agreed that IR would benefit from deeper attention to culture, power, and epistemology in the preparation of interdisciplinary researchers. The IR program included natural resource management projects in the Columbia River basin which includes 15 American Indian Tribe in the USA and 15 First Nations in Canada with land and water claims, so it was decided that Indigenous ways of knowing was particularly relevant for program growth. After a summer of planning, Sammy and I joined efforts to facilitate a new Ways of Knowing course module for the interdisciplinary water resources course required of all first year IR fellows.

The study

This research involved the qualitative study of a graduate student discourse in a course focused on STEM research across disciplines. The course was required for all first year IR fellows, and open to enrollment by other graduate students in interdisciplinary STEM and social science programs focused on natural resources. Influenced by the IR theme, (mentioned above), the course originally featured a module titled Ways of Knowing (WoK) that was largely focused on the history of development of the scientific method and the philosophy of science. Resulting from the incidents described above, the WoK module was redesigned for fall 2016 by Vanessa (as a faculty consultant) and Sammy (as a graduate assistant), to increase focus on Indigenous methodologies under the guidance of the course instructor (faculty member in College of Law). Other modules during the course included topics such as philosophy of science, fisheries, hydrology, and ethics in stakeholder-based research; however, the primary focus is on methods for integrating across disciplines. The WoK module was the first module of the semester, made up of seven sessions, five of which were facilitated by both Vanessa and Sammy; two were facilitated by a philosophy of science faculty expert (faculty member in College of Letters, Arts and Social Sciences). In this new module, students explored foundational scholarship by Indigenous scholars, including Cajete (2000), Barnhardt and Kawagley (2005), Deloria Jr. (2004), Kimmerer (2013), and selections from Decolonizing Methodologies (Smith 2012), and discussion of Critical Indigenous Research Methodologies (Brayboy et al. 2012). They also read historical and philosophical works on Western scientific thought by authors such as Popper (2013), Godfrey-Smith (2003). After the WoK module, students participated in interdisciplinary research teams and created a mock proposal to manage watershed issues with a local Indigenous community (neither Author 1 or 2 were involved in designing this proposal; however, the project was originally suggested by the Office of Legal Counsel for the Tribe involved and was developed with input from Tribal staff as well as researchers with permission to do research in collaboration with the Tribe). A final session in the WoK module occurred at the end of the semester, where we returned to the course to “check-in” on connections between WoK and other course activities.

Of the fifteen students enrolled in the course, seven agreed to participate in this study. Two additional participants sat in on the new WoK module, having taken the full course the year prior as members of Sammy’s IR cohort, and attended all the sessions dealing with Indigenous ways of knowing. They also agreed to participate in the study. Demographically, the nine participants can be described by the following general categories:

  • One Masters level student and eight Doctoral level students

  • Seven IR fellows and two non-IR fellows

  • Seven female and two male

  • Eight Euro-American/White and one Filipina/non-White

  • All participants were between the ages of 25–45.

The data set consisted of three written course reflections, called “process reflections,” ethnographic fieldnotes from teaching sessions, and one post-course in-depth interview (Charmaz 2003). The written reflections were required assignments during the WoK module. Students were asked to synthesize the readings around probing open-ended questions framed by us and the readings we assigned. Process reflections prompts included:

  • How do the readings challenge your ideas about what counts as science?; How do the readings stretch your current intellectual/disciplinary/methodological understanding?

  • How can Indigenous science inform Western science?

  • What value do you see in the intersections of diverse knowledge systems and its potential for confronting complex problems?

Upon culmination of the course, consenting participants were invited to a semi-structured focus group interview on their perceived relevance of the WoK module for their future research. Five of the nine students, all female, met with Vanessa for an interview. Four of the consenting participants were unable to meet—two cited time constraints and two others did not offer explanation for non-participation in the interviews. In analyzing the data, we were interested in understanding how students discourse models about Indigenous ways of knowing was reflected or re-framed through students’ written and “on the spot” spoken assemblages when discussing the application of course content. Reflections and interview transcriptions were coded using a multi-step grounded theory analysis (Charmaz and Belgrave 2012) to identify themes in student discourses. Fieldnotes from course meetings and personal memos from data analysis were consulted to triangulate and refine our understanding of key themes.

Possibility and constraints: from “so much more to science” to “the crap [of] history”

Our findings indicated that mainstream STEM graduate students required to participate in the WoK module were both informed and troubled by study of Indigenous methodologies, sometimes simultaneously. We present the complexities embedded in student discourses as they processed new information and articulated “take-aways” from the WoK module in two main themes: (a) Science as More Expansive: Reflexivity and Interpersonal Dilemmas; and (b) Grappling with power and settler colonial discomfort. Each theme illuminates emergent tensions and opportunities that describe what science and learning cognition scholars Manz and Suárez (2018) refer to as scientific and pedagogical uncertainty, a liminal space of meaningful learning where researchers negotiate and manage uncertainty to more deeply understand how the world works. Findings reveal how WoK provoked a space of productive uncertainty, fraught with tensions and pushback, but even so, may have opened doors to critical decolonizing engagements in interdisciplinary research.

Science as more expansive: reflexivity and interpersonal dilemmas

As students processed the new reading materials, many reflected on what they described as a lack of available space in the scientific method to analyze self, others, and relationships between human and humans with non-humans, as having a legitimate place in processes of scientific knowledge production. Students reported study of different ways of knowing triggered self-reflection of subjectivity, questioning of positivism, and invited participants to examine the normative ontological assumptions embedded in Western science. During the course module itself, graduate students performed their uncertainty with the content through their tentativeness to speak up during whole class discussions. This was rare behavior as advanced graduate students in this course are accustomed to active verbal participation. Vanessa would often use humor to soften the collective anxiety, paired with lengthy “wait time” to allow students to formulate their thoughts. One student described the emotional discomfort of speaking up when feeling outside of one’s element as “putting your life on the line!” The unease in having one’s worldview turned upside down expands students’ notions of science. This was articulated first with an inward gaze of self-reflection and interpersonal relationships. Secondly, students operationalized what they considered to be science work in light of multiple ways of knowing.

Self-reflection and interpersonal relationships

Beatrice, a doctoral student studying social and legal issues in watershed management, described being challenged to embrace the possibilities in different ways of knowing, as “a kind of personal work, requiring ongoing self-reflection and questioning of assumptions.” Ruby, a doctoral student integrating biology, hydrology, and anthropology in watershed management, similarly identified WoK as an awakening which caused her to question the foundation of her own worldview:

[WoK made me question] what does it mean for the way that you see the world, and what is your conditioning, and how does this apply from your perspective, not just, like, the ways of knowing of other people, but what does that actually mean for the assumptions that you bring into this world. (Ruby, post-course interview)

Students, like Beatrice and Ruby, underscored reflexivity as a response to WoK’s epistemological study and began to identify their own socialization and cultured way of thinking as intimately related to their understanding of research.

WoK was cited as expanding their own notion of science to include, or be responsive to gendered identities, spiritual needs, or recognizing holism outside of themselves. Gertrude, an international student from the Philippines finishing a Masters in natural resource management wrote, “the readings have definitely challenged my understanding of science to a great extent […], open[ing] my senses to the reality that being scientific does not rule all the time in all cultures (process reflection #1). Her incorporation of WoK content was described as multidimensional—”open[ning] my senses”—and as a potential conceptual interruption of hegemonic processes—”being scientific does not rule all the time in all cultures”. Other students described this multidimensionality as refreshing, such as Molly stated in her post-course interview:

I didn’t really think that much about Western Science versus Indigenous Science. And in general, the word Science became so much more than it was to me. In terms of the scientific method—and I had taught K-12 education and I was using the scientific method. Before this class, it was all peachy keen. I still love the scientific method, but there is so much more to science and observation than there was…than I [had] realized! (Molly, post-course interview)

Molly’s reflection on the ways Indigenous knowledge systems enriched her understanding of the natural world positioned multidimensionality within her research imaginary and allowed her to question institutionalized structures of knowing, such as the scientific method. Both comments by Molly and Gertrude situate different ways of knowing as connected to context and social landscapes, whereby no perspective in science can be viewed as neutral or cultureless (Bang and Medin 2010). As these women imagined themselves and “knowing” in an ongoing continuum, their reflexivity introduced space for divergent ways of knowing as productive or potentially intergrateable, instead of threatening and less than.

Reflexive analysis of self also brought out reflections on the nature of collaboration, such as intercultural collaborations, and collaborations between researchers and communities (e.g., non-researchers). As many of the course readings dealt with power, coloniality, and Indigenous methodologies, engaging analysis of interdisciplinary collaborations (a required component of the overall course), data showed participants applying WoK content to interpersonal or inter-group tensions they perceived, or imagined dealing with when collaborating with non-academics, or specialists from other areas. WoK was reflected as “helpful” with pragmatic tensions of cross-cultural conflict and collaboration, such as the need “to figure out new ways to communicate, […] exploring worldviews and alternate ways of knowing is the obvious direction ahead, but a very challenging way ahead, too,” (Cassie, post-course interview).

Operationalizing the in-between: opportunity/constraint

Graduate students complicated the binary between the subjective self and the objective narrative of scientific knowledge through replacing self in science processes; however, discourses of possibility hovered over “in-between” spaces of ambiguity that did not directly consider topographies of power in knowledge production. Participants generally identified WoK content as important, but “very challenging.” When participants described Indigenous ways of knowing, or ways of knowing not of the academy, they often treated these knowledge systems as existing in neutral contexts. As such, beyond self-reflection, the dynamics of sociohistorical consideration were commonly left in abstraction or glossed through students applied notions of WoK. Barry, a White male studying ecosystems exchanges, underscored this phenomenon through his embrace of Indigenous knowledge while simultaneously neutralizing the distinctiveness between knowledge systems within contexts of power:

…neither [Indigenous knowledge or scientific knowledge] stands out to me as the more superior or more refined system, I am happy to say. They seem to have their strengths and weaknesses when addressing a variety of complex problems. […]it is through integration that I believe that we gain the most footing in science and how we regard the truth. (Barry, process reflection #2)

Barry’s version of integration appears to tolerate difference as long as it is useful to gain footing in science, e.g., “truth,” and the scientific enterprise. His tone of confidence offers no recognition of the deep and detailed work required when “such divergent systems coexist in the same person, organizations, or community” (Barnhardt and Kawagley 2005, p. 9). According to other students, examining different knowledge systems “expos[ed] hidden assumptions” in science; however, their articulation beyond a need for “on-going self-reflection” and/or a desire to minimize immediate conflict in scientific research, was either not articulated or undeveloped. Science was most frequently positioned as capable of expanding, absorbing or responding to non-Western ways of knowing, yet what that would look like “in action” remained in the underdefined in-between. These seemly innocuous descriptors reposition science as politically neutral Euro-universalism (Tuck, McKenzie and McCoy 2014), and the center piece for expansion, enriched by reflexivity and interpersonal communication, rather than disrupted or exploded.

Grappling with power and settler colonial discomfort

In the spectrum of STEM research, students involved in the WoK module and the IR fellows’ program could be identified as “researchers with good intentions.” Their research interests ranged from addressing deforestation in fragile ecosystems, to improve clean water access for communities impacted by poverty. Not a single student directly spoke in racial or xenophobic epithets, nor directly endorsed ongoing occupation of stolen Indigenous lands. In narratives of researchers with good intensions, the examination of structural and interpersonal violence proliferated by Western research toward Indigenous peoples, communities, lands, and lifeforms, incited in students a desire to recoil or feelings of fatigue. Students oscillated between recognition or neutralizing the conflict presented by epistemic variation in contexts of asymmetrical power. At times participants located Eurocentric bias in Western science; yet, nearly all struggled to articulate the multileveled operations of power—structural, discursive, interpersonal—without abstraction or invisibilization of White supremacy and/or settler colonial dynamics. Neutralizing statements, such as Derrick’s suggestion to minimize conflict in the research process could be very simplistic—“Understand worldviews and build relationships. The rest will occur naturally” (Reflection #3); or statements that recoiled from accountability, such as Ruby’s response to Smith’s (2012) inditement of imperialism in the scientific enterprise—“…there were moments when I got frustrated […] I think it came out in some of my writings, but I was like ‘well, we’re all not the same’!” (Ruby interview)—were common ways power was skirted in students externalized mental processing about WoK content.

Settler colonial guilt and conflict

Tensions between recoiling from the on-the-ground flow of power in the academy, and an emotional/moral desire to focus on good intentions, were captured in statements by repeated sentiments to move beyond the “burden” of White guilt/blame in contemporary and future research engagements. Words and phrases such as—“pain,” “it pains me,” “I find it very painful,” and “hurting” appeared in nearly every final process reflection dealing with readings by Smith (2012) and Critical Indigenous Research Methodologies (Brayboy, et al. 2012). The words “struggle”, “grapple”, “difficult”, and “challenge” were consistently used to describe imagined actions to promote collaboration in the face of knowledge-power divides. These discursive settler colonial moves to innocence (Tuck and Yang 2012) unequivocally avoided naming Indigenous land removal, and the ongoing commodification of Indigenous land, as central pillars of the scientific enterprise.

Moments of clearly naming the tensions between incommensurable frameworks were infrequent. Only Gertrude, a citizen of the Philippines and the only non-White graduate student in the course, concretely identified processes of hegemony in the context of her work with Indigenous communities in the Philippines. In a written process reflection, she described the nature of structural inequities from the point of view of an Indigenous researcher:

If I consider myself an Indigenous student researcher, I may have the autonomy to look for the research topic which I believe would benefit my indigenous community, but I may not have the choice to do my research in a different way, one that considers indigenous knowledge generation. Here is where power comes in, the power to pursue what one really desires in a research process versus the power of what others believe is necessary or acceptable in a research process. (Gertrude, process reflection #3)

Her analysis recognizes Indigenous intellectual autonomy and its denial within academic settings. Indeed, her succinct description of hegemony mirrored what Sammy experienced as an Indigenous ecologist up to the point of this module. Gertrude, well-schooled in Eurocentric science methodologies in her home country, did not go so far as to place herself or her research directly within contexts of such conflict. Her reflection underscored tension, rather than guilt, but offered no action.

Moves to innocence

Settler colonial “moves to innocence” (Tuck and Yang 2012) were subtle yet recurring positionings performed by students. Frequent desire to dislocate oneself from the past, as seen in Derrick’s response to Smith’s claim that research is a dirty word—“I find it hard not to look past the inexcusable actions of the past and see the real merit in a cause” (Reflection #3)—was a repeated type of repositionings expressed in students’ discourses. “Moves to innocence” were not mere reflections of ignorance, they were complex internal/external negotiations to make settler occupation invisible (Tuck and Yang 2012), while also grappling with how to maintain the identity of socially conscious researchers within a contemporary context. Settler colonial moves to innocence were complex and not expressed evenly or in one single moment. Molly’s grappling with power across three moments in the module—Process Reflection #3, an exchange during a module discussion, and her post-course interview—demonstrates the complexities of these settler moves to innocence which worked to articulate a stance in support of Indigenous and decolonizing methodologies while reproducing the nascent structures of settler colonial logics.

Moment 1: I’m deeply saddened by the fact that the “researchers” who came before me have ruined it for the good ones (which I like to consider myself). […] I am the kind of researcher whose research objectives parallel the ideals of indigenous people and shines a spotlight on the folly of white-men. (Molly, process reflection #3)

Moment 2: Today, discussion examined the coloniality of contemporary scientific research practices alongside Indigenous paradigms of mutually beneficial partnerships in research and natural resource management. As students struggled to conceptualize the paradigmatic shift called for by Linda T. Smith and other critical Indigenous scholars, Sammy offered evidence from his vast experience working with natural resource management in the region. He shared his empirical observation that land which is co-managed (e.g. managed in collaboration with tribal, state and federal entities) displays characteristics of greater health in comparison to land which is held by a singular commercial entity (e.g. private farming, state, commercial lands, etc.). [Molly], intently focused, raised her hand and asked what peer-reviewed articles evidenced these findings of co-management. Appearing somewhat derailed and with a momentary pause, Sammy responded “well, I was just saying,” then added, people can just drive around the region and see these differences with their own eyes. Molly waited with pen in hand looking somewhat puzzled but nodded. Momentary silence in the classroom. I collected my thoughts on the quick exchange, and asked students to consider how power moves through the ways we (as researchers) validate or discredit “empirical” observation. (Vanessa, Fieldnotes, 9/13/16)

Moment 3: I saw power as the…road block to…[accepting] Indigenous ways of knowing. It’s the powers that be that create this strict, rigid, scientific method […] preventing natural learning process. (Molly, post-course interview)

Examining, Molly’s articulations across course experiences, we see her engage in discursive moves to reposition herself not within but beyond settler colonial structures. Her statement of alliance to Indigenous interests— “I am the kind of researcher whose research objectives parallel indigenous communities,”—while simultaneously reifying academic peer-reviewed journals as arbiters of truth—”what peer-reviewed articles reference co-management?”—created contradictory “adoption[s] of nativeness” without accountability to the violent inequities of Native removal and settler colonialism (Tuck and Yang 2012). Molly, as self-described ally, referred to the history of Western scientific imperialism as “the folly of white men”, a critique that perhaps well intentioned, also functioned to reduce hundreds of years of legal and political systems such as slavery, eugenics, policies of Indian land removal, toxic waste dumping, and the forced sterilization of Indigenous women (to name a few widely documented injustices perpetuated against Indigenous peoples by federal and state policy in the US alone) to mere lack of good sense. From Molly’s aspirational model of self as a future researcher, we can project that she intends to embrace epistemic variation, but that she recognized that ‘the powers that be” obstruct equity in science. Her model of self-outside-of-context suggests she sees embraces Indigenous ways of knowing more as an “unsettled matter that neither reconciles present grievances nor forecloses future conflict” (Tuck and Yang 2012, p. 3), rather than as a conceptual and structural shift. Molly, as an example, unpacks a process of grappling on the best of terms—a STEM researcher wanting to embrace Indigenous ways of knowing—yet reveals how limited grounding in Indigenous sovereignty and frameworks of decolonization severs settler-colonial accountability and leaves material change in abstraction.

The complex layers of everyday settler move to innocence were seen in other instances to obstruct students’ abilities to make productive connections between ways of knowing, the codification of disciplines, structures of power, and researcher positionality. Yet, in a space of deep tension, grappling also appeared to open a door for future engagements in deeper grappling with coloniality. Patricia suggested such in a post-course interview:

I think we could do more to have people discuss their views, their understandings, and maybe lack of understanding…the struggle I have with the readings is just how much it was intense, it was hard, for me to grapple with just, like, the crap–the history that is sooooo difficult and sooooo ugly. And just to be like, okay, we carry that burden with us now, how do we move forward and have discussions with people who might be still just a little pissed at us? (Patricia, post-course interview)

Patricia did not clearly reject or embrace the claims of Indigenous methodologies and/or the inclusion of Indigenous ways of knowing in a binary sense, but she did name deep discomfort as a potentially productive space for navigating (and challenging) settler colonialism in STEM. Like Patricia and Molly’s reflections, tapping the interest in ongoing interpersonal and institutional engagements with the impacts of power could be leveraged to apprentice future researchers through “the crap of history” and toward more equitable interdisciplinary work with material implication. Participants candid grappling with settler-colonialism reflected broader trends that evidence a societal lack of understanding between settlers and Indigenous peoples which is “a result of centuries-long processes that favor the narratives of EuroWestern settlers over that of Indigenous peoples” (Gaudry and Lorenz 2018, p. 164).

Discussion

Our findings illuminate tensions in undertaking inequities among knowledge systems in the Eurocentric academy. Throughout the WoK module, we observed participants reflect the challenges of breaking down disciplinary silos, and the discomfort of understanding new paradigms, particularly non-Western paradigms. While many participants responded to Indigenous ways of knowing through embodied Whiteness in a settler colonial context, across the data, participants also expressed a salient understanding that objectivity, as a philosophical concept, poses limitations for understanding social and ecological complexity. In this way, WoK was a space of useful uncertainty for students, as seen in their articulations of factors which limit research from a strict science-based way of knowing. As the scientific enterprise overwhelmingly normalizes the relationship between imperialism and coloniality (Smith 2012), setting the stage for researchers to engage in co-research processes which enable communities, non-academic experts, and local people to consider their own knowledge as valuable alongside science-based knowledge is an uncertain endeavor, and is cited as challenging (O’Flaherty, Davidson-Hunt and Manseau 2008). At times in our study, even recognizing historical context as impactful to research process was rejected by participants as in the case of Derrick who rejected Smith’s (2012) critic of Western research as a “dirty word.” Participants evidenced ways that settler colonialism reverberates—“the crap of history—” and continues to frame contemporary work in STEM, albeit in subtler forms. Yet, most struggled to understand the necessity of unpacking colonial structures at work in their assumptions and research positionalities.

Throughout the findings, grappling with culturally different assumptions about the world, from the impersonal and generalizable assumptions of science-based knowledge, to the relational and empirical orientations of many Indigenous-based knowledges, were revealed to require more time, and the reallocation of planning and accountability frameworks (Armitage, Berkes, Dale,Kocho-Schellenberg and Patton 2011; O’Flaherty, Davidson-Hunt and Manseau 2008). Is it possible to project that participant self-reflection, the development of new awareness, and working through personal discomfort are all significant elements within a larger process of conceptual change? Or was the brief space of tension and uncertainty a mere blip in the research trajectory of those who will soon join the ranks of the scientific enterprise? The knowledge-power divide present in the WoK module unfortunately did not directly include space for deep understanding of discourse, intersectional identities, and researcher positionality (Crenshaw 1991). Further, the space of uncertainty was short lived and had little mechanism to systematize the new conversation presented by WoK into the students’ coursework or formalized research guidelines. Manz and Suárez write, “cycles of construction, pushback, and refinement ground the development of scientific practices” (p. 772). If the academy seeks to support researchers to engage in complex social–ecological problems, we need to treat understanding of epistemic various with the same seriousness used in rigorous scientific practice.

This work underscores a need for research preparation which embraces dialog across distinct systems of life without the assumption that different ways of knowing means conflict. To interrupt settler colonial power imbalances “we need to tell more uncomfortable stories” (Kaomea 2003, p. 23, cited in Sium and Ritskes 2014) that engender a commitment to engaging cultural difference from a place of equity, rather than resolution. Despite the pain, struggle, and confusion expressed by participants as they read Indigenous perspectives on scientific research, many simultaneously expressed a desire to participate in cross-cultural dialog. Not limited to Indigenous ways of knowing, participants identified multiple levels, and multiple systems of cross-cultural engagement critical for increasing collaborative and interdisciplinary research. Yet again, the limited scope of the WoK module did not facilitate the time and space for participants’ reflections to go beyond general discussions, unattached to specific contexts of accountability. Given the emergent tensions presented by the WoK module, a central question we asked ourselves during and after this research was: (1) Outside of the WoK module, how and whom will take up this conversation with future STEM researchers? (2) In what ways will trans/interdisciplinary equity be engaged in the application of graduate student research?

We contend that unpacking the inherent cultural production of knowledge systems is a first step toward breaking down hierarchies which support centuries of Western-centric knowledge supremacy. While understanding of different cultural systems are mediated through local interactions, institutional structures and discursive symbols are also significant for (re)framing relationships and flows of power (Foucault 1979). Participants indicated a desire to not perpetuate research wrongs of imperialism, yet, simple indication that “I am not that” did not, an does not sufficiently address systems of marginalization (Smith 2012). Given the new awarenesses and discomforts expressed by participants, our findings surface an additional question: What would encourage STEM researchers to continue to locate and analyze power inequities in science-based research? As the impetus of this module and research addressed an immediate negative experience of Indigenous scientists in interdisciplinary research programs, our sample data set suggests that “yes”—STEM researchers can gain better understanding of the operations of power in research—but faculty, programs of study, and institutions need to support them to do so, and hold them accountable to demonstrating such capacities.

Implications of this research support a call for more researchers to recognize the need to better prepare graduate students to engage in equity in interdisciplinary research. Good intensions are not enough to support the deep work of substantive changes to graduate coursework. Engagement in interdisciplinary thought and a reconceptualization of relationality must happen on many levels, not just through traditional academic silos. Clearly, if institutions aim toward the potentials of inter- and transdisciplinarity, researchers would benefit significantly from an expanded way of thinking, and different ways of knowing. We believe methodologies are not incommensurable (Walter and Andersen 2013), and that by bringing to attention deeper understanding of distinct knowledge systems and asymmetrical power relations we can influence the trajectory of research methodologies in hopeful ways (Brayboy, Gough, Leonard, Roehl and Solyom 2012). Involvement in such research changes needs to be action oriented, promoting cooperative and collaborative efforts of inquiry in which power is viewed as a shared resource, and “can serve an important role in (re)defining the nature, scope, and function of research such that needs of communities can be addressed in meaningful, productive, and respectful ways” (Brayboy, Gough, Leonard, Roehl and Solyom 2012, p. 431). Because axiological, ontological and epistemological assumptions shape research methodologies, and inform distinct ways of knowing, we contend that if the academy continues to do little to prepare current and future researchers with tools to engage equitable power relationships in complex problem-solving, institutions will inherently limit interdisciplinary possibilities. Social–ecological systems are complex and dynamic necessitating the ideas, input and work of many hands. Until understanding of disciplines is also applied to knowledge systems, and the cultured ontological and epistemological underpinnings of all forms of thought, researching environmental complexity, such as Indigenous knowledge and TEK, will be fraught with limited reflections of the natural environment (e.g., agentic forms and more-than-human kinds). Creating space for Indigenous and other ways of knowing is certainly an issue of equity and cultural survival for Indigenous peoples, and arguably all peoples. With this, we ask current and future researchers to invest in the radical change needed to further these efforts.