How traditional knowledge can help improve marine conservation management in the Northern Gulf of Mexico.

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Marine and land management practices built on western ideals have affected the livelihoods of Indigenous groups like the Cucapá peoples from the Colorado River delta in the Northern Gulf of California, Mexico, particularly their traditional fishing activities. To better protect natural resources and improve the Cucapás’ livelihoods, land and marine conservation managers need to change their approaches to economics and natural resources management.

The co-production of new processes where Indigenous and western practices, institutions, and worldviews work together, stimulating new adaptive management methods, and collaborating respectfully offers a new natural resources management model. Land and marine managers need to go beyond consulting Indigenous communities or using –exploiting– their expertise and found new ways of cooperation. The lessons from the exercises described below could assist land and marine managers in northern Mexico in integrating the local and traditional knowledge of fisherfolks to create novel management practices.

Understanding the differences between western and Indigenous perspectives on ethics applied to animals, plants, and nature in general, is the first step to creating new management practices. For that, we need to break with conventional –western– policies and develop community-driven solutions to the social and environmental challenges faced by the communities development practitioners serve. By shifting from a mechanistic to a relational conceptual framework, there is an opportunity to change perceptions and ways of doing development practice, particularly natural resources management. 

In general, western culture recognizes a subjugation of nonhumans to humans that has its roots in the Christian rationale in the eighteenth century that it is "God's will that man exploits nature for his proper end" (Pugliese Citing Whyte in Puglise, 2013, p. 40). Consequently, during the last two centuries, the dominant western thought has established a division between man and nature, giving some the power to use violence to appropriate natural resources. This separation has given rise to the commodification of goods, significantly impacting our natural resources and displacing local and Indigenous peoples. 

Individualistic consumption patterns have led to water shortages, increased greenhouse gases, loss of biodiversity, and droughts, among other natural disasters. Although conventional –western– philosophy implemented solutions for the depletion of natural resources in the shape of natural protected areas, these areas are still based on the scientific method that sees a world where humans are separate from nature. 

In contrast, many American Indian cultures, and other Indigenous peoples worldwide, extend their web of relationships to include nonhuman beings, such as animals and plants, recognizing them as nonhuman persons with decision-making agency. An example is the tradition of the Tsilhqot'in First Nation members, who treat wild horses as neighbors. They recognize horses as individuals living in family groups and go beyond by considering them part of their own family. Practices such as sharing the harvest with family members and nonhuman relatives to establish kinship, reciprocity, and generosity are other examples of Native traditions not commonly seen in western cultures. The Honorable Harvest, conducted by members of the Potawatomi Nation, is a harvest method where members take half of the harvest and leave half in the field for their nonhuman neighbors. These and other examples can be found in Bhattacharyya and Slocombe (2017), Fox et al. (2017), Kimmerer (2013), and Reo and Whyte (2012). 

One example of the co-production of management practices between traditional knowledge and western science is the Ecological Restoration on the White Mountain Apache Reservation project in Arizona. The project focuses on the connection between human health and land health as a condition of the ecosystem's health; it points out that people are nature's primary caretakers and are responsible for its failure or success. Western Apaches understand land and water as related entities with cultural and spiritual ways of knowing and doing. Another example is the project Restoration of the Limahuali Valley in Kauai, Hawaii. It focuses on bioecological restoration and its use in understanding plants' value for the Hā'ena community in Hawaii. The case shows how crucial cultural interactions with the forest are when restoring forests. Without human intervention, the cultural landscape doesn't exist—the use of plants for food, medicine, handicrafts, timber, or spiritual practices have changed the landscape for centuries. A third example is the project Restoration of the Onondaga Lake. The project describes the interconnectivity between humans and nonhumans. In this example, everyone benefits and takes care of each other, including soil, grasses, berries, ants, bugs, birds, deer, and of course, humans. All of which lead to a sustainable ecosystem. 

The three examples present a holistic approach to natural resources management unique to Indigenous communities. The Cucapá's traditional knowledge, gathered for centuries, is very similar in its approach to non-human beings. The Cucapá people’s knowledge could include species' ecology and behavior and habitat conditions —they know where and when to fish, identify migration routes and the habitats where target species feed, spawn and recruit, and connect essential habitats within the seascape, among others. Also, local fishers possess historical data passed from generation to generation to feed the models scientists use to predict future population trends —crucial data for managing marine species populations and understanding their spatial and seasonal movements (Butler et al., 2012; Raymond-Yacobyan et al., 2017, Basurto, 2005; Basurto and Coleman, 2010; and Hamilton and Walter, 1999. 

The Cucapá fisherfolks could provide an inclusive, more integrated vision of human and nature interactions. This vision involves social, ecological, and economic factors, including fishers designing and applying fisheries management plans. Incorporating traditional knowledge can lead to more informed, equitable, and effective policy and management practices. An open and transparent process could strengthen and empower local fishers and improve ecosystem-based fisheries management frameworks. Finally, traditional knowledge offers baseline information on local ecologies, including what is present in the local ecosystems and its temporal and spatial patterning. It offers sociocultural aspects of the knowledge holders (Hamilton and Walter, 1999).

The Western Apaches from the White Mountain Apache Reservation in Arizona, the Hā'ena community from the Limahuali Valley in Kauai, Hawaii, the Haudenosaunee people from the Onondaga Lake in New York and the Cucapás from the Colorado River delta in Mexico, share three main aspects: 1) Access to land and water is critical for their livelihoods, 2) Relationality and reciprocity are crucial in their worldviews, including passing information from elders to youth. Also, these relationships go beyond humans and into nonhumans, 3) Indigenous communities use the interactions of collaboration and dependency between humans and nonhumans to provide new perspectives for designing natural resources management practices.

While western ethics emphasizes human individuality and dominance over nature, Indigenous ethics advocates establishing genuine relationships with all creation. Respect for animals and plants may take many forms, including not taking more than we need, giving back, sharing with humans and nonhumans, and not wasting. In that sense, traditional knowledge reflects the unique interactions between human communities and their environment that scientific models do not possess. It is time for scientists, land managers, and development practitioners to inform their practices with Indigenous perspectives –a different view and way of knowing and doing. By learning from each other and sharing how our cultures relate to nature, we could build new frameworks for working together.

 

References

  • Basurto, Xavier. 2005. How Locally Designed Access and Use Controls Can Prevent the Tragedy of the Commons in a Mexican Small-Scale Fishing Community. In Society & Natural Resources: An International Journal, 18:7, 643-659, DOI: 10.1080/08941920590959631
  • Basurto, Xavier, and Eric Coleman. 2010. Institutional and ecological interplay for successful self-governance of community-based fisheries. In Ecological Economics 69 (2010) 1094–1103.
  • Bhattacharyya, Jonaki, and Scott Slocombe. 2017. "Animal Agency: Wildlife Management from a Kincentric Perspective." Ecosphere 8 (10): e01978. 10.1002/ecs2.1978
  • Butler, J. R. A., A. Tawake, T. Skewes, L. Tawake, and V. McGrath. 2012. Integrating traditional ecological knowledge and fisheries management in the Torres Strait, Australia: the catalytic role of turtles and dugong as cultural keystone species. Ecology and Society 17(4): 34.http://dx.doi.org/10.5751/ES-05165-170434
  • Fox, Coleen A., Nicholas James Reo, Dale A. Turner, JoAnne Cook, Frank Dituri, Brett Fessell, James Jenkins, Aimee Johnson, Terina M. Rakena, and Chris Riley. 2017. The River is Us; the River is in our Veins: Re-Defining River Restoration in Three Indigenous Communities; Sustainability Science 12 (4): 521-533.
  • Hamilton, Richard, and Richard Walter. 1999. Indigenous ecological knowledge and its role in fisheries research design: A case study from Roviana Lagoon, Western Province, Solomon Islands. SPC Traditional Marine Resource Management and Knowledge Information Bulletin #11 – September 1999, 13-25.
  • Kimmerer, Robin. 2013. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teaching of Plants. Milkweed Editions.
  • Pugliese, Joseph. 2013. "Biopolitical Caesurae of State Violence." In State Violence and the Execution of Law: Biopolitical Casurae of Torture, Black Sites, Drone, by Joseph Pugliese, 33-55. Abingdon and New York: Routledge.
  • Raymond-Yakoubiana, Julie, Brenden Raymond-Yakoubian, and Catherine Moncrieff. 2017. The incorporation of traditional knowledge into Alaska federal fisheries management. Marine Policy 78, 132–142. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.marpol.2016.12.024
  • Reo, Nicholas James, and Kyle Powys Whyte. 2012. "Hunting and Morality as Elements of Traditional Ecological Knowledge." Human Ecology 40 (1): 15-27.