Protecting Washington's marine environments: tribal perspective

Edward A. Whitesell, The Evergreen State College
$52,361

The proposed research is a collaborative project of Dr. Edward A. Whitesell (PI), Faculty Member of The Evergreen State College and Associate of the Northwest Indian Applied Research Institute and Mr. Preston Hardison of the Tulalip Tribes, Department of Natural Resources. It is both a broad examination of how marine protected areas (MPAs) affect tribal communities and an in-depth study of traditional environmental knowledge (TEK) of marine environments. The purpose is to improve the efficacy and design of MPAs as conservation tools by rectifying a significant lacuna in current understanding about the socio-cultural systems that protected areas depend upon for their long-term success.

Even though the efficacy of any conservation policy depends upon the degree to which it harmonizes with the legal rights, needs and desires of affected populations, there is only a poor and fragmentary understanding, to date, of how MPAs affect tribal rights and interests in the Pacific Northwest. Since the late nineteenth century, the United States has played a leading role in the establishment of protected areas and yet, as important as these areas are, their history has come under increasing criticism for a common failure to adequately consider and respect the rights and values of native peoples. We now have an historic opportunity to carefully examine how MPAs affect Native American rights and interests, while this component of our protected area systems is in a relatively early stage of expansion and consolidation. In this way, MPAs may proceed in a direction that serves both conservation objectives and socio-cultural needs.

Current data on traditional marine tenure and marine cultural resources, particularly in Puget Sound, are insufficient to allow for the incorporation of tribal values into MPA planning and implementation. This research project, will expand the Cultural Stories Project of the Tulalip Tribes to interview elders about marine resources, historical uses of marine environments, and associated traditional knowledge in order to develop a model data set for the development of an MPA design that accounts for traditional marine tenure. This is expected to generate a model cultural impact assessment process that tribes can use in working with MPA development efforts. There are also many significant issues to be addressed concerning the sensitivity of exchanging tribal information with government agencies and MPA stakeholders for use in MPA design and management. This will be addressed through the development of information policy guidelines on access to tribal environmental data and traditional knowledge.

The research will identify patterns in regional MPA/tribal relations that can indicate the most reliable predictors of positive and neutral outcomes for tribes in the future development and management of MPA systems. This part of the study will be conducted through the use of interviews and questionnaires, along with secondary research of published and unpublished documents. It will be comprehensive in scope, surveying MPA/tribal relations throughout the state of Washington, but it will also examine several case studies. The results will be published and also made available to scholars and managers through conference presentations and in other forums. The Tulalip Tribes' Cultural Stories Project uses interviews with elders and independent historical data to reconstruct scenarios for past, present and future desired states the elders have for traditional resources. The location and ecological and life history characteristics of marine cultural resources will be mapped using the geographic information system ArcInfo 8, and will be correlated with forecasts made using biophysical models of watershed and shoreline processes developed at the Tulalip Tribes. The Cultural Stories methodology will be made freely available to other tribes and organizations as a model of best cases for incorporating tribal perspectives and traditional knowledge into MPA management. This is vital to the effectiveness of marine protected areas as conservation tools because it will facilitate the incorporation of TEK into protected area design and management and it will also lay the foundatWhiion for the development of cultural impact assessment methodologies in the future.

Whitesell, E. A., F. Wilshusen Schroeder, and P. Hardison. 2007. Protecting
Washington's Marine Environments: Tribal Perspectives. Final report to the
SeaDoc Society. Available as pdf