Graduate student Larissa Juip has a unique opportunity for a student to work with her on “Applying an Indigenous Methodology: Storying a Tribal Landscape System.” Indigenous storywork, as described by Jo-ann Archibald (2008), combines traditional and life-experience stories to produce a holistic narrative by building “on the storywork teachings of respect, reverence, responsibility, reciprocity, holism, interrelatedness, and synergy.”
These stories recognize different ways of knowing, such as those present in Indigenous communities and they often reflect a great emphasis on place-based knowledge and relationships. This storywork project is designed to complement a National Science Foundation research project (Tribal Landscape Systems) being conducted in partnership with the Keweenaw Bay Indian Community (KBIC), Keweenaw Bay Natural Resources, Great Lakes Fish and Wildlife Commission (GLIFWC), and Michigan Tech researchers.
Storywork has great potential to serve as an important method and pedagogy to reflect on responsibilities of Indigenous-University partnerships. Students will assist her in producing stories shared by partners in this project that reflect place-based connections and relationships as they form or are strengthened through research. The collection of stories shared by partners will become an iterative process that sheds light on the importance of place-based knowledge within the research project.
This project is funded through an NSF-CNH2 (Convergence Research: Bridging Knowledge Systems and Expertise for Understanding the Dynamics of a Contaminated Tribal Landscape System) and is part of a larger undergraduate research initiative in Social Sciences, the Undergraduate Program for Exploration and Research in Social Sciences (UPERSS).
Check out the other opportunities that include:
- Ethnic Organization and Diaspora Engagement in the Keweenaw (Kathryn Hannum, SS)
- Developing a University Partnership offering Educational / Cultural Outreach to State Prison Inmates housed in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan (Susanna Peters, SS)
- Food-Based Plants as Living Heritage (Mark Rhodes, SS)
- Michigan Tech Inventory of Historic Scientific Instruments (IHSI) (Steven Walton, SS)
- Historic Cemeteries: Mapping, Management, and Memory (Timothy Scarlett, SS)