Our “Navigating the New Arctic” grant from the US National Science Foundation is based at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in strong partnership with Alaska Pacific University in Anchorage, the University of Alaska Fairbanks, and the University of South Carolina. Most importantly, this research is a co-production of a plan laid out with people in the Villages of Kongiganak and Mekoryuk, Alaska.
We honor and acknowledge the Indigenous peoples, nations, and traditional territories of the lands in which the project participants reside. These include the traditional territories and ancestral homelands of the Dena’ina people (APU), the Dena people of the lower Tanana River (UAF), the Yup’ik/Cup’ik people of the lower Yukon and Kuskokwim Rivers, and the people of the lands of the Nipmuc, Nonotuck, and Pocumtuc surrounding the University of Massachusetts Amherst. We also acknowledge that the Columbia campus of the University of South Carolina occupies the traditional and ancestral land of the Cherokee and Congaree People. This is also land on which enslaved people lived and worked and that was transformed into the campus of the University of South Carolina through convict labor.
We have a strong connection with the NSF Navigating the New Arctic program (through our partners at APU) that supports research conducted on traditional territories and contemporary and ancestral homelands of Indigenous peoples living across the Arctic, who have stewarded and lived in relationship with these lands and waters since time immemorial.
We acknowledge the role that universities and Arctic research has played, historically and into the present, in disrupting the land relations of Indigenous peoples. We support conversations that are happening within Arctic research on centering equity in research, in supporting Indigenous leadership in research, and in developing capacity for reciprocity on the part of non-Indigenous researchers who are guests and visitors in the Arctic.
We encourage Arctic funded researchers to incorporate a land acknowledgement into their work for the traditional lands and territories where their research is conducted as a first step in supporting a greater awareness of Indigenous land relations. In addition, we encourage researchers to work towards increasing equity within their own research projects as an important foundation for knowledge co-production and weaving knowledge systems together to develop new insights about the changing Arctic.