Investigating best practice : doctoral fieldwork experiences with and without Indigenous communities in settler-colonial societies

Through the sharing of personal commentaries about our doctoral fieldwork experiences, this paper contributes to decolonial literatures about academic knowledge generation in settler-colonial societies. The commentaries each illustrate shifting understandings of our roles in perpetuating the colonial knowledge-violence and material power of the academy, and our personal ethics to do something useful in response. Such experiences are often unreported or under reported for diverse reasons. Seeking to address injustice, and to move away from extractive research relationships, we highlight four matters: consent and risk; the resource gap in research collaborations; the consequences of not collaborating with Indigenous people; and, the importance of examining knowledge frames. As constrained and compromised as it is, we argue the doctoral experience is an important opportunity for decolonising the academy. Whilst we appreciate that this paper does not address the material circumstances that perpetuate colonial privilege, we go beyond descriptive reflection to offer prescriptions for change

Investigating Best Practice: Doctoral Fieldwork Experiences With and Without Indigenous Communities in Settler-colonial Societies

Through the sharing of personal commentaries about our doctoral fieldwork experiences, this paper contributes to decolonial literatures about academic knowledge generation in settler-colonial societies. The commentaries each illustrate shifting understandings of our roles in perpetuating the colonial knowledge-violence and material power of the academy, and our personal ethics to do something useful in response. Such experiences are often unreported or under reported for diverse reasons. Seeking to address injustice, and to move away from extractive research relationships, we highlight four matters: consent and risk; the resource gap in research collaborations; the consequences of not collaborating with Indigenous people; and, the importance of examining knowledge frames. As constrained and compromised as it is, we argue the doctoral experience is an important opportunity for decolonising the academy. Whilst we appreciate that this paper does not address the material circumstances that perpetuate colonial privilege, we go beyond descriptive reflection to offer prescriptions for change

Thirsty for Justice: A People's Blueprint for California Water

The report's first chapter analyzes the origins of environmental discrimination in California water policy. After an overview of how low income communities and communities of color have been historically left out of California water management, we analyze political, economic and social trends that produce the current exclusionary system and emerging policies and technologies that could further harm low-income communities and communities of color.In the second chapter, we provide an overview of what we term "water governance": who controls water supply and quality and what agencies are responsible for ensuring that people have enough clean water. We explain the current system of water governance, examine changing patterns in control over water, and provide examples of communities that face profound barriers to participating in water decisions. We conclude by discussing barriers within water regulatory entities that prevent community voices from entering into water decision-making.In the third chapter, we provide a picture of water-related environmental injustices that low-income communities and communities of color face on a daily basis. These communities' lack of access to safe, affordable drinking water and healthy watersheds exemplifies the health burdens many communities bear as a result of California's water policies.Our report concludes with policy recommendations for how to remedy some of the most pressing water concerns low-income communities and communities of color face, in order to guarantee the basic right to safe and affordable water

Collaborative Approaches to Flow Restoration in Intermittent Salmon-Bearing Streams: Salmon Creek, CA, USA

In Mediterranean-climate regions of California and southern Oregon, juvenile salmon depend on groundwater aquifers to sustain their tributary habitats through the dry summers. Along California’s North Coast streams, private property regimes on land have created commons tragedies in groundwater and salmon fisheries, both classic examples of commons that are often governed collectively and sustainably by their users. Understanding the linkages between salmon and groundwater is one major focus of salmon recovery and climate change adaptation planning in central California and increasingly throughout the Pacific Northwest. In this paper, I use extended field interviews and participant-observation in field ecology campaigns and regulatory forums to explore how, in one water-scarce, salmon-bearing watershed on California’s central coast, collaborators are synthesizing agency and landowner data on groundwater and salmon management. I focus on three projects undertaken by citizen scientists in collaboration with me and Gold Ridge Resource Conservation District staff: salmonid censuses, mapping of wet and dry stream reaches and well monitoring. I find that collaborative research initiated by local residents and agency personnel has, in some cases, created a new sense of ecological possibility in the region. I also consider some limitations of this collaborations, namely the lack of engagement with indigenous Pomo and Miwok tribal members, with the Confederated Tribes of Graton Rancheria and with farmworkers and other marginalized residents, and suggest strategies for deepening environmental justice commitments in future collaborative work

Fishy Pleasures: Unsettling Fish Hatching and Fish Catching on Pacific Frontiers

In debates over Puget Sound salmon recovery, the Wild Steelhead Federation, a settler sportfishing advocate, argues that hatchery-raised steelhead lack fighting spirit, and figures them as unnatural. The Northwest Indian Fisheries Commission and its member tribes operate hatcheries as strategy for maintaining fish runs until degraded habitats can be restored, and figure hatcheries as one of many sites of making relations. Although the genetic science mobilized on all sides of this debate is fairly new, settler discourses that, on the one hand, blame tribal harvest for salmon decline and, on the other hand, construe sportfishing as central to settler family-making and masculinities, have roots going back to the notion of the frontier itself. As a slantwise intervention in this debate, I consider sportfishing as a site and strategy for making settler sexualities, by examining visual archives that document historical practices of sportfishing and the technologies on which contemporary salmon and trout sportfishing depends: the reservoir, the fish hatchery, and the fishing pole. Tracing arguments about Nature and settler masculinities back to the origins of fish culture in hatcheries through the writing of George Perkins Marsh, I argue labeling either normative settler sexualities and gender relations or the flooded spawning grounds beneath reservoirs as unnatural threatens co-constituted settler sexualities and reworkings of “natural” landscapes.Au sein des débats qui entourent la réimplantation des saumons dans le Puget Sound, la Wild Steelhead Federation, qui défend la pêche sportive des colons, avance que les saumons Steelhead de pisciculture manquent d’agressivité et ne les considèrent pas comme naturels. La Northwest Idian Fisheries Commission et les tribus qui en sont membres maintiennent que la production en élevage sera un stratégie nécessaire pour conserver la population piscicole jusqu’à la restauration de leur habitat naturel, et considèrent la pisciculture comme un des multiples sites propices à l’établissement de relations. Bien que la science génétique utilisée par les différents côtés de ce débat soit relativement récente, les arguments des colons accusant les pêches pratiquées par les tribus d’être responsables du déclin de la population des saumons considèrent, par ailleurs, la pêche sportive comme centrale à la la masculinité et à la construction des familles parmi les colons et remontent à la notion même de frontière. M’insérant dans ce débat par un biais différent, je considère la pêche sportive comme un site et une stratégie de construction des sexualités des colons en étudiant les archives visuelles qui documentent les pratiques historiques de la pêche sportive et les technologies dont dépend la pêche sportive contemporaine du saumon et de la truite: les bassins, les appareils à éclosion et les canes à pêche. Retraçant les arguments sur la Nature et les masculinités coloniales jusqu’aux origines de la pisciculture dans les écrits de George Perkins Marsh, je suggère que la normativité des sexualités masculines coloniales et l’établissement de bassins piscicoles sous les réservoirs aquifères sont des menaces artificielles constituées par les sexualités coloniales et leur reconstructions des paysages “naturels”

Salmon Creek salmonid and habitat data 2012-14

Data from snorkel surveys of intermittent streams during the summer rearing period (May-October) and associated habitat data. Part of a long-term study of Fay and Tannery Creeks

Salmon Creek Watershed Stable Isotope Data

Stable isotope (O and H) data collected from stream pools, piezometers, springs, and wells in the Salmon Creek watershed in 2014 and 2016.Funding provided by: National Science FoundationCrossref Funder Registry ID: http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/100000001Award Number:Samples were collected using a peristaltic pump, stored frozen, and analyze at the UC Berkeley Stable Isotope Biogeochemistry Laboratory by IRMS

Watershed Collaborations: Entanglements with common streams

Along California's North Coast, where salmon hover on the cusp of extinction, scientists and local residents seek new collaborations. Agencies, tribes, and watershed councils commission competing studies to determine links between human water use, oceanic cycles, and salmon decline. Modelers turn to ranchers' expert opinions to condition hydrologic models. Ranchers import beavers to build dams that may raise the water table. These watershed collaborations begin to transcend boundaries of human institutions, scientist / lay person, and even species. Restoring salmon-bearing streams is a project to reconfigure human relationships to water and inhabitation practices. Ininfrastructures.the western U.S., this project necessarily entails a serious grappling with ManifestDestiny legacies of Native American sovereignty, property regimes, legal doctrines, and waterMy dissertation investigates how watershed collaborations transform scientific practices,environmental subjectivities, and trans-species relations, using Salmon Creek (Sonoma Co., CA) as acase. Salmon Creek is typical of thousands of small watersheds in the Pacific West in that summerwater extractions by farmers and rural residents dry many tributaries into a series of disconnectedpools. This anthropogenic drought compounds historic beaver removal, logging, and road buildingthat have altered water, sediment, and large wood supply to the stream, limiting steelhead(Oncorhynchus mykiss) and coho salmon (O. kisutch) recovery. I argue that collaborative watershedresearch that refuses to privilege expert science over local and Indigenous knowledges can createnovel modes of scientific practice, discursive shifts, and new governance approaches. I stretch thelimits of the terms ‘watershed’ and ‘collaboration’ to encompass interactions among (1) scientistsand local knowledge holders, (2) living species and the landscapes they inhabit, and (3) humans andother species that depend on riverine ecosystems. Though disparate in methodology, the fields—Science and Technology Studies, Environmental Politics, and Eco-hydrology—share a commitment to critically re-working social-natural boundaries.Natural flow regimes—dynamic streamflow patterns that drive riverine biodiversity—arisefrom a kind of collaboration between climatic factors, geology, plants, and animals in a river basin,and are then further shaped by human ground and surface water diversions. Regarding theecosystem as a collaboratory in which humans play a role, Quantifying abiotic habitat characteristicsto determine thresholds for salmonid oversummer survival in intermittent streams investigates therole of different flow-mediated factors (dissolved oxygen, temperature, groundwater inflow, andpool volume) affect juvenile coho and steelhead occurrence in two Salmon Creek tributaries.Drawing on three years of juvenile fish surveys, synoptic water and isotope monitoring andstreamflow gauging to populate statistical models, I found that low dissolved oxygen and poolvolume limit survival; however both salmonid species can survive in spring-fed intermittent poolsthat contain sheltering logs or overhanging banks. Citizen science surveys of stream drying patternsand salmon occurrence can complement agency monitoring and should be incorporated into salmonrecovery efforts.Regarding human collaboratives of knowledge and practice, ‘Thinking with salmon aboutrain tanks: stream commons as intra-actions’ puts forth the argument that cultural practices of wateruse evolve in response to new understandings of other species' dependence on shared streams.Some Salmon Creek residents who install rain cisterns to curtail summer water use do so out ofconcern for salmon, and describe salmon and other riverine creatures as having rights to enoughwater to survive that are of the same status as human rights to water. Other residents are unwillingto reduce water use because the connection between their wells and the stream are poorlyunderstood and difficult to measure.dissertation contributes tothis‘Rain tanks, springs, and broken pipes as emerging watercommons along Salmon Creek, CA, USA’. Residents who participate in monitoring salmon populations, water quality, and their own springs and rain tanks report that these activities have increased their sense of interdependence with other human and nonhuman neighborswho rely on the watershed’s limited water sources. Drawing on Barad’s (2007) concepts of apparatus and intra-action, I argue that the notion of water as an interspecies commons is co- evolving with rainwater harvesting and that collective choice frameworks that embrace both management practices and environmental imaginaries represent a coherent alternative both to state and market frameworks of water governance and to traditional adaptive management methods and discourses.foment discourses that bring humans and other species — especially beaver and salmon, which affect water and nutrient cycles and thus are considered"ecosystem engineers"— into symbiotic relations with mutual responsibilities. In the conclusion, I explore how thesepractices and local knowledge of springs, aquifers, and rainfalldevelops a method for studying up from household waterMobilizing approaches from feminist Science and Technology Studies, the introductionextends the idea of watershed collaborations to encompass humans and other species. I draw onextended interviews with scientists, policy-makers, and local residents to argue that members ofknowledge practice collaborativesconcepts of multi-species collaboratives may filter up from local collaborationsinto public water and species recovery debates, and consider limitations to more entangledapproaches to watershed governance.Salmon Creek is geographically small and removed from major river basins, yet functions asa kind of microcosm of the political, cultural, and ecological tempests these salmon recovery andecological restoration projects stir up at any scale. Salmon are simultaneously a global fisheryresource, a key subsistence and cultural resource for traditional peoples around the Pacific, ascientific project to avert extinction, and a contested site of knowledge production. In asking whatforms of collaboration are productive, and how collaborations transform those who undertake them,this research contributes to debates on practice and ethics inherent in environmental governance inthe Anthropocene era

The watershed body: Transgressing frontiers in riverine sciences, planning stochastic multispecies worlds

In conversation with Eva Hayward’s writing on transgender embodiment, this paper explores how beaver modify landscapes differently than human engineers, and how human engineering might be transformed through riverine collaborations with beavers. Considering the body variously as a body of water — a river, which draws together all of the above and underground water in a watershed — as like our own trans bodies, and as a slippery double for the psyche of an Anthropocene engineer, July Cole and I argued that thinking with beaver as stochastic transgressors against Manifest Destiny engineering projects could transfigure engineers approaches to their work and river restoration more broadly. What if, rather than trapping beavers into service as “ecosystem engineers,” we assert that humans should engineer as beavers do, in ways that create porous boundaries between land and water and up- and downstream, by way of stick-and-mud, leaky, temporary dams? Here, I theorize a transfigured watershed body through human-beaver-salmon encounters at three salmon recovery sites in the Pacific west: a Karuk-led project on the Klamath river, agency-led beaver relocation projects in the Methow and Yakima watershed, and a citizen science-agency collaborative project in the beaverless Salmon Creek and Russian River watersheds. All three stories concern river and salmon recovery in the Pacific West, where either humans or beavers have initiated collaborative projects to raise water tables, keep rivers from going dry, and improve salmon habitat. These scientists and local knowledge holders’ encounters with beavers and their ponds thick with salmon are inspiring them to change how they undertake habitat restoration projects and also spurring some to reconsider the proper task of human ecologists and engineers, into a mode inspired by beavers themselves.  

Restoration Potential of a Mining-Impacted Urban Stream: Horseshoe Branch of Lion Creek, Oakland, CA

Horseshoe Creek, located in the Oakland Hills of California, flows through a remnant oak and redwood forests in Horseshoe Canyon. From the 1880s through the 1930s, nearby Leona sulfur mine deposited massive tailings piles in the valleys east of Horseshoe Creek. During that time, clear-cut logging of redwoods denuded and destabilized the surrounding hillsides. Today, most of Horseshoe Creekʼs upper and middle reaches are either culverted or transformed into an engineered channel, and Merritt College sits on top of the filled valleys that once formed its headwaters. Drawing from Past studies that have assessed heavy metals distribution and transport, we investigate the restoration potential of this highly impacted urban stream. In doing so, we consider the causes and effects of ecological degradation, identify areas for future study, and propose restoration actions