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Strengthening Resilience of Ojibwe Nations Across Generations (STRONG)
NSF Smart and Connected Communities Award 2233912 (STRONG), 8/1/2023 – 7/31/2026, $2 million, PI: Kim Marion Suiseeya (Northwestern University)
Vision
Our vision is to enhance disaster anticipation, preparation, mitigation, and response in Indigenous communities by building and deploying cyberinfrastructure that integrates Indigenous knowledge, advanced sensing technologies and data systems to expand the availability, utility, and usability of environmental and socio-ecological data.
Background
STRONG’s vision and proposed research emerged from sustained community engagement with representatives from Ojibwe tribes and the Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission (GLIFWC) since January 2021. STRONG held three listening sessions during our planning phase in 2021: February 16 (47 participants), March 9 (52 participants), and March 30 (37 participants). Participants included representatives from eight tribes, GLIFWC, and tribal colleges. Additionally, we held weekly team meetings, multiple sub-team meetings, attended two Voigt Inter-Tribal Taskforce meetings, and presented at the Bad River Tribal Council meeting in May 2022.
Goals
Synthesize Indigenous knowledge (IK) and scientific knowledge (SK) with new data collected through advanced sensing technology to inform tribal governance for resilience to climate change.
Co-produce culturally appropriate resilience indicators to anticipate, respond to, and mitigate acute and chronic socio-ecological perturbations.
Co-develop and deploy Noondawind, a dynamic, integrated, networked cyberinfrastructure platform to generate community impact by connecting diverse end-users with STRONG data and analyses.
Activities
The project is organized into three main themes: environmental, governance, and community impact. These concurrent and synergistic themes engage a broad network of researchers and practitioners in academia, industry, non-profits, government agencies, and tribal partners with significant capability and expertise.
Environment
Sensing the Environment to Support Resilience
To meet community needs for actionable information on regional climate change and local environmental threats, we will develop and deploy a flexible cyberinfrastructure system that integrates core edge-enabled environmental sensing nodes for climate and ecosystem observation with extended arrays of new batteryless sensors for in situ measurement of specific, tribally identified constituents of concern.
Objectives:
Deploy and pilot-test sensing systems that can forewarn on persistent ecosystem changes and imminent ecological disasters
Understand and explain the variability in Manoomin ecosystems.
Governance
Responsive Governance for Resilience
Our tribal partners identified two main constraints to effective governance for resilience. First, Ojibwe knowledge, ways of knowing, and environmental practices remain underrepresented and undervalued in county- and state-led environmental management (Folke et al. 2010; OSTP-CEQ 2021). Second, the histories of violence and displacement imposed on Ojibwe peoples, including land loss and forced assimilation, has produced generational trauma that continues to constrain full and effective environmental governance (Child 1998; Loew 2013). We will be investigating how enhanced data access, availability, and usability strengthen Ojibwe Nations’ disaster anticipation, mitigation, and responses to environmental change.
Objectives:
Understand and explain the relationship between governance and resilience
Develop governance tools and cyberinfrastructure that enhance Indigenous nations’ capacities to translate data into action.
Community Impact
Co-Designing Community Impact, Capacity Building and Outreach
Along with our partners, STRONG will co-design opportunities for engaging diverse end-users to support data availability and integration through Noondawind. These activities include co-designing engagement opportunities, capacity building, and outreach and dissemination. We will focus our efforts to ensure that Noondawind is useful and useable for four core groups: (1) tribal staff and decision-makers, who are driving the research questions and design; (2) tribal college and NU faculty and students, who can participate in and help shape the research process and outputs, as well as support longer-term capacity; (3) scientists and researchers, who can generate new knowledge and insights through integrated data; and (4) non-Native natural resource managers and policymakers, who can learn from STRONG’s experiences and knowledge products, and deepen understanding of and engagement with IK and tribal governments.
Capacity building will focus on addressing training needs related to the Sage nodes, sensor network, and Noondawind to ensure that tribal governments and college students strengthen capacity to utilize, manage, and derive insights from multi-modal data.
Outreach and dissemination will focus on cultivating broader awareness and engagement among a broader community of non-Native natural resource managers, policymakers, extending to tribal and local communities.
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