A partnership and long-term framework to generate and share cultural and ecological knowledge to sustain heritage landscapes

Partners: University of Minnesota:s Department of Geography, Environment, and Society, Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe, Leech Lake Tribal College, University of Minnesota:s Cloquet Forestry Center

This partnership aims to investigate the interactions between traditional Anishinaabe cultural practices and landscape vegetation patterns, including the use of fire, a tool thought to have been an essential part of Anishinaabe land tending before European American settlement. This partnership has three main goals:

1. Build regional capacity and knowledge for crosscultural fire history, based at Leech Lake Tribal College, to develop and undertake additional ecological-land use investigations on ceded and reservation territories in northern Minnesota and build a lasting collaborative environment of mutual engagement and benefit.

2. Develop a case study of Star Island in Cass Lake that merges ecological, archaeological, and traditional knowledge and oral history to better understand how the ancestral Anishinaabe of the Leech Lake region tended cultural resources and landscapes and how those activities are reflected in vegetation patterns today. This case study would be used to build a dialogue around cultural practices that have shaped the forests and provide materials for a knowledge-sharing workshop.

3. Model an equitable collaborative approach to cross-disciplinary research that merges western science and traditional knowledge through respectful cultural engagement to understand Minnesota:s cultural and ecological history better. This project will share the Leech Lake Band:s long reciprocal relationship to the land using a case study of Star Island as a pilot opportunity to gather stakeholders and begin a long-term conversation that is inclusive of cross-cultural perspectives on the ecology of people, fire, and pine forests.