1.3. Multidisciplinarity and knowledge diversity

1.3. Multidisciplinarity and knowledge diversity

Local Indigenous food systems connect health, wellness, and cultural identity to the environment and biodiversity. Accordingly, academic research on local Indigenous food systems must be sufficiently multidisciplinary to include health, social, and natural science concepts (Figure 4). Moreover, because the foundation of local food systems is the local knowledge of Indigenous Peoples, research on local food systems must be inclusive of academic (or western) and Indigenous knowledges. This section first discusses the challenges and opportunities of multidisciplinarity within an academic context before addressing the broader necessity of knowledge spanning academic and Indigenous ways of knowing.

Western knowledges and academic literature are often siloed into disciplinary approaches and subject areas. Natural scientists typically focus their research on biophysical systems, while also considering how people impact, interact with, and benefit from these biophysical systems. Social scientists tend to focus more on people and societies, including as a lens through which the importance and experience of biophysical systems can be understood. Health scientists focus on health care, and more holistically the health and well-being of people, including how diet (nutrition), social conditions (public health), and environmental conditions (environmental health) affect health outcomes. There are of course many interdisciplinary approaches and frameworks, including social-ecological systems, environmental health, and social determinants of health, that adopt more integrated and interdisciplinary approaches (Figure 4). Nevertheless, connecting the full richness and diversity of disciplinary knowledge to these interdisciplinary approaches is challenging in many ways. Even if social scientists study nature, natural sciences include people, and health scientists consider the environment, the three disciplines tend to approach research with distinct lenses, frameworks, and approaches. The depth of these divides needs to be recognized and understood. What we know and how we know is shaped by our worldview, our experience, and our methodological approaches. As expressed by Maslow [1], “I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail." and by Freudenburg et al. [2] “we run the risk of having our vision distorted by the very taken-for-grantedness of our socially agreed upon definitions”, identify this as “the risk of being prisoners of our own perspectives”, and conclude “our ability to understand socially significant outcomes will ultimately depend not on the separation of the physical and the social, but on our capacity to recognize the extent to which each is a fundamental part of the other.”

Focusing in on one example, public health literature tends to define and conceptualize environmental determinants of health holistically. As described by Bircher and Kuruvilla [3],

“Environmental determinants of health, based on the definition of environmental health, include all the physical, chemical, and biological factors external to a person, and all the related factors impacting behaviours … targeted towards preventing disease and creating health-supportive environments (including clean air and water, healthy workplaces, safe houses, community spaces and roads and managing climate change).”

Yet, the way environmental health determinants are described and assessed often prioritizes negative environmental impacts while failing to communicate and explore all the positive contributions of the environment to peoples’ well-being. For example, the same Bircher and Kuruvilla [3] that defines environmental health holistically, suggests the following list of environmental determinants: “Health of individuals and populations can be affected substantially by factors in the environment, including extreme weather events, availability of clean drinking water, air pollution, food scarcity, radioactivity, and safe workplaces.” The abstract of a book chapter, broadly titled as Environmental Determinants of Health begins as follows: “Several modifiable environmental factors—such as outdoor air pollution, household air pollution, drinking water contamination, occupational exposure to hazardous materials, lead exposure, and built environments that discourage physical activity—influence the risk and experience of chronic disease.” [4]. A recent World Health Organization (WHO) assessment of the environmental contribution to preventable disease defined the environment as including “exposure to pollution and chemicals (e.g., air, water, soil, products), physical exposures (e.g., noise, radiation), the built environment, other anthropogenic changes (e.g., climate change, vector breeding places), related behaviors and the work environment” [5].

Among the many, complex interdependencies between human health and the environment, the supply and safety of food, water, and air are the most direct and the most important. A healthy adult human drinks 2.5 liters of water, ingests 1000-2500 calories of food energy, and inhales 11,000 liters of air every day. With a world population of approximately 7.22 billion people (26% of which are children and therefore have lower requirements, for the time being), the minimum daily global requirements of humanity, each and every day, are 180 gigaliters of drinking water, 10,830 gigacalories of food energy, and 79 cubic kilometers of ingested air. All of this air, water, and food needs to come from somewhere and that somewhere is the environment. All human food is a product of the environment, with most food energy originating as atmospheric carbon captured by plants through the process of photosynthesis. The environment is, of course, also the sole source of the air we breathe and the only generator and reservoir of the freshwater we drink. When environmental determinants of health are listed as diseases, contaminants, and exposures, when environmental research focuses more on what people do to the environment - natural resource extraction, climate change, land use change - than what the environment provides to people, we end up overlooking the foundational truth that all of our food - our nutrition, our growth, our health, our life - is a product of the environment. The land and the environment is where and how the food we eat grows.

In this way, research on local food systems cannot be merely interdisciplinary. Incorporating natural, health, and social science dimensions into local food systems research is necessary but not nearly sufficient. Instead, local food systems research needs to achieve or at least aspire towards transdisciplinarity and the dissolving of disciplinary boundaries. Local food systems research should, in particular, work towards dissolving the disciplinary assumption that the natural world, the social world, and the health of people can be conceived of and studied as separable entities.

Working effectively across disciplinary silos within academia is challenging, but a more formidable challenge and opportunity is situated at the intersection of academic approaches and the knowledge that arises from the life experience and lifeways of Indigenous Peoples. Indigenous and academic knowledges are representative of different ways of knowing, yet are not fully dichotomous or mutually distinct categories [6]. Local knowledge can be characterized as “experience-based knowledge” [7] intrinsically linked to and sourced from personal experience and held for personal and community benefit [6]. Descriptions of Indigenous Knowledges highlight its holistic and experiential nature, including an emphasis and awareness of relationality [8] and the sentience and agency of landscapes and life [9]. Project co-PI Dr. Treena Delormier shared with us the Kanien’kehá:ka word for traditional foods - Tiohnhehkwen - described by Dr. Delormier to mean “they provide us and sustain us with life”; and to be “not a noun but a verb; a relationship”. As described by Ryan Decaire (2021), Professor of Mohawk Language, University of Toronto:

“Mohawk language is based on verbs. This perpetuates an understanding that everything constantly has a role and a place, is doing something, and has a responsibility… Tyonnhekhwenmeans they that sustain use and provide us with life. So when you have a people who refer to their food in everyday speech as “They provide us with life” - how does that guide your behaviour? How does that remind you of your relationship to that food?... It’s a constant reminder, built within the language… people use the language as a way of thinking”.

In contrast, scientific knowledge is noted to prioritize quantification, rationality, reductionism, objectivity, mechanism, experimentation, replication, and disciplinary specialization [10, 11, 12]. The distinctions and potential complementarity of local knowledge and science have been discussed frequently (e.g., [13]). For example, a resident of Quaqtaq, Nunavik interviewed in 1997 described the distinction as follows:

“We just keep finding again and again that everything is interlocked. Everything is intertwined. Everything is not neat [like] with [scientific] classification… Animals and people and the land are the same. Ecology. People . . . animals . . . one. Maintaining their good health and making sure they are healthy… they [scientists and health professionals] don't understand the maintaining of good health in our world ... in our way” [14].

The how-to challenge of including local knowledge in scientific approaches or blending science with local understanding remains a nascent area of academic research. Environmental science has become more quantitative over the last several decades [15, 16] at a time when the importance of local knowledge beyond the quantitative domain has also become better recognized [17, 18]. The emerging emphasis on quantification, modelling, and big data within biodiversity science [19, 20, 21] has been referred to as “datafication” and interpreted as “a shift in priorities in the ecological sciences - from concerns about localities and interaction milieu - to a focus on the emerging concept of global biodiversity… viewed as something that can be monitored, as an object of governance” [22]. At the same time, there is growing recognition of the need to democratize conservation by “broaden[ing] the definition of science to include multiple knowledge systems (e.g., traditional and local knowledge) and expand[ing] the practice of conservation science to include the participation and objectives of all those who wish to act collectively to support the stewardship of the biosphere” [23]. The compatibility or incompatibility of these two trajectories - towards quantification (or datafication) and towards inclusion of local knowledge and priorities - is an important and under-examined transdisciplinary challenge in biodiversity and environmental science. As the natural sciences seek to become both more quantitative and more inclusive of diverse knowledges this how-to challenge becomes more difficult and more important.

The biodiversity and environmental change knowledge possessed by local and Indigenous Peoples can improve understanding of climate change impacts and adaptation [24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29]. Local knowledge had been shown to fill gaps in scientific understanding that may be difficult or impossible to obtain through other means [17, 27] offer “multiple lines of evidence” [30], identify and address seasonal, experience, and scale biases [31], improve temporal transferability [32], provide context for interpreting results [33], and enhance community support for and involvement in wildlife science [23, 34, 35] by remedying the sterile dichotomy between science and knowledge [36, 37]. Despite these many advantages, local knowledge inclusion and community partner involvement in environmental sciences remains limited [17, 27]. Challenges to the inclusion of local knowledge may include skepticism in the scientific community [38], the difficulty of identifying suitable knowledge holders [39], the potential for local knowledge to be appropriated, marginalized, misunderstood, and misused [40], how to assess the validity, reliability, bias and uncertainty of local knowledge [38, 41], and determining how local knowledge and observations can be blended into the same models while maintaining the integrity of both knowledge approaches [40].

Approaches honouring multiple forms of knowledges have been described by Indigenous and western researchers. The following summary prioritizes Indigenous-authored interpretations of these varied framings and opportunities. Ethical space was first described by Willie Ermine in 2000 [42] as “a space between the Indigenous and Western spheres of culture and knowledge” that “inspires an abstract space of possibility” and “creates the neutral zone of dialogue.” As interpreted by [43], these “ethical spaces … unfold through processes of authentic intercultural dialogue and exchange, offering the possibility for new insights into human identity and purpose with emergent outcomes across cultures to address shared challenges of sustainability.” The Two Row Wampum-Covenant Chain treaty, developed collaboratively between Haudenosaunee and newly arrived Dutch merchants, offers an Indigenous-European framework for relationships between peoples from different “laws and beliefs” that can help to decolonize Western presumptions [44]. According to McGregor [45], the Two Row Wampum concept “permits each side to retain its integrity through undertaking its own process according to its own world view. At the same time, the two sides share information and work in partnership on issues of common concern.” The principle of Etuaptmumk, or Two-Eyed Seeing, shared by Mi’kmaq Elder Dr. Albert Marshall holds that scientific and Indigenous knowledges each have their own strengths, which are stronger when working together toward a common goal [46, 47] referred to by Elder Albert as “the gift of multiple perspectives” [46 P. 340]. Professor Robin Wall Kimmerer, member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, speaks of “braiding Indigenous and scientific knowledges like a braid of sweetgrass, with Indigenous knowledge and western science intertwined in reciprocity and care with the wisdom of plants” [48] and “science and Indigenous knowledge can be like asters and goldenrod growing together complementarily, wherein “the beauty of one is illuminated by the radiance of the other” [49].

As generous and inclusive as these invitations to honour multiple forms of knowledges are, they are offered and emphasized amidst a colonial context in which science and research have actively contributed to the marginalisation and disempowerment of Indigenous Peoples. In the words of Indigenous scholar Professor Linda Tuhiwai Smith (2006):

“At a common sense level research was talked about both in terms of its absolute worthlessness to us, the indigenous world, and its absolute usefulness to those who wielded it as an instrument. It told us things already known, suggested things that would not work, and made careers for people who already had jobs.”

Knowledge integration has been argued to augment rather than diminish power asymmetries. According to Nadasdy [40] “... since it is scientists and resource managers, rather than aboriginal hunters and trappers, who will be using this new "integrated" knowledge, the project of integration actually serves to concentrate power in administrative centers, rather than in the hands of aboriginal people.” According to McGregor [8], “"doing" Traditional Ecological Knowledge in the dominant, Eurocentric mindset basically boils down to extracting knowledge from Aboriginal people. For Aboriginal people this issue presents a rather disturbing dilemma: they wish to share knowledge, but the context has changed and knowledge now has to be protected to avoid exploitation.” In the words of the Assembly of First Nations (1995), as cited in McGregor [8] "integration resembles assimilation, the cornerstone of much government policy towards First Nations ... it reflects a reductionist attitude, by representing Indigenous Knowledge as a catalogue of facts, some of which may be deemed useful for integration into western knowledge systems. As one Mohawk put it, 'our knowledge can't be bottled.' ". As stated by Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami (ITK) president Natan Obed, in a letter preface to ITK’s National Inuit Strategy on Research [50]: “For far too long, researchers have enjoyed great privilege as they have passed through our communities and homeland, using public or academic funding to answer their own questions about our environment, wildlife, and people. Many of these same researchers then ignore Inuit in creating the outcomes of their work for the advancement of their careers, their research institutions, or their governments. This type of exploitative relationship must end.” As described by the First Peoples Working Group, Institut nordique du Québec [51] “For many years, research in an Indigenous context was carried out primarily by non-Indigenous researchers, who set the conditions for it. Historically, research was conducted in a colonial manner, without the collaboration of the peoples concerned, and without any validation or feedback on the results once the studies were complete.”

Community-based participatory research and knowledge co-production approaches have been suggested to make research in and with Indigenous communities more beneficial and relevant to its participants, and to begin dismantling the extractive and colonial legacy of scientific research in these communities [52]. As described by Israel [53], community-based participatory research adopts a partnership approach and considers the power dynamics of the researcher, the collaborators and research participants. However, community-involvement in research does not, in and of itself, create equitable relationships between researchers and Indigenous communities; in many instances the community helps participatory research more than the participatory research benefits the community [54].

Knowledge co-production offers a more collaborative alternative, defined by Armitage et al. [55] as “the collaborative process of bringing a plurality of knowledge sources and types together to address a defined problem and build an integrated or systems-oriented understanding of that problem”. According to Armitage et al. [55], the success of knowledge co-production depends on: “i) a willingness to recognize and accept existence of different systems of understanding and practices, ii) an ability to interrelate different systems of thought and perspectives in complex and uncertain decision contexts, and iii) a shared desire to use knowledge co-production to achieve mutually agreed outcomes”. A recent review of knowledge co-production in support of sustainability research [56] suggests the approach can be successful if it is “i) context-based, by situating the process in a particular context, place, or issue, ii) pluralistic, by explicitly recognizing multiple ways of knowing and doing, iii) goal-oriented, by articulating clearly defined, shared and meaningful goals that are related to the challenge at hand, and iv) interactive, by allowing for ongoing learning among actors, active engagement and frequent interactions.”

Another characterization classifies traditionally disciplinary academic approaches as Mode 1 knowledge production - noted to prioritize theory, disciplinarity, universality, neutrality, detachment, and validity through logic, measurement and prediction - and contrasts these with emerging transdisciplinary Mode 2 approaches - developed in a context of application, recognized to be particular and situational, validated by experiential, collaborative, and transdisciplinary processes, with researchers recognized to be socially accountable, immersed and reflexive agents of change [57].

Whatever collaborative or participatory approach is employed, presumed-to-be collaborative research and knowledge co-production requires reflexive, critical examination of the researcher-participant relationship. No research is value free, all research is situated and affected by dimensions of power and politics. Berger [58] describes a researcher’s positionality as consisting of three things: their social positions, their personal experiences, and their ideologies. The question of who is conducting research and why is ever-present in Indigenous and community-based research contexts.

The above description of local Indigenous food systems has been informed, in part, by the following sources: