- Author: Michael Hsu
UCCE advisor outreaches to LGBTQ+ community, partners with Karuk Tribe in Northern California
Costumed as river creatures with papier mâché heads and dressed as the Army Corps of Engineers, Cleo Woelfle Hazard and a performance art group called The Water Underground dazzled the biennial Bay Delta Science Conference a few years ago.
Woelfle Hazard – then a Ph.D. student at the University of California, Berkeley – and his companions performed numbers from the film they were making, a “queer slapstick musical” about salmon migration. They soon got 150 scientists, engineers, resource managers and other conference attendees singing along to their songs.
“Meanwhile, some of my professors were in the audience, and they were saying, ‘Well, he's also a scientist, he doesn't just do this art stuff!'” recalled Woelfle Hazard, who started at the beginning of this year as the UC Cooperative Extension fire advisor for Humboldt and Del Norte counties.
Identifying as a “queer trans masculine person,” Woelfle Hazard has spent much of his career bringing together gender studies with his professional interests – a quest chronicled in his book “Underflows: Queer Trans Ecologies and River Justice.”
Prescribed burn training to help shape queer fire ecology
In his new role, Woelfle Hazard is organizing a prescribed burn training for people who are 2SLGBTQ+ (2S is a common abbreviation for Two-Spirit, which refers to people of Indigenous North American descent who identify as having both masculine and feminine qualities). The sessions, which began in the middle of Pride Month in June, will continue over three more weekends in the fall when participants conduct forest thinning and prescribed burns.
Inspired by the WTREX (Women-in-Fire TRaining EXchanges) burn trainings for women organized by UC ANR Fire Network Director Lenya Quinn-Davidson and her colleagues, Woelfle Hazard is excited to grow skills and foster connections within the LGBTQ+/Two-Spirit community.
“I try to be ‘out' in different contexts that are not particularly queer,” Woelfle Hazard said. “And the queer burn training is one way that I'm trying to increase the visibility of queer people in fire.”
He has been overwhelmed by interest in the training – with over 100 people already registered – and is looking forward to learning how subcultures within those diverse communities can contribute to a nascent “queer fire ecology.”
“I do social science and I do ecology, but my core field is feminist science and technology studies,” Woelfle Hazard explained, “which is a field where we're looking at the social context of science and who asks the questions and how the questions change if a Native person, or a Black person, or a queer person, or an immigrant is asking those questions.”
Working alongside Karuk Tribe on Klamath River floodplain restoration
The book “Underflows” also explores the intersectionality of queer theory with Indigenous conceptions of kinship and belonging – building on Woelfle Hazard's extensive experience working with tribal communities.
During his undergraduate years, Woelfle Hazard edited an anthology, “Dam Nation: Dispatches from the Water Underground” and contributed a chapter on tribal-led dam removal efforts, including those of the Karuk, Hoopa, Yurok, and Klamath Tribes in the Klamath Basin. In graduate school, he also participated in the UC Berkeley-Karuk Collaborative, started by UCCE specialist Jennifer Sowerwine and others.
Later in his career, as a faculty member at the University of Washington, Woelfle Hazard had an opportunity to work more directly with the Karuk Tribe. Seeking to bring students to the region for field sessions, he contacted Lisa Morehead-Hillman, who directed the Píkyav Field Institute, the educational wing of the Karuk Department of Natural Resources.
In return, she asked if there was a way her Karuk students could benefit from the experience as well – and Woelfle Hazard said he would be glad to host them in Seattle. “She had never had anyone from a university make that offer before, so that was really the foundation of building trust,” he said.
From there, Woelfle Hazard connected with Leaf Hillman, the founder of the Karuk Department of Natural Resources, and they co-developed a project to look at how reconnecting the Klamath River with its floodplain could restore ecological processes and eco-cultural practices such as basketry.
Working alongside Morehead-Hillman and University of Washington students Jocine Velasco and Ry Yahn, they produced a Storymap, patterned after the Karuk creation story of “Coyote's Journey,” recounting the historical impacts of mining, dams and fire suppression in the region. They are now working on a follow-up Storymap that will describe the tribe's plans to restore the floodplain and revitalize the Tishániik ceremonial site.
Navigating intersections of science, culture
Earlier this month, Woelfle Hazard brought climate scientists from the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) to Orleans in Humboldt County, where the Karuk Department of Natural Resources is located. NCAR scientists had developed a climate model that describes changes to the Klamath Basin under a variety of future fire regimes, and Woelfle Hazard presented on how well the model meets the needs of local communities.
“Our activity kind of broke their model, which they're pretty happy about, actually,” Woelfle Hazard said. “There's a lot of learning just about what is actually useful for the tribe and other organizations; we're working with the Western Klamath Restoration Partnership, which is a tribal-led partnership with the Forest Service and a number of NGOs in the Klamath Basin.”
As part of the NCAR Innovators project, which intentionally pairs social scientists with NCAR scientists, Woelfle Hazard also studied the researchers themselves, interviewing them about their experiences and looking at ways they can better partner with tribes and grassroots organizations.
“It's been a really complex project, putting together lots of different forms of knowledge – Karuk science, climate science, and I'm in the middle, trying to translate between them,” Woelfle Hazard said.
Native and Western ways of knowing. Social sciences and natural sciences. Fire and water. Artist and scientist. In work and in life, Woelfle Hazard has sought to deconstruct binaries that obscure more complicated realities – and blur those distinctions to illuminate greater truths.
During Pride Month and throughout the year, he said it's important to celebrate progress while also continuing to fight so all people can secure their basic rights and live their lives with dignity and purpose.
“Queer ecology is another frontline of the struggle; if you're a queer/trans/Two-Spirit person and you want to be a fish ecologist, you should be able to be a fish ecologist,” he said. “You shouldn't have to worry that people are going to be saying some stuff while you're out in the field getting into your wetsuit!
“This is work that we all have to do – dismantling these structures of racism, of sexism, of homophobia. And we have to do it all the time, every day.”
/h3>/h3>/h3>/h3>- Author: Pam Kan-Rice
Reprinted from the UCANR food blog
Native Americans suffer from the highest rates of food insecurity, poverty and diet-related disease in the United States. A new study finds that Native American communities could improve their food security with a greater ability to hunt, fish, gather and preserve their own food.
“How food security is framed, and by whom, shapes the interventions or solutions that are proposed,” said Jennifer Sowerwine, UC Cooperative Extension specialist at UC Berkeley, who led the study in partnership with the Karuk, Yurok, Hoopa, and Klamath Tribes. “Our research suggests that current measures of and solutions to food insecurity in the United States need to be more culturally relevant to effectively assess and address chronic food insecurity in Native American communities.”
The study conducted by researchers at UC Berkeley and four Native American tribes shows that 92% of Native American households in the Klamath Basin suffer from food insecurity.
Native American tribes in the Klamath Basin seasonally harvest, consume and store diverse aquatic and terrestrial native foods including salmon, acorns and deer. In survey responses, 86% of the participants said they consumed native foods at least once in the previous year. Yet significant barriers, including restrictive laws and wildlife habitat degradation, limit availability and quality of these foods.
While 64% of Native American households in the Klamath Basin rely on food assistance (compared to the national average of 12%), 84% of the Native Americans using food assistance worried about running out of food or had run out of food. This suggests the need to consider more effective solutions rooted in eco-cultural restoration and food sovereignty to address food insecurity in Native American communities.
Study participants strongly expressed the desire for strengthened tribal governance of Native lands and stewardship of cultural resources to increase access to native foods, as well as strengthening skills for self-reliance including support for home food production. Community members suggested solutions including tribe-led workshops on native foods gathering, preparation and preservation; removing legal barriers to hunt, fish and gather; restoring traditional rights to hunt, fish and gather on tribal ancestral lands; providing culturally relevant education and employment opportunities to tribal members; and increased funding for native foods programs.
While growing evidence suggests that native foods are the most nutritious and culturally appropriate foods for Native American people – and over 99% of people surveyed in the region said they want more of these foods – nearly 70% said they never or rarely get access to the native foods they want.
“We know our efforts to revitalize and care for our food system through traditional land management are critical to the physical and cultural survival of the humans who are part of it,” said Leaf Hillman, program manager for the Karuk Tribe's Píkyav Field Institute. “This study will support our ability to bring that message to the decisionmakers who need to hear it.”
With the study results indicating that increased access to native foods and support for cultural institutions such as traditional knowledge and food sharing are key to solving food insecurity in Native American communities, Sowerwine and the research team propose including access to native foods as a measure for evaluating food security for Native people.
The assessment is based on 711 surveys completed by households from the Karuk, Yurok, Hoopa and Klamath Tribes, 115 interviews with cultural practitioners and food system stakeholders, and 20 focus groups with tribal members or descendants.
In addition to Sowerwine and Hillman, the study was conducted by post-doctoral researchers Megan Mucioki and Dan Sarna-Wojcicki, and research partners from the Yurok, Karuk and Klamath Tribes.
“Partnering with tribal community members in the research makes the research stronger, and that is especially true in this unique food security assessment,” said Sowerwine. “With the study design grounded in nearly a decade of relationship-building and respectful engagement with our tribal partners, we are confident that our results reflect their priority questions and concerns while contributing valuable new information to the field of indigenous food systems.”
“Reframing food security by and for Native American communities: a case study among tribes in the Klamath River basin of Oregon and California” is published in the journal Food Security.
This research was part of a $4 million, five-year Tribal Food Security Project funded by USDA-National Institute of Food and Agriculture-Agriculture and Food Research Initiative Food Security Grant #2012-68004-20018. For full results and recommendations from the project team, visit https://nature.berkeley.edu/karuk-collaborative/?page_id=1088.