News you can use about your foodshed!
Klamath Tribal Food Sovereignty News
Fall 2021 & Winter 2022
In this issue:  
  • Final months of Karuk Agroecosystem Resilience Initiative
  • RACCCA project in Civil Eats!
  • Indigenous cultural ecosystem services & the Klamath Basin
  • Community news & resources
Final stages of the Karuk Agroecosystem Resilience Initiative
Our field seasons have come and gone, we’ve held workshops, conducted interviews, created and utilized new tools to help measure and monitor climate change impacts on culturally significant species and generated data sets and decision support tools that can help inform land management strategies and be continuously built upon into the future. What now with the Karuk Agroecosystem Resilience Initiative? Back in spring 2018, our team led by researchers and practitioners in the Karuk Tribe and the University of California, Berkeley began this multi-year endeavor (also known the “RACCCA project”) to enhance the resilience of cultural agroecosystems under variable climatic conditions within Karuk Aboriginal Territory in the Klamath River Basin. This project built upon past food security work under the Karuk-UC Berkeley Collaborative and will continue on in various forms as that goal of enhancing resilience is part of the Karuk Tribe’s long-term vision and practice of cultural sovereignty and wellbeing of people and place.
In our wrap-up, we have focused on publishing the various facets of this complex project, finishing the final data collection tools that will be used by Karuk Department of Natural Resources (KDNR), and surfacing learnings and impact stories. 
  • We have had two recent publications (see below) and are planning up to four more! Additionally, we have our central “Karuk Agroecosystem Resilience Report” that will come out in two versions, one for KDNR’s internal long-term technical use and the other for our many partners, Karuk Cultural Practitioners, and invested community members. 
  • We are finalizing a Data Display Portal that will aggregate and graphically portray key climatic, biophysical, and cultural variables that can support the Karuk Tribe’s long term land use/land management planning and implementation. This is in addition to the Agroecosystem Condition Assessments mobile field tool (used to collect seasonal data in long-term research plots, established under this grant) and the Karuk Tribe Citizen Science Tool (used by any enthusiastic resident to record unusual and significant climate and biological observations in Karuk Territory). 
  • We are also putting the final (for now!) touches on the Karuk Herbarium’s voucher specimen collection so that KDNR staff and Cultural Practitioners will have that essential reference material for decades to come. 
  • Lastly, we are ensuring that we capture and take to heart the lessons learned across the team and from the many who participated in the project trainings, workshops, classroom lessons, field trips, and more, to inform future programming.  
We look forward to sharing with you all our major learnings and that public-facing Resilience Report this spring!
xúus nu’éethti - we are caring for it
Photo credit: M. Mucioki
Getting the word (and learnings) out
RACCCA project featured in Civil Eats!
In October 2021, RACCCA teammate Megan Mucioki, with teammates Daniel Sarna-Wojcicki, Jennifer Sowerwine, Kathy McCovey, and Shawn Bourque, published a wide-spanning article about the past decade of collaborative research on Karuk food sovereignty in the face of climate change, published in the online news source Civil Eats. You will see quotes and insights from many other RACCCA teammates and community members! They touch on the many findings, from Yew sensitivity to unpredictable Hazel timing, and highlight the recent development of the citizen science climate change app and the return of culture fire and other Tribe-led management practices. KDNR’s Phil Albers Jr. sums it up well by stating that “knowing the processes and how our survival is dependent on our environment and ability to gather food, and how we can maximize both to ensure future opportunities—that is going to be what helps us survive as people, period.” Read, get inspired, and share out!
Photo credit: M. Mucioki
Conceptualizing and grounding Indigenous cultural ecosystem services
This fall, our RACCCA project team published a fundamental concept article in a special issue of the Journal of Ethnobiology on Indigenous Peoples and Climate Change. In “Conceptualizing Indigenous Cultural Ecosystem Services (ICES) and Benefits under Changing Climate Conditions in the Klamath River Basin and Their Implications for Land Management and Governance,” we articulated a framework of ecosystem services that centers around Indigenous Peoples and their reciprocal relationship with landscapes. Our novel model of ICES integrates aspects of Tribal sovereignty, governance, historical trauma, mental health, Indigenous Knowledge systems, and cultural values that are not often considered in how ‘ecosystem services’ are framed in relation to ecosystems’ contributions to people and vice versa. 
We use our framework to examine and conceptualize how climate change is impacting the use, availability, and management of culturally significant plants gathered by Indigenous Peoples in the Klamath River Basin. Respondents reported that seasonal timing for harvesting culturally significant foods, fibers, and medicines differs from their childhood experiences, 20-50 years ago. As one respondent explained, people are now experiencing “the speeding up of seasons and seasonal harvests,” making it difficult to predict when to begin harvesting. We also detail examples of ICES benefits associated with spirituality, food security, health, and family to highlight the potential risk to Klamath River Basin’s Indigenous communities because of climate change. However, climate impact on ICES can be mitigated by Indigenous-led management such as cultural fire, watering, and transplanting. 
Photo credit: M. Mucioki
Local news & resources
Call to accountability in action for UC system
Back in September-October 2020, UC Berkeley supported by UC Agriculture and Natural Resources, UC Davis, and UC Riverside, led a two-part forum: “The University of California Land Grab: A Legacy of Profit from Indigenous Land.” (KNDR Director, Bill Tripp, was one of the featured speakers.) Now, the organizers (including RACCCA team member Jennifer Sowerwine) have published a report intended to “to motivate the University of California to take action regarding accountability to California Indians stemming from the University’s founding as a land-grant institution through Morrill Act land sales and from the ongoing benefits that UC receives from both returns on the original endowment and continued occupation of California Indian territories via current UC land holdings.” You can watch the 2020 recordings and read the 2021 report (or just the summary!). We hope the energy and intention behind this report will, indeed, help spur good action. 
Artwork: Cheyenne Tex
USDA and USFS shift their approach to wildfires
In a just-published report, the US Department of Agriculture and Forest Service have put forth a 10-year plan to tackle the rise of increasingly devastating wildfires. And the plan details another marked shift from the long-held Smokey-Bear approach of “put out all wildfires.” The notion of healthy and critical fire (‘good fire’) is very apparent in the plan, as noted in this The Verge article, and will expand structural support for cultural management practices such as those that the Karuk Tribe and members still practice and have been tirelessly advocating for. With newly supportive California laws and now this from the feds, cultural burning and other healing management practices have a chance to scale up, once again, at long last!
FOOD SECURITY CONNECTIONS
NEWSLETTER ARCHIVES 
Missed an issue? See what your Karuk-UCB Food Security team has been doing here.

MID KLAMATH FOODSHED FACEBOOK PAGE
Keep in touch! Find upcoming events, see photos, ask questions, let your neighbors know what's going on in the foodshed! All that and more on the Foodshed Facebook page.

MKWC FOODSHEDS WEBSITE
Wondering what, where and when to plant? Visit the Mid Klamath Watershed Council's Foodshed for excellent free information on the vegetables and fruits that grow best here, along with planting calendars, soil, and disease prevention advice.

SÍPNUUK DIGITAL LIBRARY 
The Karuk Tribe's Sípnuuk Digital Library, Archives and Museum supports food security and sovereignty with information on our regional food security issues, solutions and knowledge of traditional and contemporary foods and materials. Easy to use and open to all!
This work is supported by the AFRI Resilient Agroecosystems in a Changing Climate Challenge Area Grant # 2018-68002-27916 from the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture.