Indigenous-Led Co-Stewardship Model Offers Path Forward for Arctic Climate Solutions

In the summer of 2022, a team of researchers, Indigenous knowledge holders, and community leaders gathered at a hotel in Anchorage named after a European colonizer to discuss how to build something better. The irony was not lost on them. What they were attempting—a genuine partnership between Indigenous peoples and Western scientists to address Arctic environmental change—required something that grant timelines and academic institutions rarely allow: time to build trust.

The team was part of SEARCH, the Study of Environmental Arctic Change, which began in 1997 as a geophysical research initiative and has evolved into something more ambitious. By 2021, SEARCH's leadership recognized that abundant knowledge about Arctic change already existed across multiple knowledge systems. The organization's Human Wellbeing team, led by Jackie Qataliña Schaeffer and Jamie Donatuto, set out to synthesize these knowledges—Indigenous and scientific—into equitable solutions. But they understood something fundamental: you cannot extract knowledge from people the way you extract data from instruments. You must build relationships first.

The team's first act was intentional hiring. They sought people from diverse backgrounds and generations, united by a belief that no single person holds expertise in all knowledge systems, and motivated by a shared commitment to supporting healthy Arctic communities. Then came the harder work. Starting in June 2022, they met in person. Over the following months, they held monthly video calls across time zones—from Alaska to Southwest England—beginning each with a check-in question designed not to produce deliverables but to know each other. What seasonal foods connect you to your ancestors? How do you relate to the land where you live? These questions, which would seem tangential in most research settings, became foundational. The team spent over a year simply getting to know one another before the pressure to produce results intensified.

This approach yielded unexpected successes. In late 2022, when the Arctic Report Card—an annual synthesis of Arctic research—faced criticism for excluding Indigenous voices, the HWB team moved quickly. Within two months, they had created something unprecedented: the first oral contribution to the report. Jackie Schaeffer recorded a conversation with Ahtna Dine' Elder Wilson Justin, capturing his lived experience of Arctic change in his own voice and form. The response was extraordinary. Between December 2022 and early January 2023, news coverage of the report card appeared in approximately 870 media outlets worldwide, reaching an estimated 3.7 billion people. The publicity value, had it been purchased as advertising, would have cost $35.8 million. The team also collaborated with an Alaska Native artist to create a one-page illustration showing how different groups—Indigenous hunters, scientists, policymakers—understand salmon differently, and why all perspectives matter. They produced art installations and podcasts. They focused on Indigenous education as central to community wellbeing, recognizing that passing knowledge to the next generation is not a side project but the foundation of survival.

Yet beneath these successes lies a structural problem that no amount of relationship-building can solve alone. Federal environmental policies affecting Indigenous tribes remain rooted in colonial frameworks. The Marine Mammal Protection Act, passed in 1972 at the same moment the federal government formally ended its "Termination" policies toward Indigenous peoples, was written without seeing Indigenous peoples as vibrant participants in the ecosystems they had stewarded for millennia. Co-management language entered policy only later, and even now remains discretionary—tribes must constantly write grants to access funding rather than receiving sustained commitments. Most federal grants last one to three years, far shorter than the time required to build and maintain the trust that co-stewardship demands. Funding agencies like the National Science Foundation prioritize "concrete" Western science results within these compressed timelines and lack guidance to evaluate success through Indigenous frameworks. When the National Academies of Sciences attempted to create a committee on co-production of environmental knowledge, the effort collapsed amid accusations that the Academies itself was not practicing equitable co-production. Two staff members were fired.

The barriers are not merely cultural but structural and financial. Tribes are classified as "dependent" sovereign nations rather than independent ones, a legal designation that perpetuates power imbalance regardless of the relationship they have with the U.S. government. Indigenous knowledge holders who wish to participate in decision-making face government jargon and bureaucratic authority designed by and for people with institutional power. The system does not benefit them; it benefits those who built it.

The team's recommendations are concrete: long-term funding streams of five to ten years, not one to three. Use of Interagency Agreements to route funds through entities like Alaska's Denali Commission, which can distribute them to tribes over years without federal time constraints. Enforcement of existing executive orders requiring federal employees to co-steward land and include Indigenous knowledge in policy. Most critically: hire Indigenous scientists as program officers in major directorates, not just in Indigenous-focused programs. Increase Indigenous representation on review panels—moving beyond the tokenistic "one Indigenous representative" model that places an impossible burden on a single person. Fund teams to meet on the land together, not just in conference rooms, so they can experience each other's worlds firsthand.

The work of the HWB team demonstrates that Indigenous-led co-stewardship is not theoretical. It produces results that reach billions of people and shift how knowledge is valued. But sustaining it requires something the Arctic's colonial legacy has never willingly provided: genuine power-sharing, long-term commitment, and the recognition that Indigenous peoples have been solving environmental problems for millennia. The question now is whether institutions will change fast enough to match the pace of Arctic change itself.