0373- A1
David N. Bengston 1
An important challenge for public forestry agencies is responding to an increasingly diverse society in ways that ensure that the views of all citizens are included in management and policy decisions. But gaining clear insights into the perspectives of racial and ethnic communities is often difficult for forest managers, policy makers and researchers who are not part of these communities. This study explores a new approach to overcome this difficulty. The paper summarizes the findings of a content analysis of news articles about resource management issues written by American Indians and published in Indian newspapers. A number of distinct themes emerged. First, the importance of traditional or indigenous knowledge about natural resources, reflecting a different epistemological perspective, was frequently discussed. Second, the importance of spiritual and religious values of nature was a dominant theme. It was often emphasized that spiritual values are inseparable from subsistence and commercial values of natural resources. Third, environmental justice and racism were prominent themes in our database, reflecting a deep-seated lack of trust between Indians and organizations that are part of the dominant culture. A final major theme was the importance of holistic or ecosystem-based management of natural resources, which has long been used by American Indians.
The research approach described in this paper offers a useful tool for building understanding between forest managers and stakeholders that may be applied to other racial and ethnic communities and in other countries. The results may be used to inform forest managers about the unique perspectives of diverse stakeholders, thereby helping managers and policy makers better understand the social context in which decisions need to be made and resulting in forest policies that more closely reflect the true diversity of society.
In many countries, the communities served by public forestry agencies are becoming more racially and ethnically diverse. Demographic trends in the United States, for example, point to a steady increase in the proportion of non-White populations. A number of studies have shown that racial and ethnic communities are often distinct in terms of environmental attitudes and values, concern for certain environmental problems, participation rates in outdoor recreation and levels of environmental activism (e.g., see Jostad, et al. 1996, Mohai and Bryant 1998, Pfister and Ewert 1996, Virden and Walker 1999). An important challenge for forest management agencies is responding to an increasingly diverse society in ways that ensure the views of all citizens are included in management and policy.
But gaining clear insights into the environmental perspectives of racial and ethnic communities is often difficult for forest managers, policy makers, and researchers who are not part of these communities (McAvoy et al. 2000). Differences in traditions, social mores, and language create obstacles to communication and understanding. Histories of exploitation often create profound distrust of government institutions and their representatives. Social science methods used to obtain information about the attitudes, beliefs, and values of the dominant culture often are inappropriate and ineffective when used in the context of racial and ethnic communities. For example, mail surveys are widely used in social research, but have usually not been successful with American Indians.
This study overcomes some of these obstacles by analyzing the perspectives of American Indians on natural resource management as expressed in their own words. The paper summarizes the findings of a content analysis of news articles about resource management issues written by American Indians and published in Indian newspapers and magazines. Unlike most social science methods for analyzing attitudes and values - such as surveys, interviews and focus groups - this approach is unobtrusive and not burdensome to community members. The idea is to provide forest policy makers and managers a new window into the attitudes, beliefs and values of racial and ethnic communities as a first step in building bridges of understanding and communication across diverse worldviews.
The following section describes the textual data and methodology used in this study. Major themes that emerged from analysis of the database of American Indian news stories are presented next, followed by a discussion of the implications for forest managers and policy makers.
The data used in this study were news stories about natural resource management from American Indian news publications. The stories were downloaded from the Ethnic NewsWatch commercial online database.2 Ethnic NewsWatch is an electronic fulltext database that includes newspapers, magazines, and journals of the ethnic, minority, and native press. The database currently includes more than 700,000 fulltext articles from over 200 publications representing a diversity of racial and ethnic communities, including 25 American Indian news publications (see www.slinfo.com). These 25 publications represent a cross-section of major American Indian news sources.
The search command used to identify stories in the Ethnic NewsWatch database was as follows: "(natural resource) w/10 manag!," where the exclamation point meant that any trailing letters were permitted (e.g., managing, co-management, etc.) and the term "w/10" meant that the phrase "natural resource" had to be found within ten words of "manag!" The fulltext of all 235 stories that were found - about 650 single-spaced pages of text - was downloaded for analysis.
Although only 12.5 percent of all news sources in Ethnic NewsWatch are American Indian publications, 70 percent of the 235 stories were from American Indian news sources (164 stories). This is not surprising given the importance of natural resource management activities and concerns on Tribal lands and adjacent public lands in the United States. Due to the predominance of text from Indian news sources, I focused exclusively on these 164 stories (about 450 single-spaced pages of text) in this analysis.
The "open coding" method of content analysis was used to identify major themes in the text. This approach is better able to capture rich themes and uncover unanticipated issues than computer-coded content analysis methods. Only themes and issues that were expressed repeatedly across different articles and news sources were included. See Strauss and Corbin (1998) for details on the open coding method.
A number of distinct themes emerged from our database of American Indian news stories about natural resource management. These themes were in sharp contrast to issues and themes typically emphasized in mainstream news media discussion of natural resource management, based on previous analyses of the mainstream press (see, for example, several of the papers in Bengston (2000) and studies cited therein). The main themes included the importance of traditional knowledge, spiritual values, environmental justice and racism, and ecosystem management. Additional important themes included the link between tribal sovereignty and management of natural resources, the importance of subsistence uses, and economic benefits and values. Each of these themes is briefly discussed and illustrated with quotations from the American Indian press.
The importance of traditional or indigenous knowledge about natural resources, reflecting a different epistemological perspective, was frequently discussed in Indian news articles. Scientific knowledge and expertise is also discussed and is valued as a valid source of knowledge. But the emphasis on traditional ecological knowledge and its importance for natural resource management is striking, as in the following example:
"Botanists are still trying to figure out the possible medicinal properties of some of the native plants, but the tribal members already know because their people had been using them for thousands of years. And they were tremendous ecosystem managers," he said. "Because they relied on natural resources for their lives, they knew more about the process than scientists do today." (Hone 1994, p. 2).
A related theme is the importance of integrating traditional knowledge with scientific and technical knowledge. These two sources of knowledge are viewed as complementary, not conflicting. For example, in the context of a discussion of Native youth pursuing resource management careers, the question was asked: "Who better to integrate the best that western science and village elders have to offer than our own people, taking care of our own lands?" (Tundra Times 1995, p. 2).
Spiritual and religious values of forests have been defined in many ways. Adamowicz et al. (1998, p. 54) note "... sacred values determine what objects, practices, or places will be revered or considered taboo... they are sacrosanct and nonnegotiable." The importance of spiritual values of nature was a dominant theme in our database. As illustrated in the following example, lack of trust of government agencies to protect sacred sites and values was also often expressed: "Zah said it was ironic that during the Persian Gulf War the U.S. government was careful not to destroy religious sites of its enemy Iraq, but has not protected the religious sites of its own indigenous people." (Fort Apache Scout 1994, p. 1).
In addition to frequent discussion of spiritual values of nature, stories in our database often emphasized that these values are integrated with and inseparable from other values such as subsistence and commercial values of natural resources. For example, the following quotation is taken from a story about the rejection by the Minnesota House of Representatives of a compromise bill to settle the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe's treaty rights for fishing and hunting: "Spring spearing is not a sport for the Indian people. It is a spiritual act. It is as sacred to the Indian people as Easter is to Christians," (Spector 1993, p. 45).
Environmental justice and racism were prominent themes in our database of Indian news stories. In the context of this discussion, a deep-seated lack of trust between Indians and organizations that are part of the dominant culture is often a central part of the discourse, as in the following example: "Because of political power, undesirable facilities are more often placed in native communities or economically depressed areas. Why would a group trust anybody who would expose them to involuntary risk?" (Sho-Ban News 1996, p. 1).
Discussion of issues related to environmental justice frequently includes expressions of economic injustice in which Indian resources have been stolen or purchased for unfair compensation. In this discourse, both past and present inequities are often mentioned: "Their [Bureau of Indian Affairs] mandate was to get the land back into production, and it's never happened. It's sad. There's sad, sad stories. Some of the best virgin old growth in the world came off the reservation, and the land owners - my grandmother, Dave's grandmother - were given pennies," (Indian Country Today 1994, p. 5).
In the United States, ecosystem management was adopted by many state and federal forest agencies in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and is a relatively new approach to natural resource management for these agencies. But a holistic, ecosystem-based approach has long been used by American Indians to sustainably manage the land and resources they traditionally depended on for their survival. This theme was often expressed in our database, e.g., "Many tribes are focused on promoting healthy ecosystems ... Tribes have been managing ecosystems for thousands of years. We see our neighbors being overwhelmed by endless debates over the merits and method of ecosystem management. We know what needs to be done, and we can do it." (Fort Apache Scout 1997, p. 3).
A wide range of additional distinctive but less frequently discussed themes emerged from our analysis. For example, the link between tribal management of natural resources and tribal sovereignty was consistently expressed with great conviction. Thus, the autonomy and very survival of Indian nations is viewed as inextricably linked to the control and management of natural resources. Another theme was the importance of subsistence uses of forests (e.g., gathering food and firewood). Subsistence uses and products were frequently mentioned as vital economic and cultural resources. This discussion often also included explanations of the spiritual and religious dimensions of subsistence resources.
Finally, the economic benefits and values of natural resource management was a consistent theme in the Indian news stories we analyzed. This discussion often focused on traditional economic benefits such as the jobs and income generated by timber and other commodities. But it sometimes included a fundamentally different set of priorities for economic development. For example, the following quotation is taken from a discussion of economic development strategies for tribes: "He [an Indian economic development expert] said the most important thing for them to remember is that they're part of a spiritual biosphere made up of spirituality, language, tradition, air and water, and they must never do anything in their economic design to corrode it," (Hone 1993, p. 1).
Many of the central themes and perspectives discussed in American Indian news media stories about natural resource management are ignored or rarely mentioned in the mainstream public discourse. For example, spiritual and sacred values were the most prominent environmental values expressed in our database, but the spiritual and related values of nature are least frequently expressed in the mainstream media (cf., Xu and Bengston 1997). Deeply held environmental values are typically kept separate from the professional activities and decisions of natural resource policy makers and managers, and government policies are most often based on instrumental economic values rather than spiritual environmental values (Craig et al. 1993). Forest managers who may be uncomfortable dealing with spiritual and religious values must learn to elicit and incorporate these deeper values in decision making, and to not discount them because they are unfamiliar. Standard economic valuation techniques are unlikely to be able to adequately take account of these values (Adamowicz et al. 1998).
The importance ascribed to traditional ecological knowledge as a legitimate and vital knowledge source is another example of the sharp contrast between American Indian perspectives and that of the dominant culture. Managers trained in scientific forest management - and implicitly in the primacy of scientific ways of knowing - need to expand their epistemological perspectives and be open to other sources of knowledge.
The prominence of expressions of concern about environmental justice and racism in the Native press points to the importance of building trust between resource management agencies and Indian communities. This will not be an easy task given the long history of exploitation and the deep-rooted lack of trust that was evident in our analysis. Long-term and ongoing commitment to the goal of building trust, communication, and cooperation will be required. An example of the product of such an effort is the Memorandum of Understanding between the Lake Superior Chippewa Indians and the USDA Forest Service (Voigt Intertribal Task Force and USDA Forest Service 1999).
Natural resource managers and policy makers need a clearer understanding of the perspectives of underserved communities in order to manage public lands in ways that are responsive to all stakeholders. The research approach and data source described in this paper offer a useful tool for building understanding between forest managers and stakeholders that may be applied to other racial and ethnic communities and in other countries. The results may be used to inform forest managers about the unique perspectives of diverse stakeholders, thereby helping managers and policy makers better understand the social context in which decisions need to be made and resulting in forest policies that more closely reflect the true diversity of society.
Content analysis of databases such as Ethnic NewsWatch can provide a window into the perspectives of other cultures and subcultures, but this is only a first step toward improving communication and building understanding. Cooperative approaches that involve development of trusting relationships between forestry professionals and stakeholder communities are essential.
It is also important to remember that there is significant heterogeneity among and within racial and ethnic communities. McAvoy et al. (2000, p. 484) note "American Indian nations vary considerably both culturally and in situation, as do the individual communities within each nation." Therefore, generalizations about the perspectives of particular groups and communities should be viewed cautiously.
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Bengston, D.N. (ed.), 2000. Applications of Computer-Aided Text Analysis in Natural Resources. General Technical Report NC-211. St. Paul, MN: USDA Forest Service, North Central Research Station. 54 p.
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Hone, E., 1994. FMC Corp. awards Shoshone-Bannock Tribes $10,000 grant for plant identification project. Sho-Ban News 19(49): 2. December 22.
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1 Social scientist, USDA Forest Service, North Central Research Station, 1992 Folwell Avenue, St. Paul, MN 55108, USA. [email protected]; Website: http://www.ncrs.fs.fed.us
2 Discussion of Ethnic NewsWatch does not imply an endorsement by the USDA Forest Service.