Brown ash trees sustain the ancestral basket-making traditions of the Wabanaki people of Maine and play a key role in their creation myths. These trees are now threatened by the emerald ash borer, a beetle that has already killed millions of ash trees in the eastern United States. Wabanaki tribes and basket makers have joined forces with foresters, university researchers, and landowners to develop and deploy actions aimed at preventing an invasion by this insect. Anthropologist Darren Ranco discusses how the stakeholders in this interdisciplinary effort are using sustainability science and drawing from Wabanaki forms of diplomacy to influence state and federal responses to the emerald ash borer and prevent the demise of the ash trees central to Wabanaki culture.
Darren Ranco, PhD Social Anthropology, Harvard University), Chair of Native American Programs, Associate Professor of Anthropology, Coordinator of Native American Research, University of Maine
Offered in collaboration with the Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University and Harvard Museum of Natural History
Recorded November 18, 2014
Transcript
[00:00:05.41] Good evening, everyone. My name is Jane Pickering. I'm the Executive Director of the Harvard Museums of Science and Culture which includes the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and ethnology and the Harvard Museum of Natural History which together are sponsoring this evening's event alongside the Arnold Arboretum. It's one of those talks that covers so many different disciplines. It's really wonderful. And so tonight, Darren Ranco who is the Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Maine is going to be discussing the interdisciplinary approach that the Wabanaki people of Maine have taken to protect their brown ash trees from the invasive and deadly emerald ash borer, which I assume is what we're looking at right now.
[00:00:50.74] So after the lecture, I would like to invite you to visit the PVD exhibit, The Legacy of Penobscot Canoes, A View From the River. And the gallery is located on the first floor of the Peabody. And so to get there, join us for a glass of wine, just go around the back and we'll literally walk into a door right there. So if you sort of head in that direction, you'll find your way through. And then for a complete list of our four programs at HMSC, there is a brochure that as usual I've forgotten to bring up with me, but it's on the table at the side there. And at the table, you can also sign up for our mailing list and our email list as well as join the museum's if you wish to help support programs like the one we're having tonight.
[00:01:36.74] Finally, I'd like to just mention two events that we have coming up in the rest of the semester. First, on Thursday, December 4 at 6 o'clock. Peter Der Manduelian, Joseph Green and Adam Asia will discuss the life and contributions of Harvard professor, David Gordon Lyon, who was one of the first Assyriologists in the United States and founder of the Harvard Semitic Museum. And then on Wednesday, December 10 at 8 o'clock, the World Musical Ensemble of Dudley House will offer a holiday concert in this hall featuring an international selection of melodies. I think that will be fun.
[00:02:15.80] So I'm now delighted to introduce Dr. Jeffrey Quilter, who is the William and Muriel Seabury Howells Director of the Peabody Museum who's going to introduce our speaker. Thank you.
[00:02:29.90] [APPLAUSE]
[00:02:34.84] Thank you Jane, and thank you all for coming tonight. And I'd especially like to thank the Arnold Arboretum for co-sponsoring this event. I'm very pleased tonight to introduced Darren Ranco, Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Maine. He received his Bachelor of Arts in Anthropology and Classical Studies from Dartmouth College in 1993, and his Master of Studies in Environmental Law in 1998 from the Vermont Law School. He completed his Ph.D. in Social Anthropology right here at Harvard University in 2000.
[00:03:08.29] At the University of Maine, Dr. Ranco is chair of Native American Programs and Coordinator of Native American Research. He teaches courses on indigenous intellectual property rights, research ethics, environmental justice, and tribal governance. And he's also a faculty member of the George J. Mitchell Center for Environmental and Watershed Research at the University of Maine. It's an initiative that seeks to understand and solve societal problems related to the growing challenge of improving human well being while protecting the environment, as we're about to hear tonight. He is a member of the Penobscot Indian nation, has made great contributions to advancing research relationships between universities, native and non-native researchers and indigenous communities.
[00:03:54.17] I'm very excited about this talk. I hope you are too. Please join me in welcoming Darren Ranco.
[00:03:59.25] [APPLAUSE]
[00:04:14.58] Hi, good evening. It's so great to be here. This is my return, my triumphant return. I remember when I defended my dissertation and I was walking, it was in the May of 2000. I was walking through Harvard Yard and people are playing Frisbee, walking around, and I was just struck by it. I was like this is actually a really beautiful place. And I don't know why I thought people were trying to steal my soul for seven years.
[00:04:47.44] [LAUGHTER]
[00:04:48.33] So it was one of those experiences that probably all graduates do. I'm sure it wasn't me, it was just the universality of it.
[00:04:56.03] So it is really great to be here. The Harvard Museums have been really great and Castle and others and Jane have been really created reaching out to the communities, the tribal communities in Maine. You'll see some of the fruits of that labor. If you haven't already, it's a really amazing exhibit. The hospitality here is really great. I appreciate that you turned down the temperature for me. That was really nice. I feel I probably won't burst into the flames from the heat here in Cambridge.
[00:05:36.27] I'm going to give you some highlights of a research project and try to tell a story about how we're trying to basically work together to address something that is actually not solvable. In sustainability science and part of a sustainability science problem, a lot of what we take on are problems that are intractable. People can't just come up with simple solutions. There's no one single disciplinary or magic bullet to address problems. The obvious one that we're going through is climate change. But things like this, invasive species, are also in that vein. And I think the lessons that we've learn in these situations are probably the lessons you could learn in kindergarten, which is share, try to respect people, play well together. All the things that you would want kindergartners to do is probably what we should, especially in the university and as we work with folks out in the public, really we should keep those lessons in mind. I think it's one way see ourselves as overly expert that things tend to go a little wrong.
[00:06:49.17] That's it. Thank you all.
[00:06:50.79] [LAUGHTER]
[00:06:51.64] All right, so the goals for today's talk-- sorry, that was a very short version of this. So I'm a Mac person, and I am I'm sure I could have fixed this today, and I though oh, why don't we just fix this. But 1, 1, and 2 was really was 1, 2, and 3 on my Mac.
[00:07:06.47] [LAUGHTER]
[00:07:09.53] And she's like, what's fix that. I was like oh it's only one of my jokes. What are you talking about? I can't really get rid of that. So the goals for today's talk, and I really want to think about research and the process of working on an intractable problem, and explore the ways that we brought together different research methods and systems of knowledge to address one of these intractable problems. I also want to reflect on the ways that indigenous research methods. Wabanaki diplomacy, traditional ecological knowledge can better inform approaches in sustainability science as we address these very difficult problems. And for me, and it's always for public talk, we actually have done things and I think responded and created some resilience in Maine as far as responding to the emerald ash borer. But really want to look at the opportunities and benefits that bringing different people and different knowledges together creates. So hopefully I'll touch on at least one or two of these, 1, 1, and 2.
[00:08:08.61] So the emerald ash borer-- and I think it's somewhat fitting that the arboretum is sponsoring this as it was found just this past summer over there-- That the EAB is an invasive species. It kills close to 100% of ash trees that it comes into contact with. It's originally from eastern Russian and Asia in general. Its first detection was in Detroit in 2002, and it came over on wood shipping pallets. That's pretty much the really secure theory as to how it got here. The port of Detroit has lots of stuff coming in from Asia. It kills all types of ash trees in the way that it reproduces, and I'll show you. The adult-- which this is not scaled, this is not smaller than this-- the adult actually doesn't do a whole lot to ash trees. It nibbles a little bit on the leaves at the top but does very little in terms of harming the trees. It's the way it reproduces, under the bark, that basically girdles the tree from the inside.
[00:09:22.74] It's killed over 100 million trees in 23 states since 2002. It was found here Massachusetts and still has not been found in Maine yet, which is different than saying it's not in Maine. The detection is a really tricky thing that we could talk about. It was found here Massachusetts in 2012. And until yesterday, it was being quarantined around county lines. And there was just an announcement yesterday. Good thing, I go to googled this this afternoon, after I came to MIT. That's a new thing that they've actually now issued a statewide quarantine, and we'll talk more about what the implications are about that. And I think that's in response to the fact that last December it was found in North Andover after being found in the Western part of Massachusetts, so this idea that it is kind of all the way west in the Western part of the state and also in eastern Massachusetts I think is the driving logic to the statewide quarantine.
[00:10:24.36] For us in Maine, there are a couple of Passamaquoddy and Maliseet folks in the audience. So there's just this thing that we all make really good baskets. I'm not going to identify necessarily who's these are. This is what's at stake for us. And there are a whole bunch of different styles and traditions even within our tradition. It's one of those ironic situations that our basket making traditions are now being recognized nationally. We've had basket makers winning national awards, selling baskets for 8, 10, $12,000. I know there's some collectors in the audience. It's really gained national recognition at this critical moment where we feel like it could all disappear. And I think that sense of trying to prepare for something is really motivating me anyway in terms of the research and I think a lot of the folks that we work with. You can see a variety of those baskets.
[00:11:27.53] I was told to show a lot of pictures. So I thought I'd do that. So the emerald ash borer attacks and kills only ash trees. And you can see here a picture of what it does in terms of killing the tree. The larvae here grow. They're laid in as eggs and they grow to this length. And then eventually morph into this bug and it comes out of the tree. But it's these galleries and the way that reproduces that it basically girdles the whole tree from the inside between the bark and the wood. It prevents nutrients from flowing up and down the tree and that's what kills tells them.
[00:12:14.06] So the natural spread of this is-- and I'll show you some maps in a moment that. In 2004, the Maine Indian Basket Makers Lines brought people from the USDA APHIS, the Animal Plant Health Inspection Service part of the USDA which regulates these pests, brought folks in 2004 to Maine. And they were saying oh, it's probably not going to get to Maine until 25, 30, 35 years. And it's really much on the doorstep. And that's because of, in this slide called artificial spread, but the infested firewood has most assuredly been one of the ways. So we as humans are the ones that are spreading this around and making it go a lot faster than it otherwise would. I just like these because this is cartooned.
[00:13:04.75] One thing that APHIS has discovered is one of the vectors of spread is through in the Upper Midwest through NASCAR events, that people who go to NASCAR also tend the camp, put wood in the back of their pickups, and drive around. So all of you eastern liberal elitists can hate NASCAR even more.
[00:13:29.28] [LAUGHTER]
[00:13:31.27] Yeah, I'm not including myself in that for obvious reasons.
[00:13:34.92] Is there an important distinction between firewood and logs? Why is that a [INAUDIBLE] statement?
[00:13:40.28] Oh, we'll just because even if it's processed into fire wood, it still can be there, as opposed to a whole log where some pests have to be part of a whole log. I think that's the logic of that. One of the things that makes it really difficult to regulate is that it's almost impossible to detect at low densities. And that has as of 2008, the USDA gave up on the eradication as one of the methods of responding to this, simply because whenever it's discovered or most times when it's discovered, it is simply too late to actually eradicate it, unlike the Asian long-horned beetle, which is here in Massachusetts, which is a lot easier to detect. It's a lot more recognizable. Hangs out a little bit lower in the tree stands, et cetera, et cetera, that they're still eradication as a the possibility for that invasive.
[00:14:34.69] When we began our research project, we tried to figure out how much time we might have in terms of responding. And it had just been discovered in the summer of 2009 in Western New York. So here on this map, the areas in blue are the quarantine zones where it had been detected. And that sense that it was found in Western New York really did alarm folks that our basket making traditions we identify with, especially Mohawk, Haudenoseanee communities, that they also make baskets similar to ours or we to them. I don't know what. Origin stories are difficult for me. They were looking at being impacted by this it as of five years ago.
[00:15:22.27] And like, I've mentioned before, it has spread so much more quickly than folks thought even at that time. And this map is not correct because Massachusetts now should be all blue. Yeah, Massachusetts, all blue! The arboretum find is on here. The North Andover find this on here, just the new quarantine zone is not. And that sense of urgency, the discoveries to New Hampshire in the last year really put a sense of a lot of pressure that we do this work and do it well and try to protect these resources.
[00:16:06.58] So in response to that, I and a couple of my buddies here at the University of Maine, we came up with this title. And I think part of this is the NSF funded, as of 2009, one of the larger sustainability science grants ever to the University of Maine, and I'll talk more about that. But we came up with this sustainability science sounding title for our grant. It pains me to say it. So I will nod. You can read it. It's one of those things that we do to avoid Congress from looking at our research project and saying you guys with the baskets, that's not science. See, it sounds like science. No one's here from Congress right? So you're not going to tell?
[00:16:57.22] [LAUGHTER]
[00:16:59.11] That for us, so one of the real things, and I'm always this way trying to challenge the status quo round research functions-- I'm sure it has nothing to do with my Harvard training-- that we included the Maine Indian Basket Makers Alliances PIs on this project, that they represent the interests of basket makers in the state. Not all basket makers in in the state are part of the Maine Indian Basket, but I'd say 85% are.
[00:17:28.56] And we really wanted to make sure the interests of basket makers and both myself and John Daigle. We're both Penobscot. We both come from basket making families, but we're not arrogant enough to kid ourselves that we actually know all the time as university professors what basket makers really need or want out of a research project. And I think the explicit goal that we would both study and facilitate a process to respond to this really urgent situation defies some research traditions, not the ones that I try to identify with. But that we would actually be engaged in some particular actions and not just publishing papers that our 10 friends read is something that we're really committed to. There you go and it's funded by people.
[00:18:19.64] The idea of partnership is really important to us. And I would be again negligent in thinking that I or even our current project is creating partnership where none existed, forming a set of relations that we sui generis, out of nothing, have created, that there's been partnerships that have gone before us. And this is one of the frames I'll talk about later, that Wabanaki diplomacies and Wabanaki engagements with non-natives really do help frame this, that we are constantly seeking alliance, that our notion of sovereignty is rooted in not simply about legal and juridical control over our resources, but also the building and formation of really important relationships over time and those responsibilities that come with those relationships.
[00:19:15.82] So the Maine Indian Basket Makers Alliance was involved in this die back and ash task force creation in the 1990s. And in 2004, they brought up again APHIS and other key people to Maine to talk about how do we respond to this. And so far, industry has not been concerned with the arrival of the emerald ash borer. Clearly brown ash trees are considered a-- brown ash trees in Maine and the Maritimes we call them brown ash. They're called black ash down here and pretty much every place else in the United States, but is the same species. It's Fraxinus nigra. So I learned that's the classical education, I can speak Latin in forestry language.
[00:20:08.17] The industry, I think, ash trees don't make up a huge part of our trees in the state of Maine, roughly 4%. There are more trees than people in Main. And I think you all probably know that. And I think they think, and they have good reason to think, that their concerns will be protected quite well by the response, both by the state and the federal government. And for us, it was we were very concerned that the people who care most about this resource would somehow be locked out of the responses, and I'll talk more about that. There are certain municipalities and state that use ash tree as-- not necessarily brown ash, but a lot of white and green ash as their primary street tree. And they will care about it and we're just seeing in the last couple years a few towns planning for the arrival of the emerald ash borer but nowhere in the same way that basket makers have started to respond to this.
[00:21:07.63] So this is just my little slide again, more baskets. One of the really important elders who has continued our basket making traditions, Molly Neptune Parker, who is Passamaquoddy, and the location of our communities, but also I try to throw on somehow where our territories were conceived of by certain historians. This idea that our tribes are primarily border tribes has to do with our roots to survival. My tribe, the Penobscot Nation, being right in the center of the Penobscot River Valley I'm sure shows our survival and continuation has probably a lot to do with our genetic brilliance and--
[00:22:02.08] [LAUGHTER]
[00:22:04.06] I remember in graduate school, I read "In The Savage Mind" by Claude Levi Strauss. His reference to the Penobscot moose hunter and sort of how our mind works. And we're an of course in an occult society, not a hut society, but that our knowledge around moose hunting was obviously quite adept. He didn't say anything about Passamaquoddies or Maliseets by the way.
[00:22:28.06] [LAUGHTER]
[00:22:31.43] So one of the frames in working through the Mitchell Center and our funder being this major sustainability science grant is one approach and in terms of how I like to frame this, in a lot of indigenous researchers, and I'm really heavily influenced by indigenous research methods, really try to counter-- and I will do this as well-- really try to counter indigenous knowledges, indigenous research methods against Western scientific traditions, and really try to contrast them, sometimes diametrically opposed to them. I don't believe that's the case and I think sustainability science in the way that it is conceived has great commonalities with indigenous research methods, that it's responding to problems as they exist in society. It links knowledge to action and really constructive ways, that knowledge and research questions needs to be co produced. And that's really important that we engage the public, that we don't sort of center ourselves at the middle of our knowledge to solve a problem. That has to be done in collaboration is a particular brand of sustainability. Not everyone who does the sustainability science believes this, but I think it's sensed that multiple disciplines, it's sensed that there are these intractable problems really jives well with indigenous research methods and traditional ecological knowledges and traditional knowledge in general.
[00:24:07.30] The framing of indigenous research methods, and I, earlier in the day, I gave a talk at MIT particularly about these methodologies. The more exciting talk is here because MIT, I had 1,000 slides with just text on them. I figure they would be happy with that. Someone pulled a fire alarm or something during the middle of my talk. I'm sure it's unrelated to my text and slide choices.
[00:24:35.06] [LAUGHTER]
[00:24:37.86] Indigenous research methods were responsive to particular aspects of experiences that we've had through colonization, the feeling that we have been over researched or we've been research so much and yet somehow we haven't benefited from that research. We're still the poorest or unhealthiest set of populations. And yet, researchers keep coming and they get their money and whatever it is that's coming to them. That sense of experience, that indigenous research methods are to counter that, but also are oriented culturally towards a set of epistemologies and maybe even ontologies that frame up research as a different kind of process, one that respects the person and their relationship to community more, as well as thinks of the research as a process which can be both healing and mobilizing, as opposed to one focused on result or discovery.
[00:25:38.87] The ways in which I understand in this project and how I am analyzing what has happened so far, really requires two cultural frames. If I was in an anthropology seminar, I probably wouldn't even use the word culture. You know anthropologists hardly ever use that word anymore. Any way, there are two frames and I think they're important to separate out in the way that this process, in particular, of relationship building and responding to this urgent need has happened. There is what is more commonly referred is traditional ecological knowledge, and that's of course this a series of relationships and I'll talk a little bit about that knowledge as experiences and relationships with the natural world that indigenous people have. But also, what I'm calling Wabanaki diplomacy, which is a way to understand our relationship and the way we seek to engage others in a multicultural, multinational way.
[00:26:44.05] So to really think about our traditional knowledges and the epistemologies that drive that, we have to talk about Gluskabe. Passamaquoddy mouths used to call our trickster hero Gluska, right. And we refer to him as Gluskabe. And really it's a he, and I use the gender around him somewhat lightly. Like a lot of trickster figures and a lot of teachers, his just gender is somewhat fluid. He was sent it to us to teach us lessons. He made all the animals small. He did a whole bunch of really great things for all of us, And I think that when we think about our relationships and our understandings of the resources, we have to start there.
[00:27:32.17] In particular, there is a story, one of our creation stories, where Gluskabe shoots an arrow into an ash tree and the people come out singing and dancing. And that's a critical moment of our creation, one of the worlds that's created for us. The ash tree is critical as a life giving tree. We can talk more about this perhaps after the talk, but this is how we understand our relationship right from the beginning and identify with these resources.
[00:28:07.86] So you probably have guessed that I like to put on a series of quotes that don't necessarily agree with each other, and let you decide what you want to understand. I don't want to be tied to any particular definition around TEK. I think the diversity of opinions about this is really important. I think one of the things, and now just coming out of telling you a creation story, one of the things that TEK I think it's not appreciated for necessarily is it's a set of observations over multiple generations that looks more like what we would consider Western science.
[00:28:45.27] But that comes with the classification system, empirical observations, as well as these values and systems of belief. And I think the fact that any epistemology divides up the world into different categories is a truism. It just happens that in these traditions it's divided up maybe differently, and particularly evaluating different aspects of being, mind, body, emotions, spirit, is critical to our understanding of TEK. But I think also, that brings with it a process orientation to knowledge production that even in our languages that in order to state an opinion you almost have to state how you know it or your source, which as action oriented languages, makes a different sort of claim about knowledge than Western science which does it differently.
[00:29:47.83] So when I think about the Wabanaki Confederacy-- and actually some of these slides I just was writing 20 minutes ago, so they may or may not make sense. I don't know. The Wabanaki Confederacy, again, is framing up how we relate to other people in this multicultural, multinational context that we live in. And here you see wampum belts which is a historic belt that represents our Confederacy with the pipe in the middle and the four tribal nations on either side. Throughout the '70s as we were running up towards important Settlement Act with the state of Maine, and again in the early to mid '90s, the Confederacy has been a really important articulation of native identities in many of the tribes in terms of building coalitions, both cultural and political.
[00:30:56.26] For us then, diplomacy should be seen as something that is process oriented and really is about a series of metaphors potentially. The Haudenosaunee have a recognized diplomatic tradition that predates the arrival of Europeans. This has been articulated, this great law of piece that they had, has been articulated into a set of international relations with Europeans really early on through the Covenant Chain and the Two Row Wampum Treaty Bell. And there's a series of metaphors that drive that understanding. Again, I don't have time to necessarily go into them right now.
[00:31:38.54] The Wabanaki Confederacy is a similar series of traditions. There isn't evidence that predates the arrival of Europeans, but what we do know is that the clan systems that really organized tribal life before the arrival of Europeans definitely existed in the multiple communities across the state of Maine into the Maritimes. And that set of relations through clan defined how communities related to one another.
[00:32:08.81] And I just put in a couple of quotes to think about this as a sense of adaptation through process that our diplomacy helps us do, as well as thinking that diplomacy-- and I see this all the time with our leadership and with people from our communities-- that this way of engaging others is also I think a tradition of persuasive discourse. That is a way to engage internationally in a multicultural discussion too. It's not a bend you to my will, but I think it's a real tradition of speaking truth to power which I think is a key element of exchanging knowledge and solving problems together.
[00:32:57.00] So because I'm not a historian, I will now give you a series of quotes that are totally and historically unrelated and are only bending to my will in terms of the point I'm trying to make, that our sovereignty is driven by our understanding of diplomacy and this engagement with others that is about relationship as much as it is about our control of our territory. So you have Lauren, who is a Penobscott diplomat in the early part of the 18th Century Talking back to the Crown's interpretation of treaties and saying basically you can have your king in your lands, but we have no King and we're actually free people. We are master of our own lands in common.
[00:33:52.64] Similarly, in a series of speech acts and petitions throughout the worst of our colonial periods in the 19th century, you see Penobscot and other Wabanaki people speaking back to folks. And critically, this set a persuasive discourses is about trying to influence through argument and through a set of relations a way to express our knowledge and our implicit ownership over the resources and our responsibility to them. So when we send petitions like this, we're not just saying we have a right to because of a treaty. We actually share really critical parts of our knowledge and information about how we know the lands and what we suggest in this petition a the way of regulating weirs, a way of regulating fishing, for both natives and non-natives in a way that would respect the continuation of the resource. So it's that idea of engagement and persuasive discourse through which our knowledges come through in this particular form of diplomacy.
[00:35:13.38] We also sent a letter to the United Nations in 1957. Again, dehistoricizing this, but again trying to through persuasive discourse gain recognition, make critical points about our nationhood at that time, which I think was quite unusual for '57, and really seeking to exercise a kind of authority through this persuasive discourse. Here you see our names, we actually signing this, but also representing our clans through these totems with the signatures.
[00:36:01.25] So if we think about diplomacy and TEK as framing up how we might enacted a set of indigenous research methods through sustainability science, we can understand some of the commonalities that exists here. And for me, the idea that there is this broad agreement that collaboration that mutually benefit through research is something that both traditions share. Both agree that research should be open to different forms of knowledge with an understanding of power relations. Both agree that we should focus on the transformative nature of research with a much greater emphasis on process and potentially healing in indigenous research methods.
[00:36:48.56] It's not clear in sustainability science whether non-Western epistemologies can be really appreciated. I think that is somewhat unclear. And while sustainability science tends overemphasize large scale problems, both sustainability science and indigenous research methods require institutional change and call out universities to value different approaches to research, partnership, not again necessarily publications in peer reviewed journals that virtually no one reads.
[00:37:28.28] So one of the highlights of successes that we've had in our project up to this point has been developing a response plan and signing memoranda of understanding, which are still in draft, between the USDA APHIS and the tribes in the state. What we know about response plans to invasive species is they define how different parties in a particular jurisdiction will respond. And they provide the basis for a sort of definition or way of defining how the forest will sustainably be managed over time. And for us, this idea that we would get everyone involved is really critical to the work we've been doing for the last five years.
[00:38:22.81] What we do know is that these response plans, in general the response to invasives by nation states or even states in the United States, that minorities indigenous people tend not to be included very well or very early and this puts them totally under the gun in being locked out of how we will manage or respond. In the 10 state plans we analyzed, only 4 of them even mentioned tribes as a stakeholder group. All 10 of these states had tribes in them. Few addressed the potential impacts on tribes or how tribes might be involved as sovereign nations. Wisconsin redrafted theirs to think about tribes as collaborators, as sovereign entities and they're having their own regulations.
[00:39:20.48] And that a huge output for has been this these MOUs. But even if they're not finalized, the relationship building that that has taken place over years of work has been really fruitful. And I am quite confident that how both the state and the federal government respond to the arrival the EAB will include basket makers, will include all the partners that we've developed over time.
[00:39:49.63] So what can be done once the EAB is here and, it's already here in Massachusetts. We're already thinking about adaptation as our theme for the next phases of our work. We're adapting to something that is not even currently detected in Maine, and I think that future oriented nature of planning is one of the strengths that our team has been able to employ. And this is where the rubber meets the road or where the theory becomes something quite real, that one of our plans is to bring together adaptation projects, basket makers, harvesters, forest scientists, people who work in the forest industry to really think about ways that we can store, harvest, think about future collaborations in responding to the very technical needs that we might have in terms of the emerald ash borer killing all of these trees in the next series of decades. This is one of those situations that it's almost like trying to create situations where incubators can happen for people to come up with solutions in a free form kind of way. And we're happy that this kind of work is starting just this fall and has been funded.
[00:41:21.21] One of the biggest issues that I think we've been dealing with is and that we will deal with in the medium term is an increasing scarcity a basket quality ash. And one of the ways that we wanted to frame up our study was to have basket makers bring us to-- which I actually knew this wouldn't work-- bring us to places that they gather and locate for foresters the basket quality ash. Of course, none of the people wanted to do that and reveal where they take brown ash from.
[00:41:59.55] And what we did instead and this has been a really fruitful project, is select the different stands of brown ash randomly throughout the state. These are all the ecoregions identified on this map. That we would then work with harvesters to identify what basket quality ash would look like and work with forestry folks to identify site conditions, soil conditions, to be able to figure out where we might be in the future locate new locations of basket quality ash, places where people currently are not harvesting. And we've done a lot of work on this as well as trying to work with let large landowners who through forest certification are required to allow indigenous people to access certain resources and as well to develop permitting system.
[00:42:55.53] We've also been documenting for future generations gathering methods. At some point, I don't think the weaving traditions will go away honestly. I think there will be enough ash that exists and there might be some other materials used, but that I think one set of knowledges and the diversity of this knowledge by tribe and by family is really critical that we need to document this. And for us, we've developed this archive which the Maine Indian Basket Makers Alliance own to really preserve for future generations. And we're working on the end user elements of this. It doesn't make any sense if we just put a bunch of movie files in some hard drive somewhere. We want to make sure that it's usable and important the people in the future.
[00:43:52.46] I've been working. I've had a couple programs where we work with tribal youth to collect seeds and send them to places for storage. This is a picture of a seed. This isn't real. It's a seed bank, but it's not the one that you'd send your seeds. Otherwise, it'd just be a picture of some building somewhere that didn't say seed bank on it. Anyway, but we've been working with youth from the different communities to collect brown ash. And I think as we develop the mapping systems as well, we will be able to develop a larger seed collection plan that would really emphasize basket quality ash as well as the genetic diversity of brown ash for future generations so we can replant.
[00:44:42.93] And this is how. Actually gathering seed from ash trees is pretty difficult because they tend to grow up pretty high in the stand. So there are these techniques that you use. And I'm no good at this, so other people who are much better are good at cutting away the seeds as they come out late in the summer.
[00:45:06.63] For us, too, that our primary grand ended just this past summer. And we've been able to find some foundations to continue funding our network and series of relationships. It almost felt like with the arrival the EAB in New Hampshire that we had run out of funding just about the same time as discovered in the state of Maine, which is no good of course. And I think of that real emphasis of bringing people together, having regular information meetings about the current status, has been a really great process. And people in these meetings get along great in terms of sharing different approaches, knowledge, and working together.
[00:45:51.08] This is my last slide. And it just represents, we are able to bring some of the basket makers and harvesters out to Michigan in the summer of 2010 so they could see what an ash stand that has been destroyed by the emerald ash borer looks like, also learn how to identify it as they are processing ash trees for making baskets. And it's really about this sort of diplomacy and this emphasis on the process that folks have really emphasized to me as I become frustrated with certain things.
[00:46:31.05] As the idea, of course, is that in the '90s, we had the die back of the ash. Now, we have the emerald as borer. Next generation will be something else and it'll be something else. It's really the quality of our relationships with others in developing both our persuasive discourses with others in terms of meeting our needs, but also just the quality of how we act in partnership that really will define our future in relation to our resources. So that's it.
[00:47:04.21] [APPLAUSE]
[00:47:12.90] There was a question back there, Yeah.
[00:47:14.76] Thank you for very much. I guess I was hoping to hear if you were making something that could be done to solve the spread. And can you speak to that a little bit?
[00:47:28.11] Sure.
[00:47:29.49] It sounds like OK, we're stuck saving the seeds.
[00:47:35.75] Yeah, as an anthropologist, I'm happy to talk about forestry for a while. There have been a series of responses. I mentioned that eradication is no longer considered an actual management option of this. So what happens with most invasive pests is that you're trying to buy time so nature can find a way, which is actually something in our meetings has been repeatedly visited. And I think the basket makers really understand that at some point there will be a response.
[00:48:10.98] So the management of that is APHIS, and this was really big a few years ago. They don't do this quite as much. They bring in little parasitoids and bugs from Asia that hunt the emerald ash borer, which don't worry, the government bringing in more invasives to fight invasives there's a really good risk assessment that they do when this happens. More than not is that these parasitoids, these invasives that they bring into hunt it will die out, that they actually don't. And this is primarily what has been happening. Some of them are starting to proliferate, but they're not. These are again bugs that are used to different kinds of ecosystems and different kinds of environments to a certain extent.
[00:49:00.13] What we do you see is some native wasps are responding, and we see some increase in certain species of wasp that are hunting the emerald ash borer which is really good. In Maine, we've used it's the Cerceris wasp as a bio detection. They're not enough to hunt it and kill it to such an extent that it would control its population, but it's a good biomonitoring system.
[00:49:27.64] Also, in certain parts of the Midwest, we're seeing an increase in woodpecker population where they're actually responding to have a whole new food source of this green little bug as well as the larvae inside the trees. So that's been hopeful.
[00:49:46.11] But I think the problem with these forests pests, nature will find a way. There will be genetic responses within the trees themselves, but the scale of response to invasives in forest pests anyway is now 60, 80, 100 years. So that would be a really grim picture for us as we think about the future of the resource.
[00:50:08.17] Can it you anticipate is there an estimate of the percentage of the ash trees that will survive this invasion, that this really isn't the complete annihilation of the species?
[00:50:27.60] The picture so far is as grim as it gets with any invasive. I won't say 100% because they tend not to talk in that fashion. They say 99%. So there is the blue ash tree, which exists in the southern part of the US, which has some resistance to it. And part of it might be because of the whatever it is that makes it blue. Again, maybe there's a forester in the audience that can tell me what it is then. But there is that resistance.
[00:51:03.03] I just heard a paper by people studying how the EAB kind of sticks around. And as new trees grow up, the EAB will-- in Michigan this work has primarily been done-- will stick around long enough to wait out the three to five years and then attack the saplings of ash trees. But the good thing about this I guess is that it will always reseed. It lives long enough to reseed. So we'll have these small numbers of ash trees that are really young and will die, but they'll continue to reseed as the emerald ash borer attacks it. So the species itself will not completely disappear for that simple reason alone.
[00:51:49.41] And I think in places like Maine where the Midwest, a part of that really quick rate of spread in the Midwest has been that ash trees make up 40% of the forest in a lot of the places out there. In Maine, it's roughly 4% so the rate of spread might be different. We're not entirely sure how that is. But there are ash trees within 50 miles of Detroit that are still alive. It's probably been there since the late '80s, early '90s. No solution, no real clear solutions. I'm sorry. Yeah.
[00:52:26.97] Have the basket makers been experimenting with different other species?
[00:52:31.44] Could you repeat the question?
[00:52:32.44] Oh yeah, sure. Have the basket makers been experimenting with other species? Yes, and that's not new. Basket makers have been experimenting with different species for as long as I can remember. The issue simply is that there is not a tree that we have this relationship with that is as good. Now, if you talk to someone like a master basket maker, Molly Neptune Parker, Jeremy Frey, any of these really great basket makers, they'll say I can make a basket out of anything really. I mean they're just great artists, so they're not tied to that.
[00:53:14.65] It's just that if you say like well, what would you want to make a basket out of? Its this particular tree. And a lot of it has to do with just the inherent properties as well. Of the ash species, this is the one that grows in the wettest conditions. So what that means after you've even processed it, pounded it out, broken down the strips is that it can be laying out for days, weeks, months even years, and if you rewet it, it becomes flexible and alive again and absorbs that water almost as well as it did the very first day you processed it. And so you can weave it. You don't have to worry about it breaking like a lot of other hardwoods.
[00:53:58.07] Jeremy always says it was made to be a basket. You know that's what it was given to us for. It was just made to be woven in this way. So there's a science or a chemistry behind it that I think is important. I saw you back there.
[00:54:17.34] My family, my granddaughters live in Yarmouth. And the street ash planted in the community along the yellow ribbon is tied on it.
[00:54:27.69] Yep.
[00:54:28.51] Based on the fact that they've missed the signs, I didn't wake up enough to learn what was going on until we could read a sign, and my granddaughters are [INAUDIBLE]. So, my question is, is this an educational program that's being carried out you're doing research on [INAUDIBLE] or is this about other problems with ash trees, a different ash tree?
[00:55:01.23] I don't know. So the question is in Yarmouth, there are yellow ribbons around ash trees. And--
[00:55:07.97] I guess communities [INAUDIBLE].
[00:55:09.78] Yeah. So I think some communities are starting to identify ash trees and also say to residents that this might be a resource that is going to need to be removed. So one of the sad ways in which the response has happened in municipalities is that they don't want the EAB to show up and kill all the trees, so they want to be able to budget the removal costs over a series of 10 years as opposed to-- So they want to spend $1 million a year each year for 10 years, as opposed to having to shut down their school system where they have to spend $10 million for one year in terms of removal. So there is this sort of budgetary issue around the response and removal of the the invasive pest.
[00:56:04.49] I'm not saying that's what Yarmouth is doing. There are these ribbons and signs for trees that they hang the purple traps around that are monitoring for the emerald ash borer. I've seen that, so I'm not exactly-- This is being recorded. Yarmouth, down with you. I'm just saying that. The sad potential is that this tends to be budgeted over a series of time. I think I saw someone over here.
[00:56:33.29] I was just curious when you say processing for baskets, you mean like chopping a tree down and utilizing the wood you chop down to make baskets.
[00:56:41.97] Yes. Yes, so processing. I have videos and stuff. I should probably show that. So there's a question about what did I mean by processing. The ways in which we take sticks and the folks refer to them as sticks, the way we process to make it into strips of wood so it could be woven has to do with-- and this is also of forest chemistry thing-- because the ash tree, the brown ash tree grows in mostly wetland areas, it grows fairly slow especially when the roots are completely submerged in water. And it grows a little bit faster when it dries out. And that creates a different kind of wood in the growth ring at the end of the year that allows you to use the butt of an axe to pound out so the growth rings will separate. And that's the very first stage of the processing of brown ash to make it into a basket.
[00:57:47.35] I'm really horrible at pounding ash. Again, I'm a theory guy, but there's some great people. I have this video of Jeremy actually processing it. And he's out there with flip-flops on and you know it's like a hammer he goes so quickly. And apparently has no concern about his feet that he might actually hurt himself. People who just do this so much, they don't even think twice.
[00:58:17.60] Eventually, we process it down where even those strips are further separated at least once, maybe twice. The wood becomes very thin and silky in nature. And then it's cut down to certain size strips and those are the things that are woven. Did I explain that right? If you understand where I'm-- I'm a horrible explainer. I should've brought a video.
[00:58:40.35] Can you still make baskets out of a dead tree?
[00:58:44.22] So yes, this is a good question. Can you make baskets out of the dead trees? Yeah, to a certain extent. It will break down where it'll be almost impossible to process after a certain time. I don't know what the time is. All the trees that we process are dead on some level. They're cut down. So yes, I don't know of how long it takes for it to be almost unprocessable, which is in the first stage when whatever it is that's living or wet in the tree makes it almost impossible to tear. I don't know if you guys know how long that would be. I would imagine months and depending upon if it's frozen. I think people in the winter if you harvest then, people will keep the tree just there an not process it all winter. If it's frozen, I think it lasts longer. That's just in my observation that folks don't feel as urgent a need to process it if they take something in the winter. They'll let it stand out in the yard for all the way through spring and then process it later. Yeah.
[00:59:50.86] So does the emerald ash borer equally attack all the species of ash and then no other species of trees at all?
[01:00:00.32] The question is does the emerald ash borer attack all species of ash. Yes. And then, are there any other trees that it attacks? And no. So part of it is ash trees have a particular-- there are different kinds of borer and they tend to attack be trained for certain kinds of trees and it has to do it the way that they reproduce. Think I showed you that slide. They've coevolved with the tree itself. So the pest itself is really tied to a reproduction cycle and it's drawn by the pheromones of that particular tree in the way that reproduces.
[01:00:41.21] So one of the things that is a forestry tool that it's used in management is that you can girdle a tree and basically create that a set of pheromones of a dying ash tree, which is really what draws these pests to a particular area that smell. The purple traps which are used for monitoring have a synthetic version of that pheromone which is not as good. The purple traps have not been all that great in terms of detection. The girdled trees have been. Of course, you're killing the tree by girdling it.
[01:01:18.72] And most people when you say hey, I want to come and girdle your tree, it'll kill it, and then it'll probably draw all the emerald ash borers that live in the five mile radius to your property and kill all your other ash, they're reluctant for some reason to do that. So we have in Maine, every summer now for the last few years, we've had about 1,000 of these purple traps, which is again the synthetic pheromone. And we've developed a trap tree network where we girdle roughly 20 to 30 trees across the state in areas where we think it might show up, campgrounds again with the movement of firewood, that sort of thing. Yeah.
[01:02:01.47] Are the ash trees all natural growth or are they farms?
[01:02:07.42] So the question is--
[01:02:08.38] Before the borer arrives.
[01:02:09.99] Yeah, so the question is are there farms of ash trees or is it natural growth. So the ones that the basket makers have been harvesting have been all the natural growth. The Aroostook band the Mi'kmaq have developed a small farm of them. Have you guys been to that? They're my friends from Maine. I saw when they were really, really small and just starting out in the greenhouse. And I think they were just starting to plant. My sense was one of the things that they had to figure out is the germination of brown ash, that there's a kind of some tricks around it that they actually did figure out where they were getting it. The response rate of germination was really low percentage and then they figured out how to make it work better. My sense was that they weren't growing enough to harvest, and the idea is also that it really has to be around for probably 30, 35 years for it to be of the size and scope of where folks want to take it and use it for developing into a basket. So there's some waiting time. When I talk to some of the Mi'kmaq, I know they like well the tribe is never going to let us harvest those anyway. They're cynical. But that's not a Mi'kmaq trait necessarily.
[01:03:34.50] [LAUGHTER]
[01:03:35.07] I'm just saying that this situation in terms of figuring that out is--
[01:03:42.00] Was this a problem before the trees when trees from Russia or Asia, wherever it was? Were they considered pests, the emerald ash borer?
[01:03:52.20] So the question is, in Asia where the EAB comes from, is it a problem? It is to a certain extent a problem. But unlike here, where there's nothing hunting it, they have a whole series of things, like these parasitoids I talked about, different woodpeckers, different things there, as well as the trees themselves. And it tends to be that the emerald ash borer in Asia only kills trees that are already sick for a variety of reasons. And I can just happen in the forest for a variety of reasons.
[01:04:31.42] This is the nature of invasives which makes them such a sticky problem, is that of course where they are, nature has adapted. There's some sense of an equilibrium that has been reached, whereas here in North America this is a new pest. I mean there are other borers that attack ash trees here, and they tend to just only really harm sick trees. The ability of this to take down stands of really healthy trees, it is remarkable. It is an effective pest. And it's one of those that when you talk to these tree entomologists types, that they're really impressed by its own way.
[01:05:17.68] Is there any correlation between the success of the emerald ash borer and climate change? Has that been successful?
[01:05:27.21] There has been. So the question is the success of the EAB, is it related climate change. That has been researched a little bit. I don't think the findings are yet conclusive just in terms of the scaling around it. We do know because of climate change, the rate of invasive species will increase. There's a whole series reasons around that. But no, we haven't seen that directly.
[01:05:53.64] One thing that a number of the climate models, and this is also a huge worry for basket makers, is that the range of brown or black ash might go up into Canada where we won't have this tree by 2100 depending on which model and what the rate of the increase in temperature is. It has to do it again the relationship between moisture and temperature that would make put us out of the zone where brown or black ash lives, which is a northern, wet loving species of ash. It already has a Northern Territory. Back there.
[01:06:35.40] Has the emerald ash borer ever been utilized by humans for anything like jewelry or postcards or anything?
[01:06:44.19] I don't. So has the emerald ash borer been used by humans for anything. I don't know of anything. No, I don't. I have no idea. It could be. You know it a bug. Maybe people eat it or something. They're cute I mean they're.
[01:07:00.98] [LAUGHTER]
[01:07:03.46] I don't know of anything.
[01:07:05.00] Last question.
[01:07:05.93] Last question here.
[01:07:07.77] Is there more to the relationship of the creation myth and the basket makers?
[01:07:16.07] So the question is there more to the relationship with ash trees for Wabanaki folks beyond the creation and making of baskets. There's a little bit of a disagreement. I talk to different folks about that. I am interested in the relationship with ash, with brown ash in particular. Some folks I know have said that that story about ash comes from a source that they question actually. I mean this story is in our communities. I've heard it in different contexts and most people don't consider it a key, like the primary creation story for us as people. It's about a particular time that Gluskabe was dealing with particular issues.
[01:08:11.46] I think that it has become a cultural keystone species which is a scientific term, also sort of a term of art. That because it has this value economically, culturally, potentially spiritually because of the story, I think that it has become more important as we've used ash as an economic resource. I think critically as well that the choice to become a basket maker in the 19th century as a lot of folks did, and which was to sell these ash baskets to tourists along the coast, allowed folks to maintain a seasonal round in relationship with resources-- summer coastal living, winter more inland living-- that that was a really important choice for folks to maintain other cultural connections as a community, living on the coast in the summer. That has become more important since it's become involved as an economic resource. I do think that there's enough evidence that the basket making tradition predated all that. I do you think it became more important because of other cultural elements in terms of our relationships with the seasonal round in particular.
[01:09:33.35] I think that was the last one. I'm happy to have a glass of wine with any of you and answer more questions.
[01:09:40.53] Thanks for being such a great resource.
[01:09:41.73] [APPLAUSE]