Name: Renee Meschi
Title of Research Project: People, Plants, and Fungi: Examining the Biological and Social
Landscapes of the Swan Creek Park Food Forest
1.) Reflectively describe your literature research process. Tell us how you used library
resources or services of any kind (from ILL to online databases to archives collections to
meeting with your liaison librarian).
Since foraging is often an informal practice, I was able to find references to informal names for
mushrooms in Ukrainian, but had trouble finding a scholarly way of verifying these names. I met
with liaison librarian Eli Gandour-Rood, and we had an incredibly fun time looking through
multilingual scientific literature, attempting to cross-reference Ukrainian names of mushrooms I
had found in an informal recipe forum online. Some of the books we found through the ILL
system were only available in the Czech Republic or the UK, and were thus out of reach; this
means we had to shift our process and instead looked at international scientific literature that
was available in online databases found on EBSCO. Through this, we were able to reasonably
cross-reference the names of one genera of mushroom, and following this process I was able to
continue cross-referencing the rest of the mushrooms on my list. Eli gave me the idea of looking
through Czech literature to find analogous names, since Czech is an Eastern Slavic language but
doesn’t use Cyrillic, so it is easier to search. I can read Cyrillic, so this approach didn’t initially
occur to me, but it was really helpful! I was able to repeat this process with other plants and
mushrooms.
I met with humanities liaison librarian Peggy Burge, and was expecting to find ways of gleaning
information about foraging through literature. Instead, I was pleasantly surprised to find out
that Peggy is a scholar of Russian Studies, and was thus able to offer incredible advice on how to
sensitively disambiguate Ukraine from Russia when talking about both groups, how to find
histories that honor both countries’ perspectives, and basically how to navigate the incredibly
complex history of the Soviet Union and its influence.
I met with Professor Andrew Gardener to talk about best practices in anthropological research,
as well as the ethics involved in the portrayal of multiple groups of people. We spoke about the
best way to proceed with my own research knowing that it was laying the groundwork to one
day take oral histories. I also spoke with Professor Douglas Sackman about proper terminology
in the field of Pacific Northwestern History.
I used many of the resources listed on Professor Sackman’s HIST 122 course research guide,
which Peggy Burge assembled, including the Center for Study of the Pacific Northwest, and the
University of Washington Digital Collections. I made great use of the contents of the library’s
Pacific Northwest Reading Room, and of course ordered many books from the Interlibrary Loan
system.
The CWLT was also a tremendous resource for me as a dedicated space for research, especially
considering the fact that I do not own a computer (I have a netbook) and I live off-campus. The
CWLT is equipped with many books about researching and writing journal articles; I found these
helpful, too, when making an overhead assessment of my work. Rachel Gary frequently shared
the space with me, and was always enthusiastic to talk about research.
2.) Tell us about a challenge you faced while doing literature research and how you overcame
it.
Summed up under the heading of one theme, I would say that navigating differing standards of
evidence across disciplines was my biggest challenge. Campus resources helped me gain
confidence and literacy among different academic realms, and I feel that my research was
enriched as a result.
When I met with Professor Andrew Gardener, we discussed how to frame certain anecdotal
evidence that my own discipline (STS) might dismiss, because in anthropology, less formal
primary source information can hold a greater authority than the scholarly conversation at
large. This was interesting for me, especially considering that the people I am studying for this
project are directly linked to the food forest, and much of what I am researching is for the
purpose of conducting culturally sensitive yet thorough interviews in the future.
The theme of standards of evidence was most pronounced for my work on the Native Americans
of the Puget Sound region. For the signatory tribes of the Treaty of Medicine Creek, I placed the
highest value on their own statements of history on their respective official websites, because I
often found discrepancies between the history relayed by tribes and the history relayed by non
native scholars. This put me in an interesting position because it meant I had to be more critical
of even well-reviewed scholarly sources than I might be otherwise, and at times I felt as if there
were two very different scholarly consensuses in operation. The direct perspectives of Native
Americans has been difficult (but not impossible) to access; I found that the Puyallup Tribe, for
example, has a center filled with archives and artifacts, but it is only open to enrolled Puyallup
Tribe members. I therefore looked for secondhand accounts of these archives, which were
accessible online.
I also spoke with Professor Douglas Sackman to find out what the best terminology would be
when referring to the tribes of the Puget Sound, because in my studies I found this to be a
controversial issue. The answer, essentially, is that there is no answer. Sackman confirmed that
tribes in general prefer to be referred to by their tribal name wherever possible, but when
referring to multiple tribes, the almost every accepted convention is arguably offensive. “Native
American” is the term Sackman prefers, and is the one I favored in my own research, but even
this term is considered a generic, government-created term by many.
My worries about such terminology highlights another challenge I encountered my research,
and that is the fact that many of the groups I researched are actively involved in the food forest
today. Referring to Metro Parks, for example, and their history in acquiring the Puyallup Tribal
land that now hosts the food forest was challenging because I wanted to be academically
critical, but not in a way that would unnecessarily vilify a group I work with closely. This means I
had to be extremely sensitive in my portrayals without sacrificing accuracy.
3.) How does your research contribute to the scholarly conversation in your field? What is the
significance of your research, in layperson’s terms?
I contribute synthesis and context to the scholarly conversation in my field. Though I am
researching many areas that already have a significant body of literature, these different
components have not yet been synthesized into one body that is directly relevant to a specific
time, place, and community. What is fascinating to me is the fact that this synthesis already
exists in the form of people’s collective lived experience at Salishan; I am simply working to
uncover it.
As the Swan Creek Park Food Forest trail blazes ahead, it can feel as if there is no time for
reflective scholarly inquiry. Many of the volunteers on the Swan Creek Park Food Forest board
are action-oriented busy professionals who do not necessarily have the time or interest to
conduct this kind of research. Failing to take the context such research provides into account,
however, is to miss opportunities to improve the ethical standing of the project.
The SCPFF has had trouble connecting with the Puyallup Tribe, for example, and after
researching the history of the site and the Puyallup Tribe’s connections to it, I can see why.
Before approaching the tribe more persistently, the SCPFF board must first seek to inform
themselves with a working understanding of tribal politics and perspectives, which has to this
point been missing.
The same goes for working with the multiple diasporas of the SCPFF. Though I focused on the
Ukrainian diaspora, I have created a template that can be followed for the other groups involved
that will add complexity to the group’s understanding of what forests mean to people as a
community resource, and how they can expect to engage people who have different ways of
approaching community organizing and agriculture. All too often, we weigh group involvement
on a scale that is tared to just one cultural way of meeting and making decisions. Then, when we
say that our groups lack diversity when multiple identities are indeed present, we serve only to
perpetuate an invisibility that is all too common in such projects. A detailed analysis such as the
one I conducted this summer can help make such groups visible.