OWAABANDA’AAN DIBAAJIMOWIN: IMAGES, STORY, AND SOCIAL MEDIA IN
INDIGENOUS ENVIRONMENTAL GOVERNANCE
Ryan N Comfort
Submitted to the faculty of the University Graduate School
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree
Doctor of Philosophy
in the Media School
Indiana University
May, 2021
Accepted by the Graduate Faculty, Indiana University, in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy
Doctoral Committee
__________________________________________
James Shanahan, Ph.D.
Chair
___________________________________________
Lesa Major, Ph.D.
Committee Member
__________________________________________
Jennifer Midberry, Ph.D.
Committee Member
__________________________________________
Eduardo Brondizio, Ph.D.
Minor Area Committee Member
April 8, 2021
ii
Acknowledgements
To Tol Foster, Ned Blackhawk, Aaron Bird Bear, Patty Loew, Sean Teuton, Chris Teuton, Jeff
Corntassel, Jean Dennison, Bryan Brayboy, Debbie Reese, and all the other indigenous
intellectuals who offered me help, guidance, inspiration and/or friendship along the way, chi
miigwich.
To my committee, Jim, Jenn, Lesa, and Eduardo, thank you for your guidance along the way.
Hopefully you can see your influence in the following pages.
To my wife, thank you for your love and support.
iii
PREFACE
As a teenager, I could never quite understand why I should still be afraid while hunting
and fishing. It had been more than a decade since a series of federal circuit court decisions in the
early 1980’s upheld the right of Ojibwe people to hunt and fish off-reservation, but as many who
have worked on civil rights issues will attest, public attitudes and behaviors often lag far behind
the law. Just because the courts said we could hunt and fish on the territories that we had ceded
didn’t mean the local landowners would stop harassing us or shooting at us in the dark. Lights
used by Native spearfishers are easy to see across a black glassy lake, providing targets for those
seeking to prevent us from exercising our rights. Memories of racist and often violent conflicts
with non-Native landowners run deep in Ojibwe communities.
We have always managed the land and its resources, but only recently have we
incorporated western science and received recognition from other governments for our
stewardship. Since Ojibwe people began officially co-managing the natural resources in and
around the Great Lakes, ecosystem quality has improved. In fact, some resources exclusively
managed by our own Nations are doing better than their state-managed analogs (Waller & Reo,
2018). Traditional ecological knowledge, western scientific methods, and indigenous
environmental values have helped protect and rebuild ecosystems, not only in my own traditional
community but globally as well. Yet, few seem to know about our success, perhaps still holding
to the view that natural resources are a zero-sum game that will result in a tragedy of the
commons. Anything “we” do takes away from “them.” There’s a deep irony in that view, and it
ignores our daily stories of environmental stewardship.
The conflict over our rights to hunt and fish off-reservation in northern Wisconsin led to
the passage of an unfunded mandate to incorporate content about the history, culture, and
iv
sovereignty of Wisconsin’s indigenous people into the state’s educational curriculum. The hope
was that education would help reduce or eliminate animosity towards indigenous people and
ultimately prevent future conflicts over natural resource use and management in the state. The
law, commonly referred to as Act 31, also required that university students looking to become
teachers were prepared to teach this content, and it was this mandate that guided my first
professional task at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. I had been hired by the School of
Education to develop and implement a curriculum for university students to prepare them to
teach about Wisconsin’s indigenous people, but I quickly discovered that accurate content about
contemporary indigenous people was difficult to come by. There were textbooks, but these
mostly focused on history and traditional culture, not necessarily on the contemporary lives and
issues of indigenous people, so I began a search for contemporary stories.
Up until this point I had been a casual consumer of indigenous media, but both my media
use behaviors and the indigenous media environment were changing dramatically. The majority
of my news about my own community came from talking with friends and family back on the
reservation. Growing up I had intermittently glanced at the tribal newsletter that arrived in the
mail, but I wasn’t particularly interested in reading the minutiae of tribal governance encoded in
the minutes of tribal council meetings. As an undergraduate student I read the New York Times
daily, but in several years of reading, I can’t recall any stories about Ojibwe people.
Occasionally there would be a story about a conflict in South America that involved an abuse of
indigenous people or lands, but nothing about my own community. I subscribed to Indian
Country Today, the only U.S. national indigenous newspaper at the time, but the paper itself was
in its death throes. At the start I would get a weekly paper, then there were delays and I might
receive a backlog of four editions at the end of the month. At one point I couldn’t predict when
v
or if the next edition would arrive, and eventually they stopped altogether. Like many other
papers, Indian Country Today was struggling to make ends meet in an increasingly digital media
environment.
I had a new professional imperative to find stories about contemporary indigenous
people, and the rise of internet-based communication, including the rise of social media
platforms, was increasing my access to the media I sought. I still vividly recall feeling amazed,
excited, and proud after watching a very short video published on YouTube by the indigenous
comedy group the 1491s. It featured an indigenous student at Dartmouth performing a jingle
dance across the quad while holding her iPod in the air like an eagle feather fan and wearing a
grey hoodie. The word “Represent” appeared in bold as she danced off the screen. It was a
strong visual statement about the way tradition and culture blend into contemporary indigenous
lives. It was also perhaps the first viral video endemic to Indian Country. Here was a story
about contemporary indigenous culture that was missing from the popular consciousness, and it
gave me hope that somewhere in the capacities offered by new and visual media there were
answers to the problems we faced. I began working with the Wisconsin Education
Communications Board and Wisconsin Public Television to produce contemporary stories about
our history, culture, and sovereignty. It was a start, but I was still relying on others to tell our
stories.
I tried my hand at freelancing as a video producer, but I only learned how powerful
media framing can be. Poverty and conflict seemed to be the only story frames acceptable when
covering indigenous peoples. Such a narrow view precluded stories about indigenous science
and environmental efforts from being told, even when pitched as features. The same archaic
view of indigenous people seemed to guide editorial decision making. In 2013, that perception
vi
was cemented when I watched National Geographic honor the non-Native photojournalist Aaron
Huey for his photo-essay on Pine Ridge. I’ll never forget when he announced, in front of an
audience of the country’s top visual media producers, that the indigenous people of this continent
had “absolutely no voice.” Huey received a standing ovation, and I came to the conclusion that
our problem was bigger and more complicated than I realized.
At the very heart of my academic work is a desire to find a mechanism within multimedia
storytelling to help others to see our environmental science and stewardship, to understand
indigenous sovereignty, and to reduce conflict over natural resources. Big questions arise from
this goal. Can journalistic norms and practices change around coverage of indigenous issues?
How are indigenous scientists perceived by the public? Are there effective uses of social media
for sharing indigenous science and environmental information? These are questions that will
take a lifetime of scholarship to answer, and with a lack of prior scholarship on the role of media
in indigenous environmental management & governance, it will take significant foundational
work.
To start, the present dissertation uses the concept of indigenous environmental
governance as a means to center indigenous sovereignty and provide a conceptual cornerstone
that is often missing in communication scholarship. Indigenous environmental governance is a
broad term referring to both the process and practice through which indigenous people assert
their inherent rights to determine their own priorities and methods for managing the ecosystems
in which they live. As a process, governance can occur at local, regional, and/or global scales,
and frequently involves multiple governments. Since the 1970s, indigenous peoples have made
significant progress both in gaining recognition of their right to self-governance and in
participation in global environmental governance (ILO, 2020; United Nations, 2019), yet
vii
marginalization and discrimination continues as colonial nation states pass laws and implement
policies impinging on the ability of indigenous peoples to subsist in their traditional territories
(Mamo, 2020).
The majority of research contained herein focuses on the communication actions of
indigenous governments, the formal entities and organizations that have widely accepted legal
standing within and outside indigenous communities. Communication with environmental
stakeholders, including indigenous citizens, non-indigenous governments, and many others, is
part of the process of environmental governance engaged in by indigenous peoples. So little is
known about how indigenous nations use strategic communication in their environmental
management programs and governance processes that broad descriptive work is necessary before
any substantive theory building can begin. The present dissertation aims to meet this need
through a conceptual introduction and three empirical chapters that each focus on a different
element of the indigenous environmental communication landscape including government
producers, environmental media content, and indigenous audiences.
The introductory chapter takes a broad look at where indigenous science and
environmental communication lives in the scholarly literature and how it has been
conceptualized. Indigenous peoples are often conceptualized as a class of citizens embedded in a
larger colonial nation-state, but indigenous peoples are citizens of indigenous nations with
inherent rights to self and environmental governance (Gray, 1997; Jentoft et al., 2003),
challenging the utility of traditional nation-state divisions to discuss indigenous science and
environmental communication. The reality for many indigenous groups is that environmental
issues will always cross political and cultural borders, particularly as indigenous peoples reaffirm
their rights nationally and globally. New media technologies have helped create a globally
viii
connected pan-indigenous network through which scientific and environmental information can
be shared widely, but these new technologies come with both promise and challenges. To
capitalize on these promises and address the challenges that come with a more globalized media
environment, many indigenous groups have turned to producing their own media. Whether
through journalism or advocacy media, one goal has remained constant: the desire of indigenous
people to build political agency and standing, frequently with the goal of influencing the
environmental policies of colonial nation-states or implementing their own environmental
policies. The chapter reviews these trends in the literature, proposes a definition of indigenous
science and environmental communication (ISEC) as a scholarly focus, and suggests new
avenues for research based on this definition and a more robust conceptualization of indigenous
peoples as citizens of indigenous nations.
The first empirical chapter presents a survey of the communication attitudes and practices
of environmental professionals employed by indigenous nations. Survey questions asked about
professionals’ demographics, use of communication tools, attitudes about communication media,
and perceived obstacles to better use of communication and media. The survey used a
combination of multiple choice, Likert-type, and open-ended questions modeled after existing
environmental and communication practitioner surveys. A grounded-theory approach was used
to code open-ended responses. Results supported previous research suggesting public agencies
require new models of strategic communication, but indicated that indigenous agencies charged
with environmental and natural resources management are faced with unique challenges that will
mandate a more tailored model. Specifically, a history of mistrust and a strong desire to keep
cultural information within a community present two key factors that must be taken into account
in any strategic communication model used by indigenous environmental agencies.
ix
The second empirical chapter presents a comparative content analysis of the Facebook
images shared by indigenous and state natural resource management agencies. The editorial
choices made in the selection of images revealed interesting areas of organizational and cultural
value alignment and divergence between the agencies. Compared to state agencies, indigenous
agencies shared more images related to doing the work of environmental governance, suggesting
these agencies value communicating these expressions of sovereignty. The study also examines
audiences’ reactions to each image as expressed by “likes.” While indigenous audiences didn’t
indicate a strong preference for one type of content over another, state audiences liked images of
animals, plants, and ecosystems more than images of environmental managers and other symbols
of governance in action. Although limited in scope, the chapter provides evidence for how
cultural values may play out in a strategic communication model used by indigenous agencies.
The final empirical chapter examines the audience side of the picture by specifically
focusing on the population most likely to be dependent on media for learning about
environmental issues, citizens in the indigenous diaspora. Interviews with citizens at four
different field sites were analyzed for common themes regarding the flow of environmental
information to and from these citizens. Trends supported strong connections between citizens
and their friends and family back on their traditional lands that were predominantly facilitated by
social media. Interactions with mainstream media revealed a version of a two-step flow model in
which family and friends often served as a key node for passing along environmental
information, but also worked in reverse, with citizens in diaspora picking up on global
indigneous issues and passing the information back to family and friends. Another key theme
suggested that higher level leadership in indigenous governments was perceived as being
x
responsible for environmental issues, and there was generally little knowledge of departments
tasked with environmental stewardship and natural resources management.
Taken together, the chapters of this dissertation begin to paint a picture of the science and
environmental communication landscape in which indigenous people operate. While
environmental professionals and citizens alike believe in the power of media and
communications to help them achieve their environmental goals, there are key stumbling blocks
that prevent the most effective use of contemporary communication tools by indigenous nations.
Traditional strategic communication models prioritizing transparency present challenges for
indigenous nations seeking to protect cultural knowledge and identity. Until a model of
indigenous science and environmental communication can be produced reflecting indigenous
priorities and values, tribal leadership may restrict communications in an effort to protect our
knowledge, but possibly at the cost of achieving broader goals. Our voices matter, and I still
hold out hope that telling stories of indigenous environmental science will help ease tensions in
and around our communities.
The beginning of 2021 came with news that a potentially deadly assault on indigenous
fishermen exercising their treaty rights was handled in much the way indigenous people have
come to expect over the past 40 years. Intoxicated, a non-Native local fired his shotgun at an
indigenous family who were fishing on a lake in Northern Wisconsin. During the trial, he
claimed he was yelling and shooting at a “squirrel” and pleaded no-contest (Fernandez, 2021).
His bullets missed the fishermen but caused injury nonetheless. The family was traumatized, and
our collective fear was maintained for another year. We could only hope that the courts would
uphold the law and send a clear message to those hoping to continue our oppression. They did
not. The original charge of disorderly conduct with a hate crime modified, already lenient for
xi
what tribal lawyers had argued was a federal crime, was reduced to a $343.50 fine from the
Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources for interfering with a fishing/hunting harvest. It’s
hard to ignore the larger social context in which white supremacy has been given a pass and
allowed to reignite across much of America these past few years. The fact that racial justice
seems to have taken a step backwards is all the more reason to share stories of indigenous
accomplishment, and I hope this research will allow us to do that better and louder.
xii
Ryan N Comfort
OWAABANDA’AAN DIBAAJIMOWIN: IMAGES, STORY, AND SOCIAL MEDIA IN
INDIGENOUS ENVIRONMENTAL GOVERNANCE
Government communication, the public information and media relations activities of
governments’ executive offices, remain an underdeveloped area. Furthermore, no scholars have
explored the communication of indigenous governments specifically. The communication
around indigenous environmental science and management provides a fruitful area to explore
how indigenous governments and their citizens use media. The present dissertation seeks to
better understand how indigenous governments use media in environmental governance,
particularly in the era of social media. The dissertation also aims to understand how some
indigenous citizens who might be more reliant on mediated communication receive indigenous
environmental information and the role of indigenous governments therein.
Three separate but related studies attempt to answer these questions. The first study
presents a survey of environmental professionals employed by indigenous governments. The
second study presents an analysis of social media images shared by indigenous natural resource
management agencies. The final study presents the results of a series of semi-structured
interviews with citizens living away from their homelands. Results indicate that most indigenous
environmental agencies are struggling to enact communication programs that include mediated
communication due to a mix of cultural and structural considerations; yet, both professionals and
citizens desire greater use of social media and the development of more multimedia narratives
bridging cultural knowledge with contemporary science as a means of both cultural revitalization
and political influence. As scholars attempt to develop models of strategic communication that
work for public organizations, the present dissertation indicates that any model of indigenous
government communication must take into account the cultural and historic contexts of these
communities.
____________________________________________
James Shanahan, Ph.D.
Chair
____________________________________________
Lesa Major, Ph.D.
Committee Member
____________________________________________
Jennifer Midberry, Ph.D.
Committee Member
____________________________________________
Eduardo Brondizio, Ph.D.
Minor Area Committee Member
xiii
Ryan N Comfort
OWAABANDA’AAN DIBAAJIMOWIN: IMAGES, STORY, AND SOCIAL MEDIA IN
INDIGENOUS ENVIRONMENTAL GOVERNANCE
Table of Contents
Preface
iv
Introduction
Challenging the nation-state: Indigenous nations in science and environmental
communication
1
Chapter 1
Rethinking cultural factors in government communication:
A survey of environmental professionals working for indigenous governments
25
Chapter 2
Same land, different values: How Facebook photos reflect organizational and
cultural differences between indigenous and U.S. state governments
50
Chapter 3
Environmental communication in the indigenous diaspora: Investigating the flow of
indigenous environmental information in the social media era
71
Conclusion
Moving indigenous science and environmental communication forward
96
References
101
Appendices
119
Curriculum Vita
xiv
INTRODUCTION
CHALLENGING THE NATION-STATE: INDIGENOUS NATIONS IN SCIENCE AND
ENVIRONMENTAL COMMUNICATION
Indigenous peoples are citizens of indigenous nations whose social, cultural, and political
borders have become intertwined with those of other nations, states, and nation-states, and as a
result, indigenous science and environmental communication (ISEC) almost always crosses
international borders and challenges the utility of the nation-state concept in communication and
media scholarship. ISEC is a multi-disciplinary, multi-scale, and multinational area of study that
may benefit from connecting fragmented, but ultimately related, areas of research. To this end, I
propose the following definition:
Indigenous science and environmental communication (ISEC) is the area of scholarship
concerned with the production and distribution of indigenous science and environmental
information, the representation of indigenous science and environmental issues in media,
and the strategic use of science and environmental information in the furtherance of
indigenous self-determination, environmental management, and international
environmental governance.
While this understanding of indigenous peoples as possessing an inherent right to selfdetermination, along with a right to environmental governance within traditional territories, has
soundly been established in the indigenous studies literature (Büchi et al., 1997; Jentoft et al.,
2003; Lemont, 2006; M. Murphy, 2004; Poole, 2004; Ryser, 2012; United Nations, 2007;
Wilkinson, 2005), the implications of this complicated political relationship with modern nation-
1
states have not been fully considered or addressed in the scholarship on science and
environmental communication. The purpose of this chapter is not to say that all scholarship on
indigenous nations should adopt frameworks used by international communication scholars.
Rather, the goal is to offer a more complicated picture of the contexts in which indigenous
science and environmental communication occurs based on a view of indigenous nations as
closer to self-governing states than ethnic nations and suggest new avenues for communication
and media research based on this conceptualization and proposed research focus.
How scholars think about the relationship between indigenous peoples, nation-states, and
environmental systems can have a significant effect on how we talk about and study ISEC. All
research in this area contains implicit or explicit assumptions about the political status of
indigenous peoples and the nature of ISEC. For example, some scholars have examined mass
media coverage of indigenous environmental issues and focused on indigenous activists and
actors situated largely outside formal environmental governance systems (for examples see Abel
et al., 2014; Belfer et al., 2017; Chen, 2019; Corrigall-Brown & Wilkes, 2012; Phelan & Shearer,
2009). Others have focused on the dialogic process through which indigenous scientific
knowledge is created and shared, often for the purposes of resource management and shared
environmental governance (Berkes, 2007, 2009; Berkes et al., 2000; Ignatow, 2007; Richardson,
2008; Taylor & de Loë, 2012). While the former might best be viewed in the context of
transnational communication depending on the scope of the issue and the organization of
activism and advocacy, the latter might be best understood through the use of science
communication frameworks and more traditional comparative approaches. Both are valid
perspectives that capture components of complicated indigenous science and environmental
communication systems, but each viewed in isolation can lead to different conclusions about the
2
political status of indigenous people, the nature of ISEC, and the boundaries that communication
crosses.
This chapter makes two key arguments. First, communication and media scholars
should expand their conceptualizations of indigenous peoples to include indigenous governments
as akin to nation-states. Second, scholars should consider the implications of indigenous
nationhood on a more holistic agenda of indigenous science and environmental communication
research. Building these arguments requires an overview of three foundational areas. The first
section of the chapter will discuss the political status of indigenous peoples and indigenous
nations, an area of scholarship that has been robustly developed but perhaps unevenly applied in
communication scholarship, and then explore why traditional frameworks of international
communication can be limiting or problematic. The second section explores ISEC as a focus
area of research that remains largely unassembled in the existing literature but is critically
important in the function of indigenous environmental governance. The final section concludes
the chapter with a discussion of what an expanded understanding of indigenous nationhood
means for communication and media scholarship. The deeply complicated relationships among
indigenous peoples, modern nation-states, and environmental systems make research in this area
conceptually challenging but critically important.
Who communicates and what boundaries matter?
Unfortunately, when it comes to indigenous peoples and the environment, popular myths
and stereotypes create impediments to thinking about indigenous people as contemporary
scientists, environmental managers, and communicators, let alone as citizens of self-determined
nations with environmental governance rights and responsibilities. In media coverage of
environmental issues, indigenous people, if they are included at all, are frequently cast as victims
3
of environmental degradation, as environmental warriors, and/or as mythical environmental
saviors (Dunaway, 2008; Phelan & Shearer, 2009; Roosvall & Tegelberg, 2013; Widener &
Gunter, 2007). Stereotypes in media coverage suggest indigenous people have a more spiritual
relationship with the natural world than a scientific one (Moore & Lanthorne, 2017). Indigenous
cultures are often portrayed as historic relics or possessing mythical connections to the natural
world (Miller & Ross, 2004), arguably the antithesis of modern science, and unsurprisingly some
environmentalists have taken to viewing indigenous people as the first and purest ecologists to
whom western civilization might look for inspiration in solving its environmental woes
(Nadasdy, 2005). These stereotypes have given rise to the popular perception that indigenous
people have a deep, reverential, and primitive connection to their environments such that they are
more a part of the natural landscape than actors within it and upon it (Harkin & Lewis, 2007).
The problems with these images of primitive ecological nobility are many, but two
specific elements are necessary to discuss here. The first major problem this stereotype raises is
that it creates an image of indigenous people as disempowered sources to be represented in
media as victims, environmental warriors, and earthly sages, not necessarily as agentic producers
of science and environmental communication media. Second, the stereotype implies that
indigenous people are a homogenous group of environmental actors who function at a localized
geographic scale, not as diverse individuals or groups of culturally different actors at multiple
levels of social organization and scales of environmental governance, denying the reality that
indigenous people have always been, and continue to be, active participants in environmental
management and governance (e.g. Berkes et al., 2000; Chief et al., 2016; Cuerrier et al., 2015;
Lepofsky et al., 2017). Breaking these stereotypes requires a more complex discussion of who
4
indigenous peoples are and what characterizes their political relationships to modern nationstates.
The language used to describe colonized peoples has been a point of great debate in both
scholarly and political circles (Smith, 2012), but understanding the nuance provides a critical
foundation for examining the social and political scales at which ISEC occurs. The term
indigenous people has largely fallen out of favor with scholars but it is worth discussing briefly.
Indigenous people are those whose identity, values, culture, and history are distinct from the
nation-state(s) in which they live (Lambert, 2014). Other scholars have characterized indigenous
people as the “disadvantaged inhabitants of a present-day country who have lived in the area
since before it became a nation-state” (Gray, 1997). As opposed to centering indigenous identity
solely around race and ethnicity, these conceptualizations of indigeneity place an emphasis on
history and culture within a given place (Dove, 2006). Specifically, indigenous people have a
history that predates and includes colonization by another nation-state. Some scholars have
pointed out that the term indigenous people is problematic due to its homogenizing, generalizing,
or collectivizing of the experiences of colonization that can vary greatly from one group of
indigenous people to the next (Smith, 2012). Furthermore, these early conceptualizations of
indigeneity defined indigenous people according to their colonized status, not necessarily
according to their own inherent rights to self-governance.
The term indigenous peoples more accurately reflects the vast diversity of indigenous
identities and experiences of colonialism among groups of indigenous people. Some scholars
have argued the term has helped to internationalize indigenous experiences and enabled diverse
groups of indigenous people to collectively engage in the global political sphere around common
issues (Jull, 2003; Smith, 2012). Struggles to maintain pre-colonial land tenure and to assert
5
self-governing rights that existed prior to contact with the colonial state, including environmental
governance rights, are often key in these shared experiences and struggles (Gray, 1997; Jentoft et
al., 2003). Indigenous environmental governance rights have been a cornerstone of efforts to
stop or reduce the disproportionate adverse outcomes of natural resource development on
indigenous lands whether from mineral extraction in Australia (Banerjee, 2000), oil drilling in
Nigeria (Naanen, 1997), forestry issues in Guyana (Colchester, 1997), or Uranium mining in the
U.S. (Johston, Dawson, & Madsen, 2010). This recognition of indigenous people as inherently
self-determined further emphasized the political components of indigenous identity and moved it
further away from notions of ecological primitivism (Murray Li, 2000). The recognition of
diverse cultural groups with similar colonial experiences led to what some scholars have termed
the era of indigenous internationalism (Jull, 2003), characterized in part by the transnational
environmental activism of indigenous peoples from multiple nation-states.
Yet even the term indigenous peoples can obscure the environmental governance rights
and responsibilities that many indigenous peoples hold or are currently fighting for. In the
context of international environmental communication, the concept of the indigenous nation is
crucial, though often misunderstood, erroneously applied, or omitted all together. In contrast to
other identity groups or ethnic nationalities, indigenous peoples challenge the authority of
nation-states to govern their traditional territories and societies, a challenge that is based on the
fact that indigenous peoples were citizens of self-governing and self-determined nations prior to
colonization. As Michael Murphy writes, “Indigenous peoples view their right to selfdetermination as neither derivative of nor subordinate to that of any other political community. It
is a right that can be recognized and protected by the statutory and constitutional law of settler
states, but whose source is viewed as prior to and more fundamental than those legal instruments,
6
anchored as it is in the historic independence of self-governing indigenous societies” (Murphy,
2004, p. 273). Some nation-states have indeed recognized and protected these rights while
others have not. The United States and Canada in particular have made strides towards
recognizing indigenous self-governance (Ryser, 2012) and the rights of indigenous people to
participate in shared environmental governance (Nesper & Schlender, 2007). In practical terms,
the concept of the indigenous nation adds another dimension to who might serve as a
communicator of ISEC and challenges traditional conceptualizations of international
communication based on nation-state boundaries.
A core assumption of both international and intercultural communication is that
difficulties and differences emerge when communication crosses political or cultural borders
(Rogers & Hart, 2002). Intercultural communication focuses on what happens when
communication between people crosses cultural boundaries while international communication
traditionally uses the structure of the nation-state to explore differences in media making
institutions, in production and reception of messages, and in cultural uses of media (Gudykunst
& Mody, 2002). However, developments in the global flow of information and the complexity
of the modern multinational nation-state have started to challenge the utility of this structuring
concept in international communication scholarship (Lee, 2014). Furthermore, the re-emergence
of indigenous nations defies nation-state borders, particularly as indigenous peoples begin to
assert their rights to self-determination and territorial governance, ultimately creating another set
of national boundaries that environmental communication must cross.
To demonstrate the difficulty and complexity of using the concept of the nation-state to
discuss where ISEC takes place, consider the negotiation of water management issues in the Gila
River Indian Community (GRIC) in the United States. In 2015, the GRIC hosted a conference
7
on indigenous water management that was attended by representatives from 49 U.S. state
agencies and 13 other indigenous nations from within the U.S. (Chief et al., 2016). The purpose
of the conference was to share indigenous views on water management across state and tribal
governance agencies. The question of whether the conference counts as indigenous
environmental communication is answered in the affirmative by our established definition of
ISEC, but the question of whether this is an example of international communication depends in
large part upon how we understand the political and cultural boundaries at play. Communication
doesn’t leave the nation-state borders of the U.S., but within the U.S., the GRIC is a recognized
indigenous nation. Even though communication does not cross the geographic boundaries of the
U.S., it does cross national and cultural boundaries from the GRIC to the U.S. and to the 13 other
indigenous nations present at the conference. According to traditional ideas of international
communication, communication among indigenous nations and with their colonial nation-states
does not fall within the realm of international communication.
Once communication crosses geographic nation-state borders, it may seem clear that
indigenous people are engaging in international communication. Again, this becomes
complicated when a single group of indigenous people occupies traditional territories in multiple
nation-states. For example, Inuit people from the U.S., Canada, Greenland, and Russia regularly
meet as part of the Inuit Circumpolar Council (ICC) to share and discuss issues of common
concern to Inuit people (Alia, 2010). The ICC has become a leading voice in protecting and
maximizing indigenous rights to self-government, including exercising those rights to protect
environments from industry and other non-indigenous governments (Jull, 2003). In the example
of the ICC, communication occurs among people from four different nation-states but within a
group of people with the same cultural identity and regional origin who arguably existed as a
8
single indigenous nation prior to colonization. The ICC serves as a platform to facilitate
mediated and interpersonal communication among Inuit people, and to present a unified Inuit
voice to a global audience. In the case of the ICC, the traditional definition of international
communication applies, but may not be relevant to communication among Inuit people. In both
cases of the GRIC and the ICC, international communication occurs, first among indigenous
nations and second between indigenous nations and colonial nation-states, but only the later
traditionally receives the label of international.
At the core of this argument is the notion that the nation-state is not a useful boundary for
studying ISEC, but the concept of the indigenous nation is. While some scholars argue that the
nation-state will always remain a core fixture of international politics (Lee, 2014), others argue
that these boundaries are becoming less important, particularly as indigenous people collectively
define their rights outside of traditional nation-state structures (Ignatow, 2007). Furthermore,
some scholars have argued that even when indigenous people are recognized by colonial states as
having sovereign or semi-independent political powers, they are rarely allowed to participate in
international negotiations with nation-states as equals, thus requiring the formation of
transnational communities to leverage greater political power (Roosvall & Tegelberg, 2013). As
a result, thinking about indigenous peoples and communities as transnational communicators has
proven a more useful lens for some scholars of indigenous communication (for example, Alia,
2010), but there is also value in thinking of indigenous people as members of individual
indigenous states with environmental governance powers and responsibilities, including the
responsibility to communicate with indigenous citizens and other governments.
To summarize, communication that crosses the boundaries between indigenous nations or
between indigenous nations and traditional nation-states should be considered international
9
communication if scholars adopt the view that indigenous people are citizens of indigenous
nations. This conceptualization adds a significant layer of complexity to communication and
media scholarship. Communication might originate from individual indigenous people, from
indigenous media organizations, indigenous governmental organizations, or indigenous nongovernmental organizations and be transmitted to a diversity of indigenous or non-indigenous
actors and/or organizations in other nations or states. While the analogy between indigenous
nations and modern nation-states may seem obvious, communication and media scholarship has
largely overlooked indigenous nations as producers of communication and media, and as a result,
overlooked the international and strategic communication engaged in by indigenous nations in
the service of environmental management and governance. As more indigenous nations manage
and govern the environments they share with other peoples and governments, the need for
successful science and environmental communication strategies will only increase (Nesper &
Schlender, 2007).
Defining an indigenous science and environmental communication focus
The second task of this chapter is to assemble a more holistic framework for research on
indigenous science and environmental communication (ISEC). Scholars who study traditional
ecological knowledge (TEK) might argue that indigenous environmental communication consists
of the process by which environmental knowledge is produced, disseminated, and remembered
by indigenous cultures (Berkes, 2009). Scholars who study environmental justice might argue
that indigenous environmental communication consists of the global public discourse and
indigenous activism designed to raise awareness of indigenous rights (Schlosberg & Carruthers,
2010). Scholars who study indigenous media might argue that both international indigenous
political organizations and national indigenous television networks constitute the means of
10
international indigenous environmental communication (Alia, 2010). Mass communication
scholars might focus on the news coverage of indigenous environmental issues or representation
of indigenous environmentalists in mainstream news coverage, implying that indigenous science
and environmental communication involves both media representations of indigenous
environmental actors and indigenous journalism’s coverage of environmental issues (Dunaway,
2008; Loew & Mella, 2005). These scholarly areas are connected by a shared concern over how
indigenous people produce and share environmental knowledge and to what end this information
is used. The following section attempts to assemble these fragmented literatures in building a
definition of ISEC that provides space for a broad community of scholars to locate their work in
a global media system.
TEK and Indigenous Science
Perhaps the most appropriate place to start building ISEC is by examining how
indigenous environmental knowledge is formed and communicated. The literature on traditional
ecological knowledge (TEK) is primarily concerned with how indigenous people have learned
about the environment and then transmitted that information within the culture (Berkes et al.,
2000). TEK is grounded in first-hand observations and passed down from generation to
generation, and through this intergenerational communication, knowledge about local
ecosystems is accumulated by groups of indigenous people (Berkes et al., 2000; Cajete, 2000;
LaDuke, 1994). Cultural practice is the means of both discovering and communicating
indigenous environmental knowledge, and it represents another scientific epistemology. For
example, the Sámi peoples in northern Finland have developed terminology for describing snow
density and moisture content that is then used to make decisions about reindeer herding and
grazing practices (Riseth, et. al., 2010). Sámi application of this taxonomy, based on visual and
11
physical observations, has shown significant correlation to western scientific measurements
(Riseth, et. al., 2010). TEK and science have frequently been viewed as opposite ends of an
epistemological spectrum, a point argued even by some indigenous scholars (Pewewardy, 2001),
but others argue that the two are not diametrically opposed, that there may be significant
overlaps in these knowledge systems, and that such a persistent debate may even be a needless
distraction (Nadasdy, 2005). As such, a number of scholars have become concerned with
bridging the perceived divide between indigenous TEK and western science (for example,
Berkes et al., 2000; Chief et al., 2016; Drew & Henne, 2006; Nadasdy, 2005; Nadasdy, 1999;
Riseth, et. al., 2010).
The debate over TEK and western science raises a question of where contemporary
indigenous environmental researchers fit within the framework of indigenous environmental
knowledge production and communication, particularly as indigenous scientists themselves work
to reconcile their western and indigenous training (Dyck, 2001; Kimmerer, 2013). While TEK
historically used storytelling and other interpersonal communication methods to transmit
knowledge, contemporary indigenous scientists participate in academic conferences, publish in
academic journals, and share their knowledge with communities, frequently blending culture and
contemporary science communication (Dyck, 2001; Kimmerer, 2013). Indigenous scientists and
scholars argue that a broadening of acceptable scientific approaches that include indigenous
epistemologies is necessary to bridge the perceived gap (James, 2011). In this view, the debate
is not TEK versus science, nor is it how to integrate TEK and science; it starts with the premise
that TEK is science and that indigenous values and worldviews are not incongruent with science.
In many ways, contemporary indigenous scientists are engaging in an extension of the TEK
process. Cultural transmission of environmental knowledge includes communication using both
12
traditional and contemporary science communication channels. Possibly as a result of this
debate, some scholars have moved their focus from “traditional” to local or indigenous
ecological knowledge to more accurately reflect the contemporary production of indigenous
science tied to place or culture (for a discussion of the differences see Dudgeon & Berkes, 2003;
and for examples see Davis & Wagner, 2003 and Lauer & Aswani, 2009).
What has become clear from established definitions of TEK and from current debates, is
that indigenous science, like western science, must be communicated and frequently involves
indigenous scientists who might be traditionally trained, western trained, or both. While there is
a substantial body of literature examining the communication of TEK on an interpersonal basis,
there is a lack of scholarship drawing from established science communication frameworks that
focuses on indigenous scientists as communicators or the use of mass communication media and
technology in the transmission of indigenous scientific information. However, this is not to say
that indigenous mass communication scholarship does not exist.
Indigenous media and coverage of science and environmental issues
The second major body of literature necessary to build an ISEC framework centers on
precisely how indigenous communities share information and the role of technology in sharing
and maintaining indigenous cultural identity (Wilson & Stewart, 2008). Driven by the global
indigenous movement and facilitated by increased indigenous access to media content and media
production technologies, some scholars have argued that local and regional voices are becoming
part of a global indigenous media empire that is helping to assert indigenous identity and push
for global change (Alia, 2010; Ginsburg, 1994). One scholar uses the term hubs to describe the
indigenous community nodes connected by these interpersonal and digital media networks,
arguing that new media technologies have helped indigenous people living in diaspora to
13
maintain connection to their home communities, share information interpersonally with others
living away, and facilitate the flow of information from one far-flung indigenous community to
another (Ramirez, 2007). For example, the emergence of indigenous film festivals and
professional alliances not only created spaces for interpersonal connection among filmmakers
from a wide variety of indigenous nations; the films themselves created a transnational narrative
of collective indigenous issues framed through the lens of self-determination and collective
social action (Ginsburg, 1994). While it might be tempting to view this level of connection
among indigenous people as a novel outcome due in part to the development of internet
technologies, particularly when technology has enabled indigenous people to publish in their
own voices and read the voices of other indigenous people across the globe in a virtual instant,
indigenous people have consistently adopted the newest media technologies to facilitate
communication.
Adoption of new media technologies offers a promising avenue for connection and
political action among indigenous nations, yet the same advancement presents new risks in the
longtime ambivalent relationship between indigenous peoples and mass communication. Along
with the power to connect indigenous peoples comes the power to perpetuate misinformation and
stereotypes (Wilson & Stewart, 2008), the power for others to appropriate indigenous knowledge
(Daes, 2003), and the power to drown out or undercut indigenous voices (Chen, 2019). These
challenges are not new, but increased globalization may have amplified some. For example, a
western desire to “salvage” the “disappearing” indigenous cultures of the Americas drove
technological developments in recording devices as anthropologists rushed to capture indigenous
languages and customs (Hochman, 2014). In the process, indigenous knowledge became the
14
property of non-indigenous people. Media recording technologies and modern research methods
are still being used to take ownership of indigenous knowledge, but to different ends.
Bioprospecting, also sometimes referred to as biopiracy, is the process through which
researchers travel the globe to collect TEK and associated biological material in order to develop
modern pharmaceuticals, often without benefit to the indigenous peoples who conducted the
environmental science to develop this knowledge (Svarstad, 2005). For example, in the mid
1990’s researchers from U.S. based universities partnered with healthcare organizations,
including corporate pharmaceutical companies, to study and capitalize on the indigenous
knowledge of the Aguaruna people in the Peruvian Amazon (Greene, 2004). Some scholars have
argued that the major problem facing indigenous nations in the internet age will be in
maintaining control of indigenous knowledge, including both sacred and scientific knowledge.
Legal scholars have argued that TEK should be considered the intellectual property of
indigenous communities and as such, any commercial applications should result in a shared
benefit for indigenous people and commercial enterprise (Reid, 2009). The problem has become
so pervasive among indigenous nations that language designed to protect the rights of indigenous
nations to their ecological knowledge has been written into the United Nations Convention on
Biological Diversity (Daes, 2003). The risk of losing control over indigenous knowledge is only
one potential problem of a globalized media system that scholars of ISEC must consider.
The same capabilities allowing indigenous peoples to amplify their voices on a global
stage can also be used to mischaracterize indigenous peoples and amplify oppositional voices.
While the Idle No More movement, a transnational pan-indigenous movement coordinated to
protest reduced environmental protections, was able to attract significant media coverage in
Canada, so too were oppositional voices to the point they overwhelmed indigenous perspectives
15
in news media coverage (Chen, 2019). Furthermore, greater representation in news media
coverage does not always mean better representation. During the environmental movement of
the 1970s, indigenous people were often framed as victims of environmental degradation caused
by non-indigenous people but also representing a sort of idealized environmental ethic
(Dunaway, 2008), and little has changed in the subsequent half century. News media coverage
of the Copenhagen Climate Summit in 2009 frequently framed indigenous people as victims and
heroes of environmental protection due to traditional cultural values, not as modern scientists or
as organized nations with political agency and an environmental agenda (Roosvall & Tegelberg,
2013). The promises of new media technologies, along with persistent concerns about the
consequences of adoption, revolve around the ability of indigenous communities to control the
dissemination of valuable, sacred, private, or cultural information, while at the same time
building global connections among indigenous people and exercising collective political agency.
Perhaps due to these concerns, but certainly due to problematic coverage in mainstream media
channels and a frequent lack of access to other mass communication outlets, many indigenous
people and groups have opted to produce their own media (Comrie, 2012).
One of the key distinctions in any study of indigenous people and communication is
whether the communication is about indigenous people or by indigenous people. Scholars
broadly understand indigenous media to be those forms of media “conceptualized, produced,
and/or created by Indigenous peoples across the globe” (Wilson & Stewart, 2008, p. 2) as a way
to differentiate from media about indigenous peoples. For example, some scholars have closely
considered the role of journalism practice and new media technologies in the facilitation of
indigenous communication (see Alia, 2010; Hanusch, 2014; LaCourse, 1979; Murphy & Avery,
1983; Murphy & Murphy, 1981; Roth, 2005; Wilson & Stewart, 2008). A smaller subset of
16
scholars have compared the coverage of science and environmental issues featuring indigenous
people in both indigenous produced and non-indigenous produced media (Clark, 2002; Loew &
Mella, 2005), or compared coverage of indigenous science and environmental issues among
different nation-states (Belfer et al., 2017). Within this focus on media produced by indigenous
peoples, the scholarship on indigenous media falls largely into communication produced by two
groups: indigenous journalists and indigenous activists.
Along with the rapid adoption of new media technologies by indigenous nations has
come a substantial rise in indigenous journalism (Hanusch, 2013). While indigenous journalism
is not a new phenomenon — the first indigenous newspaper in the US was the Cherokee
Phoenix, first published in 1828 (Murphy & Avery, 1983) — new media technologies have
helped boost its recent growth. While many indigenous news outlets cover the same issues as
mainstream outlets in similar markets (Murphy & Avery, 1983), how those issues are covered
has been shown to differ significantly (Loew & Mella, 2005), demonstrating the counternarrative function of indigenous journalism (Hanusch, 2013). For example, in a study of
environmental issue coverage in indigenous and mainstream newspapers in the U.S., Loew and
Mella (2005) found that indigenous journalists emphasized land governance rights and political
sovereignty more than mainstream journalists, and indigenous audiences reported that these news
outlets were their primary source for news about environmental issues and self-governance.
Participants in the study also reported a lack of confidence in the ability of mainstream outlets to
cover indigenous issues, particularly concerning environmental governance rights, with an
appropriate understanding of the issues (Loew & Mella, 2005). Unfortunately, indigenous
journalists are often dismissed or marginalized as “activists” due to coverage focusing on
indigenous issues, concerns, and perspectives (Grixti, 2011). Interviews with Māori journalists
17
showed that even within indigenous journalism circles there is some ambivalence over whether
or not indigenous journalists could be both objective reporters and issue advocates, suggesting
that the model of indigenous journalism as activism is becoming outdated (Hanusch, 2014).
What should emerge from this discussion is that there are unique concerns about the use
of media and mass communication technologies to share indigenous scientific and environmental
information that may play a role in the development and function of formal indigenous
communication channels. Communication scholars in this area have largely focused on
indigenous journalism and film, but the pressing need to collectively control and disseminate
environmental information suggests that indigenous nations may also play a formalized role in
ISEC production.
Communication and indigenous environmental activism
When it comes to performing environmental communication roles, indigenous people are
more than activists. They are scholars, scientists, professional journalists, amateur bloggers,
traditional storytellers, and a host of other communication sources and producers. These
identities may overlap or not; indigenous people can be both scholars and activists, scientists and
storytellers (Corntassel, 2003). The scholarly literature on indigenous people and environmental
communication often leans towards examining media through the lens of political activism (e.g.
Dunaway, 2008; Ginsburg, 1994; Ignatow, 2007). While there are historic reasons for this
emphasis that can be traced to the environmental movement of the 1970s (Dunaway, 2008), use
of an activist frame to discuss the role of indigenous people in global environmental
communication strongly persists in both popular media (see Kopacz & Lawton, 2011) and in
scholarly discourse (e.g. Schlosberg & Carruthers, 2010; Sylvain, 2014; Willow, 2009).
18
The framework of environmental justice is a perspective that emphasizes the just
distribution of environmental benefit and consequence along with equitable participation in
environmental decision-making (Pezzullo & Sandler, 2007). Originally, justice was conceived
as a more equitable distribution of environmental harm and consequence, but scholars have since
expanded the concept of environmental justice to be about equity in other realms including
political agency, food security, control of TEK, and a host of other related issues (Schlosberg &
Carruthers, 2010). Justice can be defined by three goals, including 1) equity in the distribution
of environmental risk, 2) recognition of the diversity of participants and experiences, and 3)
equity in participation in the political process through which environmental policies and
management decisions are set (Schlosberg, 2004). Indigenous scholars have argued that justice
also means maintaining equity in the ability to experience and learn from traditional
environments (Whyte, 2016). Environmental justice provides a powerful tool for critiquing
inequities and helping establish collective goals that indigenous environmental communicators
might work towards.
The framework of social movements is also a staple in the literature about indigenous
people and environmental communication (for examples see, Chen, 2019; Hunt & Gruszczynski,
2019; Laurie et al., 2005; Raynauld et al., 2018). A social movement is a series of “sustained
interactions between aggrieved social actors and allies, and opponents and public authorities”
(Tarrow, 2011, p. 33). Within this framework, indigenous people are part of the aggrieved social
actors seeking environmental change. For example, Morgan (2007) studied what happens to
indigenous social movements when they begin interacting with more traditional political
structures, such as when seeking to gain access to United Nations policy processes, arguing that
the outcomes are not always a predictable change towards more moderate activist strategies
19
(Morgan, 2007). Others have looked at the way indigenous activists used new media
technologies to raise awareness about Canadian legislation reducing environmental protections
that would have serious implications for indigenous people, finding that new media technologies
did help raise awareness but these voices were often drowned out by oppositional voices in
mainstream outlets (Chen, 2019). Hunt & Gruszczynski (2019) looked at the role of social
media in recent indigenous protests over the construction of an oil pipeline in the US, finding
that indigenous and other social movements may be able to garner attention for their issues
outside traditional media’s gatekeeping structures.
While valuable in understanding how media and activism contribute to social change,
these approaches to indigenous communication run the risk of obscuring a key distinction among
indigenous social actors. Returning to Tarrow’s (1998) conceptualization of a social movement,
if indigenous people are viewed only as aggrieved social actors, this definition suggests that they
are not part of the public authority, they are not governing entities engaging in traditional
politics, a conceptualization that conflicts with other arguments about the self-determined and
self-governing status of indigenous peoples previously discussed. Indigenous governments with
public authority are treated as part of the group of aggrieved social actors fighting against a
larger governing authority. This is not to say that scholarship on indigenous social movements
and environmental justice issues are not valuable and necessary, only that a repeated and
sustained scholarly focus that obscures or generalizes the unique role of indigenous nations as
environmental governance organizations reinforces a narrative that indigenous people are part of
an activist class, not necessarily scientists or governments with public authority. Indeed,
scholars have argued that indigenous social movements may actually create a new class of
indigenous professionals and new spaces for indigenous governance (Laurie et al., 2005), and
20
some scholars have incorporated this into a more complex definition of global social movements
(Morgan, 2007). More research is needed to fully develop a picture of how indigenous
environmental governance, social movements, and communication campaigns intersect, but
ultimately, the scholarship on indigenous environmental activism suggests that ISEC also
involves the strategic use of communication by nation and non-nation actors to achieve self and
environmental governance goals.
Implications for future research
The purpose of this chapter was to connect several disparate threads of inquiry and in the
process challenge conceptualizations of indigenous nationhood as it has been or might be applied
to indigenous science and environmental communication (ISEC). Indigenous peoples are
citizens of self-governing nations that existed prior to colonization. The history of indigenous
nations and environmental governance gives them a unique status in international relations, with
some scholars referring to this global group as Fourth World nations (Ryser, 2012), rendering the
traditional nation-state emphasis of international communication scholarship insufficient to
describe the complicated production and dissemination of ISEC. The reality for many
indigenous people and nations is that environmental issues will always cross political and
cultural borders. Indigenous scientific and environmental information rarely stays within a
single nation. New media technologies have helped create a globally connected pan-indigenous
network through which environmental information can be shared widely, but new technologies
come with both promise and challenges. To capitalize on these promises and address the
challenges that come with a more globalized media environment, many indigenous groups have
turned to producing their own media. Whether through journalism or advocacy media, one goal
has remained constant, the desire of indigenous people to build political agency and standing,
21
frequently with the goal of influencing environmental policy or regaining environmental
governance authority.
The chapter proposes that ISEC is a multi-disciplinary, multi-scale, and multinational
area of study that may benefit from connecting fragmented, but ultimately related, areas of
research. ISEC involves production and distribution of indigenous science and environmental
information, the representation of indigenous science and environmental issues in media, and the
strategic use of science and environmental information in the furtherance of indigenous selfdetermination, environmental management, and environmental governance. Perhaps due to a
disconnect between the scholarship on indigenous nation-building and international
communication, the strategic science and environmental communication efforts engaged in by
indigenous governments or governing organizations remains an understudied area. While the
concepts advanced by the broader areas of science and environmental communication may work
with indigenous communities, the previously discussed fraught relationships with western
scientists, information sharing, and mass media may create a unique set of influences,
circumstances, and effects when it comes to communication by indigenous scientists and
governments. To address these concerns, I propose three new strands of ISEC research.
The first strand should explore the basic questions of how, why, where, and to what effect
do indigenous scientists communicate, with a perspective that bridges the locally focused science
communication of TEK with the international and transnational nature of contemporary
indigenous information sharing. Questions in this strand might take a narrow focus. For
example, new research might explore how individual indigenous governing organizations use
science in their policy work with other governments who share management responsibilities over
the same resources. Questions might also take a global focus, such as exploring the role of
22
transnational scientific organizations in sharing and communicating indigenous ecological
knowledge.
The second strand, somewhat related to the first, should explore the strategic science and
environmental communication efforts of indigenous governments or governing organizations.
While it is true that indigenous people are often marginalized in national and international
environmental policy processes, many indigenous groups and nations have also been successful
in reaffirming their legal rights to participate in policy formation or to direct governance of their
traditional lands and natural resources (Laurie et al., 2005; McCool, 2002; Nesper & Schlender,
2007; Wilkinson, 2005). Yet, there is a lack of scholarship examining these indigenous
governments, governing organizations, and environmental management agencies from the same
perspectives used to study the communication efforts of their non-indigenous peers. If
indigenous governments are to co-manage their environments and resources across international
boundaries, then new scholarship needs to examine what kinds of communication efforts are
most effective at creating attitude, behavior, and policy changes supportive of indigenous
environmental agendas.
The third strand should examine the reception and effects of indigenous science and
environmental communication on audiences and diverse publics. While there exists a bevy of
research on indigenous representation in media (e.g. Carstarphen & Sanchez, 2012), little if any
scholarship considers the effect of seeing indigenous people as scientists, official government
sources, or both, on different audiences. How do non-indigenous audiences respond to
indigenous scientists speaking about climate change? How do the dimensions of indigenous
stereotypes affect audience perceptions of trust and credibility? What factors make indigenous
audiences more likely to help indigenous conservation officers manage a resource? The
23
questions in this strand of research may help indigenous governments and organizations enact
their environmental policy agendas.
Underpinning these new directions in ISEC research is a need for foundational
descriptive work and theory building. The scholarship on social movements has somewhat
explored the role of indigenous government communication around specific issues or events, but
there is a lack of understanding about how indigenous governments communicate about science
and environmental issues on a daily basis. The literature on indigenous journalism gives us some
clues since many papers and outlets are owned and run by indigenous nations (Murphy &
Murphy, 1981), but these studies have an inherently different focus drawing more from
journalism studies than strategic communication or public affairs. Works like that of Berkes
(2009) and Ramirez (2007) give us hints about how environmental information might flow
through indigenous communities, but additional work is also needed to understand what the
science and environmental communication media landscape looks like from the perspective of
contemporary indigenous audiences living on traditional lands or in the indigenous diaspora.
Indigenous journalism scholars have laid excellent foundations for understanding
communication from an indigenous perspective (see Lowe & Mella 2005; Hanusch, 2013), but a
heavy reliance on nation-state based research frames has limited our understanding of how the
media landscape changes from one indigenous nation to the next. Ultimately this chapter is a
call for scholars to fully consider the implications of indigenous nationhood on communication
research programs and to re-conceptualize science and environmental communication research
with this more complex understanding of indigenous peoples and indigenous governments.
24
CHAPTER 1
RETHINKING CULTURAL FACTORS IN GOVERNMENT COMMUNICATION:
A SURVEY OF ENVIRONMENTAL PROFESSIONALS WORKING FOR INDIGENOUS
GOVERNMENTS
As indigenous nations grow their capacities for environmental governance and
management, the need for effective public information and engagement functions will grow as
well. Since the 1970’s, formal recognition of indigenous environmental governance has seen a
resurgence. The self-determination era of federal Indian policy in the U.S. saw a number of
federal court cases in which indigenous nations repeatedly reaffirmed their legal rights to control
their own environments and natural resources (Wilkinson, 2005, p. 198). In 1989, the
International Labor Organization adopted the Indigenous and Tribal Peoples Convention (No.
169) setting the stage for a global agenda to promote and protect the rights of indigenous peoples
(ILO, 2020), and the passage of the U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in
2007 formally established international recognition of the rights of indigenous peoples to
participate in the governance of their lands (United Nations, 2007). Today, organizations like
the American Indian Science and Engineering Society (AISES) report that indigenous
communities are ramping up their efforts to fill jobs related to a ballooning demand for health,
environmental, and technology services (AISES, 2016). These trends have created a growing
cohort of environmental professionals employed by indigenous nations.
Colonization has created a difficult context for indigenous environmental governance to
operate. While indigenous people have always managed their environments using traditional or
25
local ecological knowledge, colonial processes frequently resulted in the marginalization or
usurpation of indigenous environmental management and the exploitation or destruction of
indigenous environments (Weaver, 1996, p. 3). Policies like the 1887 Allotment Act in the
United States, a federal land management policy that sought to divide up indigenous lands into
individually owned tracts and push indigenous people away from subsistence living towards
western agricultural models, resulted in the decimation of indigenous lands and forests
(Wilkinson, 2005, p. 16). In New Zealand, the Government Fisheries Regulations of 1877 were
crafted without regard to traditional Maori management practices and resulted in the continued
degradation of traditional fisheries (Hersoug, 2003). Environmental policymaking has largely
omitted indigenous knowledge and practices, let alone recognized the rights of indigenous
people to set their own policies over the resources in their traditional territories. Indigenous
environmental communication is often relegated to a place outside of governance, frequently and
erroneously viewed as the advocacy of a minor stakeholder without legal or political standing.
While those outside of indigenous governments might still hold these views, indigenous people
see a strong link between self-governance, environmental issues, and communication (Loew &
Mella, 2005).
One question in organizational communication and public relations theory is whether
traditional models of public relations, primarily developed for use in the private sector, can work
in the context of public organizations with governance responsibilities (Rainey, 2003; Fisher Liu
& Horsley, 2007; Horsley, Fisher Liu, & Blake Levenshus, 2010). Some scholars have argued
that factors including political influences, an orientation towards public good as opposed to
profit, legal constraints, greater public scrutiny, and poor public perception of government
communication, create the need for a communication model unique to public organizations
26
(Fisher Liu & Horsley, 2007). As such, it would be erroneous to treat private, public, and nonprofit sector communication equally on the basis that significant differences in these dimensions
can lead to significantly different communication needs and practices. Furthermore, if
differences in these factors affect organizational communication practice, then indigenous
government communication may require yet a different model given the particularly complicated
historical and political landscape within which indigenous governments operate. Yet existing
models of government communication have omitted the complex structures and unique concerns
these organizations.
The purpose of the following study is to explore the communication attitudes and
practices of an understudied population, and to illuminate possible factors that might contribute
to the development or modification of a communication model for indigenous governments. The
study will examine how people working for indigenous governments in environmental and
natural resource management areas use communication media, how they think about the role of
communication media in their jobs, and what challenges or barriers to better public or
interagency communication might be. Communication has long been viewed as a key
component of environmental management, yet no scholars have studied the beliefs, attitudes, or
practices of indigenous government agencies.
Literature Review
The communication activities engaged in by environmental governance agencies,
diversely referred to as information and education (I&E), public affairs, public information,
environmental education, stakeholder engagement, and even sometimes marketing (Fazio &
Gilbert, 2000, p. 14), can help build support for environmental policies and practices (Manfredo,
Vaske, & Sikorowski, 1996). Public information and education campaigns have been shown to
27
successfully change behavioral intentions on a host of environmental issues ranging from
pesticide use (Salcedo et al., 1974), to preventing the spread of aquatic invasive species (Shaw,
Howell, & Genskow, 2014; Seekamp et al., 2016). Effective stakeholder communication and
engagement can reduce conflict in the development and implementation of environmental policy
(Senecah, 2004), and successful inter-agency communication contributes to better comanagement of shared environments and resources (Temby et al., 2015). However, no
scholarship has yet examined the communication-related attitudes, practices, and challenges of
the growing cohort of indigenous environmental governance agencies.
Indigenous communication and environmental governance
Not surprisingly, more scholarship has focused on representation of indigenous people in
media, rather than on communication by indigenous people (Wilson & Stewart, 2008), but that
may change as new communication technologies increase the ability of indigenous nations to
quickly share information and ideas across a global network (Alia, 2010, p. 7). Along with this
ease of communication comes new challenges. Daes (2003) argues that protecting indigenous
environmental information might be a significant struggle in this globalized communication
environment. The lack of indigenous-produced environmental media, the increased use of new
media technologies, and the potential challenges brought about by a globalized communication
system all may play a role in how indigenous environmental professionals think about the
communication efforts of their environmental governance organizations.
The lack of indigenous representation in mass media is not a new phenomenon but
combined with the increased accessibility of new media technologies and the reaffirmation of
self-governance, it provides an incentive and opportunity for indigenous nations to tell their own
environmental stories. Supporting the dual roles of communication in indigenous communities
28
as both advocacy and governance, Roth (2005, p. 10) argues that indigenous people in Canada
view communication technology as a tool for developing both political influence and social
infrastructure. For example, First Nations people in the northern half of the country built upon
early government mandates to create television programming advancing the preservation of
language, the affirmation of culture, and the presentation of indigenous viewpoints on local
issues as a means of persuading the southern half of the country to understand indigenous
viewpoints on development and land management (Roth, 2005, pp. 178-182).
Compared to television, social media formats enable visual communication at much
lower cost to individual producers, and social media platforms place a heavy emphasis on the
creation and sharing of visual content. Social media has enabled new faster modes of sharing
visual symbols of both indigenous culture and political resistance (Wood, 2015). Visuals can
have a significant effect on the amount of time users spend with a given post and can increase the
likelihood a viewer will view or read the associated story (Ulloa et al., 2015). Furthermore, as
more indigenous people live away from their traditional territories, interactions between this
population and their home environments may become increasingly mediated through social
media and visual formats. As such, the present study will pay particular attention to attitudes
about visual media and the perceived importance of seeing environments and governance.
Along with an increase in the ability to publish information about indigenous
environmental issues, comes concerns over how such information might be used or viewed by
non-indigenous audiences. The process of collecting indigenous environmental knowledge for
commercial development and use, typically in the healthcare and pharmaceutical industries, is
commonly known as bioprospecting (Liang, 2011). The use of such knowledge without benefit
to indigenous people is known as biopiracy (Liang, 2011). The processes of bioprospecting and
29
the potential for biopiracy have led to a broader concern among scholars about the implications
of making indigenous environmental information too accessible (Daes, 2003). While scholars
and indigenous groups have made efforts to document indigenous knowledge both as a
protection against loss and as a mechanism of information control, some scholars have argued
that such practices only serve to promote the appropriation of indigenous environmental
information (Nordin, Hassan, & Zainol, 2012). It remains unclear whether these concerns are
also present in the minds of environmental professionals when they consider what information to
share with different audiences. Some scholars have found that feelings of ownership over
information can increase the likelihood of sharing that information with others (Raban & Rafaeli,
2007), but it may be that broader social concerns about information control result in different
attitudes within indigenous communities.
In reaction to a proposed bill to reduce federal environmental protections in Canada,
indigenous activists leveraged social media to create a grassroots campaign to raise awareness of
indigenous rights and environmental issues known as the “Idle No More” (INM) movement
(Chen, 2018). Compared to issues mediated through traditional gatekeeping structures, the
social media discourse around INM featured a significant presence of non-elite and indigenous
voices (Callison & Hermida, 2015). While the indigenous social media landscape framed the
issue as one of self-governance, including the right to manage traditional environments, these
voices were overwhelmed in mainstream Canadian media by opposing viewpoints (Chen, 2018).
While social media has enabled more indigenous people to share their perspectives, this increase
in voice has not necessarily been received, if at all, in the ways indigenous communities might
hope for (Dreher, McCallum, & Waller 2016).
30
Social media use by government organizations
Governments and public agencies at all levels have dramatically increased their use of
social media as a tool to reach clients, publics, and stakeholders (Sobaci, 2016; Mergel, 2013, p.
16; Rainey, 2014, p. 251). Mergel (2013, p. 16), drawing from a series of interviews with
government communication professionals, attributes this rise to a series of professional and
social factors. At the most pragmatic level, government communicators are moving their efforts
to where they perceive the greatest audiences exist (Ganapati & Reddick, 2012), but changes in
the way audiences find information, the increased availability of information about client and
stakeholder attitudes, and the reduced costs of communication efforts all may contribute to this
spike in adoption of social media technologies (Mergel, 2013, p. 16). Sobaci (2016) suggests
that the two-way flow of information enabled by social media platforms can be particularly
useful for local governments and smaller agencies to quickly gather information about social
problems or to source ideas for new programs and initiatives (Sobaci, 2016). Lastly, social
media are perceived as an effective means of increasing government transparency and
responsiveness due to their ability to quickly and easily publish information (Ganapati &
Reddick, 2012), particularly in crisis or risk scenarios (Hughes & Palen, 2012). As
governmental organizations dramatically increase their use of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and
other social media to communicate with clients, stakeholders, and the public (Sobaci, 2016), it
raises the question of whether indigenous environmental organizations will also follow this
trend, particularly given the previously discussed concerns over how indigenous cultural and
environmental information is used. As a result of these trends, the present study proposes the
following set of research questions:
31
RQ1: Who are IEEPs frequently communicating with and through which
channels?
RQ2: What kinds of attitudes, beliefs, and concerns do indigenous environmental
professionals hold about communicating environmental information, particularly
via social media?
RQ3: How might indigenous nations improve their communication efforts around
environmental and natural resources management?
Method
The present study collected data from environmental and natural resource professionals
working for indigenous nations, through an online survey (n = 71). At the time of survey design,
no comprehensive data existed on the number of indigenous nations in the U.S. who maintained
staff dedicated to natural resource or environmental management. As a result, there is no census
of the number of people employed by indigenous nations in this capacity. Furthermore, some
transnational governance organizations exist that employ up to 50 full-time staff which would
not be counted in a survey limited to indigenous nations alone (for an example see GLIFWC,
2019). The inability to roughly estimate or easily identify members of the total population
eliminated the possibility of using a true random sample. Due to these challenges, the present
study used a combination of convenience and snowball sampling.
The survey was distributed to approximately 600 people on the membership and
recruitment email list of the Native American Fish and Wildlife Society (NAFWS), a non-profit
organization focused on improving communication among the indigenous nations within the
U.S. The sponsorship of this known and trusted organization, and the expressed research goal
with direct benefit to the mission of the organization, was designed to address the need for
32
reciprocity when conducting research with indigenous communities. After the initial
distribution, two follow-up emails were sent. The initial follow-up email repeated the same
request for response. The second follow-up email was more targeted. Large indigenous
environmental governance organizations including the Great Lakes Intertribal Fish and Wildlife
Commission and the Northwest Indian Fisheries Commission, in addition to specific
departmental managers on the NAFWS list, were asked to relay a request for response to their
staffs.
Since little is known about the organizational structures, staff levels, or staff roles of
indigenous NRM organizations, it is possible that a great deal of heterogeneity exists in size and
structure among these organizations, and communication work may be diffused among multiple
personnel with job titles outside what might be expected. A survey conducted at the
organizational level would be particularly difficult to execute due to uncertainty over these
variables (Dillman, Smyth, & Christian 2009, p. 406). Furthermore, one goal of this survey was
to explore how communication is perceived by and used by different types of indigenous NRM
professionals that may exist within an organization. As a result, responses from different types
of professionals within a single organization were desired. Given the combination of sampling
strategies used in this study, advance or individual compensation for participation was not
feasible. Instead, participants were entered into a drawing for one of five $100 Amazon gift
cards sent electronically to the winning participants one-month after the conclusion of data
collection.
The survey instrument contained five sections and was created using Qualtrics online
survey software. An online survey platform was selected over mail or phone survey methods
due to the sampling strategy requiring a format that could be easily shared among indigenous
33
networks. Consistent with the structure of other surveys of professionals and their adoption of
communication tools (e.g. Peffer, Bodzin, & Duffield Smith, 2013; Eyrich, Padman, & Sweetser,
2008), survey sections collected data on 1) participant demographics, 2) employment, 3)
communication uses, 4) communication attitudes, and 5) communication challenges.
Modifications to questions followed the guidance of Dillman’s “Tailored Design Method”
(Dillman et al., 2009, p. 16). Before beginning the survey, participants were first asked to
identify the type of organization they work for. Only participants who reported employment
with a federally recognized tribe, state recognized tribe, or intertribal agency were allowed to
proceed to the full questionnaire.
Provided a participant passed the screening question, they were then able to proceed to
the full survey. The demographic section collected age, gender, race/ethnicity, and education
level. The employment section asked participants a series of five questions. Participants were
asked to report 1) the area of natural resources or environmental management in which they
worked, 2) their primary job duties, 3) their years of employment in their current job, 4) their
years of employment in the field, 5) the geographic region in which they work, and 6) the
approximate number of people in their organization. The purpose of this section was to collect
organic variables that may help in exploratory analysis and to get a better sense of who is tasked
with communication activities within an organization.
The communication uses and practices section asked a series of three questions. The first
primary asked how frequently respondents communicated with a list of different audiences
including tribal members, non-tribal members, internal departments, other tribes, inter-tribal
agencies, state agencies, federal agencies, and mass media. The second question asked how
frequently respondents used different communication channels including email lists, websites,
34
public presentations, print newsletters, digital newsletters, printed posters and fliers, radio,
television, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, podcasts, Twitter, blogs, other photo sharing sites,
and other video sharing sites. The final question asked whether or not the respondent had been
interviewed by a journalist or a reporter for a news story. These frequency-based questions were
recorded using a five-point scale of daily(4), weekly(3), monthly(2), yearly(1), and never(0).
The communication attitudes section was separated into two parts. The first part began
with an open-ended question that asked what types of environmental communication efforts
indigenous nations should focus on and why. This question was designed to provide more
nuanced data about areas for future research and partnerships with indigenous communities in
addition to providing data about participant beliefs about the role of communication in
environmental management. The remaining four questions asked participants to report the
feelings about 1) the importance of using visual media to show different environmental issues, 2)
the effectiveness of social media in communicating with different audiences, 3) the effectiveness
of communication in changing people's environmental opinions, and 4) the effectiveness of
changing people's environmental behaviors. The second part of the communication attitudes
section asked a series of eight five-point Likert-type questions that asked participants to rate the
appropriateness (from very appropriate to very inappropriate) of sharing different types of
information (traditional cultural beliefs, traditional cultural practices, current environmental
management practices, current environmental science) through different types of media (social
media and traditional media).
Given the difficulty of making a priori predictions about the barriers or challenges to
communication, the communication challenges and barriers section asked one open-ended
question. Participants were asked “What could be done to improve communication with tribal
35
members on issues related to environmental or natural resource management?” Similar to the
first open-ended question in the attitudes section, this question was designed to provide more
nuanced information that may inform future research. Both open ended questions were coded
using a grounded theory type approach (Glaser, 1965). Responses to each question were coded
and annotated three times to continually identify and refine the theoretical categories emerging
from the data. The results of the survey and subsequent analysis are reported in the next section.
Results
Ninety-seven responses were collected during a three-month period. Respondents were
removed from the dataset if they either 1) declined participation after reading the study
information sheet, 2) failed a series of screening questions, 3) completed the survey in under 5
minutes indicating a lack of thought or attention, or 4) did not progress beyond initial
demographics. The remaining respondents (n = 71) reported a mean age of 42 years (range 19 to
67 years) and were majority male (61% male, 34% female, 5% unknown). The racial
composition of the sample was 44% Native American and indigenous (n = 31), 42% White (n =
30), 6% Hispanic/Latino (n = 4), 1% African American (n = 1). Education level was skewed
slightly higher with 7% reporting a high school diploma or GED, 13% Associates or 2-year
degree, 37% Bachelor’s degree, 30% Master’s degree, and 10% reporting attainment of a
doctoral degree.
The majority of respondents reported working for federally recognized tribes (79%, n =
56) with a smaller set having worked for intertribal agencies (21%, n = 21). Almost half of the
respondents reported working in their current job for 5 years or less (45%, n = 32). However,
respondents had worked in the fields of environmental or natural resource management for an
average of 14 years (M = 13.69, SD = 9.28, range 1 to 42 years), but the distribution was
36
somewhat bimodal and skewed higher with 27% working less than 5 years and 41% working
more than 15 years. Participants were also asked which specific areas of natural resources or
environmental management their work entailed. Respondents were able to select multiple areas
from a list or input other areas of work: 42% had jobs working with water, air, or environmental
quality, 40% with wildlife, 39% with fisheries, 17% with rangelands, 17% with recreation, and
smaller percentages of work with forestry (13%), planning and development (11%), agriculture
(9%), and energy (1%).
Audiences and channels
The first research question sought to answer who indigenous-employed environmental
and natural resource professionals are communicating with and which media channels were most
frequently used. Tribal members were the most frequent audience, followed by internal
departments and non-tribal members. Mass media were the least frequently communicated with
(see Figure 1). An exploratory factor analysis was used to determine if there were significant
groupings based on frequency. The analysis showed that IEEPs roughly group by whether their
communication was directed towards public outreach (tribal members and non-tribal members, a
= .79) or governmental affairs (internal departments, other tribes, intertribal agencies, state
agencies, and federal agencies, a = .65). Given the low frequency of communication with mass
media, it was not surprising that mass media did not load on public outreach or governmental
affairs factors, nor did it stand alone as a factor.
Regarding the types of communication channels used, email lists were the most frequent
channel followed by agency websites, public presentations, and Facebook (see Figure 2).
Principal component analysis was used to identify underlying patterns among these items. Initial
eigenvalues indicated three factors explaining 26%, 12%, and 10% of the variance, respectively.
37
The varimax-rotated matrix showed use of print newsletters, digital newsletters, and printed
posters and fliers loading on the first factor (Cronbach's a = .83). Use of television, radio, and
podcast channels loaded on the second (a = .78), and use of blogs and YouTube loaded on the
third (a = .86). Three additional factors were also identified but were omitted due to reliability
scores below .7.
Figure 1
Frequency of communication by audience
Notes: Communication audiences are listed in rank order of most frequent to least according to
the mean frequency of each audience type. Bars represent the proportion of respondents who
indicated each frequency.
38
Figure 2
Frequency of communication channel use by type
Notes: Channels are listed in rank order of most frequent to least according to the mean
frequency of each channel type. Bars represent the proportion of respondents who indicated
each frequency.
Attitudes and beliefs
The second research question (RQ2) asked what kinds of attitudes, beliefs, and concerns
IEEPs hold about communicating environmental information. Given the high priority placed on
visual content by social media platforms, the first set of attitude questions sought to determine
whether IEEPs viewed it as important to share pictures of ecosystem elements and environmental
governance. Ten items measured the importance of sharing different types of images on a fivepoint scale from “very unimportant” to “very important.” There were no significant differences
in importance among different types of images. In other words, images of fish and wildlife on
tribal lands, images of environmental problems outside of tribal lands, and images of tribal land
and property development were all perceived as similarly important for citizens to see. The ten
39
items were combined into a single index of Visual Importance (a = .97) by taking the average of
each respondents’ scores across the ten items. According to this index, respondents indicated
that it was important to very important for people to see images of ecosystems, environmental
problems, and environmental management both on and off indigenous lands (M = 4.17, SD =
1.07).
Respondents also indicated their beliefs in the efficacy of media at changing public
opinions and behaviors, along with the efficacy of using social media as a tool for
communicating environmental information with different audiences. Respondents felt that
media are moderately effective tools for public Opinion Change (M = 4, SD = .9) and slightly
effective tools for public Behavior Change (M = 3.6, SD = .95). Overall, social media was
viewed as a slightly effective communication tool (M = 3.34, SD = .77), but this varied
depending on the audience (see Table 1). Responses were neutral as to whether social media
was effective for communicating information with state and federal agencies, but it was viewed
as effective for communicating with both tribal and non-tribal citizens as well as other
indigenous run departments and agencies.
Table 1
Efficacy of social media as a communication tool by audience
Audience
M
SD
t*
df
p
Tribal members
3.99
0.8
10.363
70
0.000
Non-tribal members
3.5
1.06
3.947
69
0.000
Inter-tribal agencies
3.44
1.09
3.414
69
0.001
Other tribes
3.4
0.97
3.453
69
0.001
Other depts. (internal)
3.38
1.03
3.101
70
0.003
Federal agencies
2.87
1.15
-0.932
70
0.354
State agencies
2.83
1.12
-1.27
70
0.208
Note: *One-sample t-tests against neutral (M = 3).
40
The third set of attitude questions asked respondents about the appropriateness of sharing
different types of information via social media and traditional media. A 2 (media channel:
traditional vs social) x 4 (information type: cultural beliefs, cultural practices, environmental
management science, environmental management practices) repeated measures ANOVA was
conducted to determine if there were any main effects or interactions of information type and
media channel on the appropriateness of sharing. There was a significant effect of information
type on appropriateness of sharing, Wilks’ lambda = .39, F(3,64) = 33.12, p = .000 (see Figure
3). There was not a significant effect of media channel, Wilks’ lambda = .99, F(1,66) = .04, p =
.84. Factor analysis showed cultural beliefs and cultural practices loading onto one factor and
explaining 59% of variance according to initial Eigenvalues, as well as environmental beliefs and
environmental practices loading onto a second factor explaining 21% of variance. As such,
cultural beliefs and cultural practices were combined to form a single measure of Cultural Info
(M = 3.06, SD = 1.12), and environmental science and environmental practices were combined to
form a single variable Environmental Info (M = 4.34, SD = .76). An independent samples t-test
showed that respondents felt that it was significantly more appropriate to share environmental
information than cultural information via media, t(70) = -10.57, p < .001.
41
Figure 3
Appropriateness of sharing information types via social and traditional media
Note: Error bars represent a 95% confidence interval. 1 = ‘very inappropriate’, 3 =
‘neither appropriate or inappropriate,’ and 5 = ‘very appropriate.’
Race as moderator of attitudes and beliefs
An exploratory analysis was conducted to determine whether respondent attitudes and
beliefs were moderated by race. For example, indigenous respondents might report feeling more
comfortable sharing cultural information than non-indigenous respondents. Respondents were
grouped into either indigenous (Native American or other indigenous) or non-indigenous (white,
black, Latino, Asian, and other) test groups. Independent samples t-tests were used to determine
if there were significant differences between groups in terms of the attitude variables discussed
thus far (visual importance, opinion change, behavior change, cultural info, and environmental
info). Results showed no significant differences between the groups (see Table 2).
42
Table 2
Comparison between indigenous and non-indigenous attitudes
Indigenous
Non-indigenous
Variable
n
M
SD
n
M
SD
t
df
p
Visual importance
31
4.18
1.13
35
4.22
0.95
0.14
64
0.891
Opinion change
30
4.03
0.96
35
3.91
0.89
-0.52
63
0.606
Behavior change
31
3.58
1.12
35
3.54
0.82
-0.16
64
0.875
Cultural info
31
3.15
1.1
35
3.02
1.17
-0.46
64
0.648
Environmental info
31
4.33
0.66
35
4.46
0.68
0.78
64
0.438
Priorities and challenges
The third research question (RQ3) asked how indigenous nations might improve their
communication efforts around environmental and natural resources management. Two openended questions were used to examine this research question, one asked about what
communication efforts indigenous nations should prioritize and the second asked about the
challenges to better communication with tribal members specifically. Of the 71 respondents
included in analysis, 59 provided a response to one or both open ended questions. Responses to
the two questions revealed intertwined themes that echoed and elaborated on trends observed in
the quantitative data.
The first priority and set of challenges dealt with how communication is planned and
conducted by NRM professionals. Taken together, a majority of responses reflected a call to
develop more comprehensive and strategic communication strategies, but the type of
communication work needed was mixed. Respondents discussed the need to improve
communication with tribal citizens, non-tribal citizens, and other governments. As one
respondent wrote…
43
“...as [natural resource] professionals we MUST be able to communicate
effectively with our tribal membership and council, but I also think it's important
that we also communicate with neighboring agencies, both state and federal.”
Respondents recognized the complexity of the communication networks in which they were
situated and suggested the need to maintain interpersonal channels while improving their use of
new channels. Public outreach and presentations were viewed as traditional ways of learning
about the environment, but many respondents also acknowledged that they might reach a wider
and younger audience through social media. Some respondents also suggested that an even
broader strategy was needed that included outreach to local mass media outlets as a means of
reaching non-tribal citizens.
The complexity of indigenous environmental communication networks means that some
audiences may not be reached effectively, or in some cases completely omitted, as
communication activities are planned and prioritized. Respondents expressed frustration that
external audiences knew little about indigenous NRM values and practices. A few expressed
frustrations that internal audiences, including other tribal government agencies and tribal
citizens, also knew little about what their NRM agency was doing or why. To this end, many
respondents discussed the need for better data about the communication channels used by their
audiences and the kinds of messages their audiences respond to. The challenge in developing
better communication strategies and messaging was frequently attributed to the lack of, or overly
restrictive, nation-level communication strategies. As one respondent wrote…
“Our biggest block to communication is the way in which our [council] will allow
us to reach out to the public. We aren't allowed to have a department Facebook,
Instagram, or YouTube, and the amount of actual information and data that we
can share with other organizations (state and federal) is highly restricted.”
However, not all respondents indicated that social media might be a new priority or help
overcome challenges, but most were open to new media provided that traditional channels were
44
maintained, reflecting a call for a more inclusive strategy. Several respondents suggested that
indigenous nations should be less restrictive about the channels through which communication
happens, but also develop guidelines about what gets communicated through these channels. For
example, one respondent suggested nations develop guidelines about the kinds of cultural
information that should or shouldn’t be shared. This question of what types of information to
communicate leads into the next major theme.
The second major theme to emerge centered around the purposes of indigenous NRM
communication and the kinds of content needed to achieve those purposes. In effect, this theme
dealt with why indigenous NRM agencies should communicate. Many respondents emphasized
the need to use communication to bolster the case for why indigenous environmental
management and governance matters. As one respondent wrote, indigenous nations should focus
on…
“Unique aspects of tribal natural resources work, that is, bringing culture into
the science. This is not intuitive. How to bring culture into the science needs
people to help to communicate how this is done and how it is different from just
science or management for state/federal agencies.”
Some respondents talked about the need to communicate with tribal citizens as a means of
building support for agency work, while others talked about the need to share information about
science and environmental management. A number of responses like this emphasized the
importance of grounding contemporary science and management efforts within the traditional
cultural and ecological knowledge of nations and their citizens. Several respondents wrote about
the need to produce messages that informed their stakeholders about the work of their agency
while others indicated that communication with tribal members consisted of a multi-directional
flow of information with NRM professionals acting as hubs to relay both traditional ecological
knowledge and contemporary science. Again, one of the principal barriers to communication
45
that better incorporated scientific and cultural knowledge was attributed to a lack of guidance on
the kinds of information that would be appropriate to share. Respondents most perceived that
strategic communication by their agencies was not prioritized or was devalued by government
leaders. These results strongly emphasize the importance of cultural factors in indigenous NRM
communication.
Discussion
Indigenous environmental management agencies use a combination of traditional public
engagement activities, including workshops, posters, and public presentations, much like their
peer non-indigenous agencies, but indigenous agencies may not be adding social media to their
management tools as enthusiastically as non-indigenous governments have been shown to be
doing (Sobaci 2016). While the quantitative data showed heavy reliance on more traditional
forms of communication, the qualitative data revealed a desire to increase use of social and mass
media channels. This gap between desire to use new forms of media and actual use begs the
question about why this gap exists, particularly when survey respondents felt that it was
important for citizens to see visual media of indigenous environments and management.
It might be tempting to predict that a long and problematic relationship with mass
communication channels (see Carstarphen and Sanchez 2007) would result in beliefs that these
channels would be ineffectual and thus result in lower use, but the data on attitudes and beliefs
collected in this study suggest the explanation is more complicated. Survey respondents showed
a significant belief in the power of communication to change environmental attitudes and to a
lesser extent, behaviors. The professionals in this study also recognized the importance of using
communication to demonstrate the connections between culture and environmental science, not
only for increasing engagement by tribal members but also in advocating for indigenous rights in
46
inter-governmental communication. Respondents also believed that citizens should be able to
see the work of their agencies, and in the qualitative data, suggested this was an important part of
building support for agency work. Taken together, these results show an overall positive
orientation towards mass communication media as useful tools for indigenous environmental
governance. Indeed, these results fit with a long-standing trend of indigenous peoples adapting
new media technologies to fit their social or political needs (Alia 2010; Roth 2005), and the gap
in use of new media might be explained by other factors.
The gap in mass communication use might be related to the specific subject matter more
than the particular channel used in communication. Respondents believed social media to be an
effective public communication tool, but they were more ambivalent about the appropriateness
of sharing cultural information than sharing scientific information. The literature suggests these
concerns may be tied to a history of appropriation of both indigenous cultural and environmental
knowledge, often for economic gain. For example, indigenous art has been widely appropriated
by the fashion industry (Moynihan 2018) and indigenous environmental information has been
mined for its economic value in the development of modern pharmaceuticals, often with little
benefit to indigenous communities themselves (Daes 2003). While economic risks are certainly
a concern, and frequently provide a framework through which to seek legal remedy, the risks of
appropriation are also closely tied to the identities and political powers of indigenous peoples
(Young and Haley 2012). While a desire to control information is not a new factor in public
information campaigns, the history that potentially influences this desire and the consequences of
cultural and environmental knowledge appropriation, work particularly hard against the desire of
professionals to make their case for culturally-informed and indigenous-controlled
environmental governance.
47
The second possible explanation for the gap between professionals’ attitudes and beliefs
and their actual use may be related to the structure of indigenous governments and where
concerns over information control reside. One of the limitations of this study was that it only
surveyed professionals working for environmental and natural resource management agencies
that, for the most part, were situated within larger indigenous governments. The attitudes and
practices of nation-level communicators were not captured as part of this dataset, and several
respondents indicated the communication activities of their agencies were beholden to the beliefs
and priorities of higher-level leadership, leadership that they believed deprioritized
communication, deprioritized environmental issues, or had concerns over information control.
These trends certainly fit with the issues faced by other government communicators (Fisher Liu
and Horsley 2007), but they may be more pronounced in indigenous governments due to
histories of appropriation. Future research would do well to examine the strategic
communication structures of indigenous governments more broadly as such research will lend
context to the communication activities of their environmental agencies.
Ultimately these results point to both theoretical and practical considerations for future
work. From a theoretical standpoint, the present study supports the conclusion that indigenous
environmental and natural resource management agencies need a strategic communication model
that accounts for historic and cultural factors related to the sharing of information that connects
culture and environmental science. As previously noted, little research exists on the strategic
communication structures of indigenous governments or of the attitudes and beliefs of
professional communicators working at the nation level. As several respondents have also
pointed out, more research is needed on indigenous audiences, particularly related to
environmental media. From a practical standpoint, these results open the door for a host of
48
partnerships between indigenous nations and researchers that will hopefully result in research
projects that benefit both theoretical development and the communication needs of indigenous
nations.
Conclusion
The goal of this study was to determine whether the social, cultural, and political
landscapes of indigenous environmental governance might mandate a new or revised model of
government communication and to determine what factors may play a critical role in the
development of such a model. Prior research indicates the need for different models of
communication that work with the concerns of public serving communicators, but this study
provides evidence that indigenous government communicators carry additional concerns that
require a more tailored approach. Scholars have argued that the influence of politics, a mandate
to serve the public good, and devaluation of agency communication by leadership are unique
concerns of government communicators (Fisher Liu and Horsley 2007), and these concerns are
similarly echoed by the professionals surveyed here. Like other governments, indigenous
governments are interested in how social media might serve their efforts, but equal importance
may be placed on retaining face-to-face interactions as these interpersonal interactions are a key
part of the traditional way in which environmental information has been communicated and offer
the clearest way of controlling cultural information. Indeed, this study has shown that any
strategic communication model needs to specifically address concerns over environmental and
cultural information being misused or misappropriated yet works within a social media
environment that may not lend itself easily to these goals. While this challenge may seem
daunting, indigenous environmental professionals seem eager for more research on
environmental and natural resource communication efficacy in their communities.
49
CHAPTER 2
SAME LAND, DIFFERENT VALUES: HOW FACEBOOK PHOTOS REFLECT
ORGANIZATIONAL AND CULTURAL DIFFERENCES BETWEEN INDIGENOUS AND
U.S. STATE GOVERNMENTS
Governmental organizations that manage natural environments, such as the U.S. Forest
Service, the Michigan Department of Natural Resources, and the Great Lakes Intertribal Fish and
Wildlife Commission (GLIFWC), routinely make editorial choices about the content they share
on social media, and in the process, convey cultural and organizational values about the idealized
relationship between humans and their environments. Unpacking the values suggested by these
organizations’ social media communications becomes even more important when organizations
based in different cultures inhabit and govern the same environments. To illustrate the
complexity of this issue, consider the upper Great Lakes region on the border of the U.S. and
Canada. Fish and wildlife in this region are managed by no fewer than three U.S. state agencies,
approximately 22 indigenous nations, Canadian agencies, and a number of inter-tribal and
international consortia. Successful co-management of ecosystems and resources necessitates
information sharing and conflict resolution strategies that reach audiences both within and
outside indigenous nations (Nesper & Schlender, 2007). Yet little scholarship has looked at
indigenous governments as producers of media, let alone considered how social media are used
by a growing contingent of indigenous agencies focused on natural resources management
(NRM).
50
Communication professionals working for government agencies have recognized the
growth of social media audiences, and many are turning to platforms like Facebook and Twitter
to reach more diverse and fragmented audiences (Mergel, 2013: 14). The choices made by these
communicators, specifically choices in the use of visual content, can significantly affect how
much attention audiences pay to posts and the likelihood that audiences will further engage with
the associated issue (Hwong, Oliver, Kranendonk, Sammut, & Serroussi, 2016; Ulloa, Mora,
Pros, & Tarrida, 2015). Indigenous nations have a long history of adopting and transforming
new media technologies for their own use (Alia, 2010; Roth, 2005). Social media has been
instrumental in raising awareness of indigenous environmental issues such as in protests over the
placement of oil pipelines in the U.S. (Hunt & Gruszczynski, 2019), the rollback of
environmental protections in Canada (Raynauld, Richez, & Boudreau Morris, 2018), and the
abrogation of indigenous water rights in Mexico (Duarte, 2017).
One set of voices has yet to be examined in studies of indigenous social media use:
indigenous governments. Government communicators have different sets of constraints, roles,
and responsibilities when it comes to communication than do corporations, activists, and nongovernmental organizations (Fisher Liu & Horsley, 2007). They must use communication to
share information with diverse publics on a daily basis, beyond moments of protest and
collective action. Government communicators have explicit public responsibilities, face greater
scrutiny, and are often bound by more legal constraints than non-governmental organizations
(Fisher Liu & Horsley, 2007). The present study compares indigenous nations and U.S. state
government agencies’ uses of the Facebook “photos” feature and makes inferences about the
cultural and organizational value orientations suggested by this shared content. The study also
asks whether the use of the Facebook photos feature by agencies aligns with what their
51
respective audiences value. Prior research on environmental communication in indigenous
newspapers has shown that these media emphasize indigenous sovereignty to a greater degree
than non-indigenous papers covering the same issue (Loew & Mella, 2004). Findings from this
study suggest a similar trend in indigenous government communication.
Literature Review
Environmental governance on social media
Particularly for smaller governments and their agencies, the lower cost of running social
media compared to static websites has provided an additional set of tools for rapidly
disseminating information, increasing transparency, and soliciting participation in governance
(Sobaci, 2016). Some governmental social media platforms have proved better at information
provision while others are better at facilitating citizen engagement (Haro-deRosario, SáezMartin, & del Carmen Caba-Peréz, 2018). For environmental governance specifically, internetbased sources have not always been trusted places to find information (Shindler, Toman, &
McCaffrey, 2009), but more recent scholarship has shown that governmental use of social media
has the potential to improve relations with citizens and stakeholders. Government presence on
social media has become an indicator of validity, political legitimacy, and responsiveness to
citizen concerns (Bonsón, Ratkai, & Royo, 2016). Social media users who encounter
government information online report greater perceptions of government transparency which are
positively related to trust in government (Song & Lee, 2015). Trust in government is further
increased when social media experiences are positive for the user (Hong, 2013), or when users
perceive that governments are using social media to promote meaningful public engagement
(Warren, Sulaiman, & Ismawati Jaafar, 2014). These findings are particularly important for
52
environmental governance agencies for whom public engagement has become a key component
(Depoe & Delicath, 2004: 4; Gibson, Ostrom, & Ahn, 2000).
Governments tend to use social media for information-sharing functions rather than
public engagement (Waters & Williams, 2011; Lee, VanDyke & Cummins, 2018). In an analysis
of the Facebook and Twitter pages of U.S. science-based agencies, scholars found that these
organizations used social media primarily as a one-way conduit for information dissemination
(Lee & VanDyke, 2015). In a more targeted analysis, Lee, et. al. (2018) found that the U.S.based National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration uses social media primarily for
information provision without attempts to suggest how the public might use the information to
change their attitudes or behaviors. A diversity of voices and concerns is often lacking in
governmental social media, as one study of the U.S. Department of Agriculture showed image
content depicting primarily white men, with fewer images of women or minorities (Fairchild &
Petrzelka, 2020).
The research on governance, social media, and visual communication contains two
critical gaps. First, the majority of scholarship on social media use and content in governance
focuses on agencies at the national level, omitting an investigation of governments and agencies
at the local, state, regional, or tribal level. These omissions are notable given the growth of
indigenous NRM agencies since the 1970s. In some cases, the outcome of NRM disputes
between indigenous and state governments has been the creation of tribally specific and intertribal environmental management agencies with authority similar to state and federal agencies
(Nesper & Schlender, 2007). For example, one dispute in northern Wisconsin led to the creation
of the Great Lakes Intertribal Fish and Wildlife Commission (GLIFWC), an intertribal agency
53
tasked with coordinating indigenous resource use and management with state and federal
agencies (Nesper & Schlender, 2007).
The second major gap is found in the omission of scholarship on social media visuals by
governmental agencies. Visual content has become a staple of social media (Russmann &
Svensson, 2017). Visuals are processed faster than text (Lang, Potter, & Bolls, 1999), and can
influence user interaction with a story (Hwong, Oliver, Kranendonk, Sammut, and Serroussi,
2016; Ulloa, Mora, Pros, & Tarrida, 2015). Importantly, visuals can help people feel like they
can participate in environmental change (O’Neill & Nicholson-Cole, 2009). The present study
attempts to address these gaps by posing the following research question:
RQ1: Do tribal and state environmental governance organizations differ in their use of
the Facebook photos feature?
Social media visuals and value orientation differences
Values are the situationally stable goals that serve as guiding principles for how people
interact with their worlds (Schwartz, 1992; 21), and a value orientation refers to the rank-order
of these principles (Kluckhohn & Strodtbeck, 1961; 4). Researchers have long used visual media
to reveal human values related to the environment (Schafer, Hamilton, & Schmidt, 1969; Ribe,
1989; Ode, Fry, Tveit, Messager, & Miller, 2009; Karjalainen & Tyrvainen, 2002). For
example, a forestry program that values commercial use above recreational use will make
different environmental management choices than a program that holds the inverse of that value
orientation. Fundamentally, value orientations help guide decision-making in addressing
common human-environment problems (Kluckhohn & Strodtbeck, 1961; 4). As a result, value
orientations have been theorized as the foundational cognitions that guide environmental
decisions, beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors (Fulton, Manfredo, & Lipscomb, 1996), and
54
substantial scholarship has examined the role of values in determining environmental behaviors
and attitudes (e.g., Bujis, 2009; Steg, Perlaviciute, van der Werff, & Lurvink, 2014; Namazkhan,
Albers, & Steg, 2019).
The selection of environmental visuals is related to social, cultural, and organizational
value orientations (Water & Lo, 2012; Gilpin, 2010; Evans, 2016; Cheng, 2015). For example,
Meisner & Takahashi (2013) found that the cover images of Time magazine revealed that the
magazine generally places a low priority on coverage of environmental issues. However,
coverage has progressively increased as broader public awareness of these issues has increased.
In other words, as environmental issues moved up in the cultural value orientation ranks these
issues appeared more frequently in visual media. One way that social, cultural, and
organizational influences have been theorized to guide the selection and publication of visual
content is through the process of visual framing. Fahmy et al. (2014) liken this process to the
way a photographer chooses to include some elements of a scene within the frame of the image
while others are left out. Entman (1993) defines framing as a process “to select some aspects of
a perceived reality and make them more salient in a communicating text, in such a way as to
promote a particular problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation, and/or treatment
recommendation.” Lele et. al. (2019) argue that environmental problem frames consist of three
important dimensions including the values they prioritize, the explanations they use, and the
futures or goals they envision. In other words, the process of visual framing relies on the
application of one or multiple value orientations in order to help communicators determine what
should be featured or emphasized within the frame or within the selection of images.
Indigenous environmental values
55
While there is substantial literature on environmental ethics and beliefs of North
America’s indigenous people (see Harkin & Lewis, 2007; Nadasdy, 2005; Smith & Freher,
2010), scholarship on these higher-level belief structures has not yet been translated into a
uniquely indigenous environmental value orientation or more accurately, a series of value
orientations unique to each indigenous culture that could be used in the analysis of
environmental governance images. Simplistic stereotypes depict indigenous peoples in a
primitive relationship to the environment to the point that they are viewed as part of a pristine
landscape (Krech, 1999), but the reality is that indigenous nations have always manipulated and
managed their environments and continue to do so, albeit in different ways than contemporary
western approaches. Fixico (1996) suggests that indigenous values are based on relationships
with the natural environment characterized by reverence of, respect for, and equality among all
living and nonliving elements of environmental systems. Often these values are part of a belief
structure in which natural environments are held as sacred (Jostad, 1994; Aftandilian, 2011).
These generalizations should not be interpreted as universal to all indigenous nations nor
should indigenous peoples be assumed to hold a static value structure stuck in an idealized
environmental past. Harkin (2007) argued that some indigenous stories of the Kwakwaka’wakw
reflect “a profoundly anthropocentric universe” in which humans occupy a central predatory
role. In examining the way Navajo workers used the Tribal Employment Rights Ordinance to
secure jobs in resource extraction operations on reservation lands, O’Neill (2010) argued that
indigenous people also use contemporary economic values to make choices about natural
resource development. Some scholars have argued that environmental science and engineering
are not just western values, but deeply held and long-standing indigenous values (Thomas, 2001;
Cajete, 2000).
56
These examples are not to say that indigenous peoples do not generally possess
environmental values informed by deep cultural beliefs, just that modern indigenous values may
be informed by a complicated mix of influences that cannot be easily dichotomized into
anthropocentric vs biocentric, traditional vs contemporary, western vs indigenous, or spiritual vs
scientific orientations. Therefore, the purpose of the following research question is not to offer a
definitive indigenous value orientation, but to highlight any differences in social media image
sharing patterns that may be indicative of differing environmental value orientations. In other
words, the second argument of this study is that visual content on social media can provide the
descriptive groundwork for more in-depth analysis of the social, cultural, and organizational
value differences among indigenous and non-indigenous environmental governance
organizations by asking the following question:
RQ2: Does use of the Facebook photos feature by state and indigenous environmental
governance organizations suggest differences in value orientations that may be informed
by social, cultural, or organizational factors?
Public engagement and values on social media
Social media create spaces in which the values of an organization and the values of
audiences interact. For example, the content shared by news organizations is indicative of the
news values each organization prioritizes, but the likes, shares, and other engagement metrics
indicate that certain types of content are valued more by social media audiences (GarcíaPerdomo, Salaverría, Kilgo, & Harlow, 2018). The meaning and consequence of likes as
feedback is debated. Likes suggest a relationship between a poster and public, but may not be
indicators of relationship closeness or depth of engagement (Scissors, Burke, & Wengrovitz,
2016; Snead, 2013). However, levels of engagement on social media have been shown to
57
translate to other forms of engagement with an organization (Oh, Roumani, Nwankpa, & Hu,
2017). Facebook likes can also be a reflection of audience characteristics (Kosinski, Stillwell, &
Graepel, 2013), and scholarship has shown that likes can be reflective of value orientations
(García-Perdomo, et. al., 2018). Following from this previous scholarship, this study asks
whether the likes given to different types of content suggest differences in value orientations
between environmental governance organizations and the publics they serve. The following
question is thus posed:
RQ3: What value orientation differences between agencies and their publics are
suggested by audience ‘likes’ of content posted in the Facebook photos section of state
and tribal environmental governance organizations?
Method
The researcher conducted a quantitative content analysis of the images shared by state
and indigenous natural resource management agencies in the upper Great Lakes region in the
U.S. The scope of the study was limited to the geographical service area of the Great Lakes
Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission (GLIFWC), an intertribal natural resource management
agency that represents eleven different indigenous Ojibwe nations across the states of Michigan,
Wisconsin, and Minnesota. A single geographic region was selected to allow comparisons
between agencies who manage roughly the same ecosystems. Differences in visual content
therefore can be more easily attributed to differences in image selection by NRM agencies
informed by social, cultural, and organizational values as opposed to major differences in
ecosystems and resources. Furthermore, GLIFWC represents specifically Ojibwe nations, which
helped to control for variance in values due to cultural differences among indigenous nations, but
allows for variance due to value differences among bands. Similar to American states, the
58
federally recognized tribes under the broader cultural umbrella of “Ojibwe Nations” each carry
their own identities that are derived from their individual stories, histories, landscapes, and
governments (Loew, 2001). Following this structure of one broader indigenous nation composed
of diverse bands allows a more analogous comparison to the federal/state structure of U.S.
environmental governance.
Data
The data for this study consisted of 559 images shared by seven different NRM agencies
on organizational Facebook pages, including three state agencies (Wisconsin, Michigan, and
Minnesota) and four indigenous agencies (GLIFWC, Mille Lacs, Bad River, and Fond du Lac).
Of the eleven tribal nations within the GLIFWC service area, at the time of sample construction,
three maintained separate Facebook pages for their natural resource departments. A constructed
year was created by sampling images from a one-year time frame in order to account for seasonal
variances in image content. Images were collected by taking a digital screenshot of each image
posted under the “Photos” section of agency Facebook pages. A two-week gap between the time
of collection and the dates of the sampling frame was allowed to pass to ensure images had time
to accumulate likes. All images posted by the four tribal agencies within the sampling frame
were collected. This resulted in a 277-image census for tribal pages.
State agencies posted significantly more images within the sampling frame, so a different
strategy was required to generate a similarly-sized sample. Stratified systematic sampling was
used to collect images from state agencies. Approximately 92 images were collected from each
of the three state agencies. The total number of images posted during the sample timeframe was
calculated for each agency and then divided by 92 to get n. Every nth image was then collected,
resulting in a sample size of 282 images for state pages.
59
Analysis
An image coding framework was developed using Ostrom’s (2009) framework for
analyzing social-ecological systems (SES), and a preliminary open-coding of a test sample of 54
images from agencies outside the sampling frame of this study. The complex constellation and
patterns of interaction among ecosystems, resources, human users of systems and resources, and
governments who manage these elements are what comprise a social-ecological system (Ostrom,
2009). The framework provides a high-level typology of the actors, environments, and
interactions that might be visually depicted in organizational communications and refrains from
indicating any priority order or pre-existing value orientation. Using the SES framework, a
codebook was created to operationalize six variables: 1) SES focus, 2) SES interaction, 3)
Gender, 4) Age, 5) Visual focus, and 6) Likes.
SES focus captured which element of a social-ecological system was primarily
emphasized through the overall thematic focus of the photo. All the information presented in the
image was used to determine if the primary emphasis of the image was on 1) the resource system
(e.g. a photo of a stream), 2) a resource unit or units (e.g. a plant or animal), 3) resource user
(e.g. a hunter), or 4) a governance system (e.g. a conservation officer). In coding this variable,
text and captions, if available, were used to clarify ambiguous content. For example, a caption
might be used to help determine if an image of a person examining a plant was an environmental
scientist for the agency (part of a governance system) or a resource user. While multiple SES
elements could be present in a single image, this variable captured which element received
primary visual emphasis.
To account for multiple SES elements in a single image, the variable SES interaction
coded for the specific types of interactions among the four primary elements of an SES system
60
that were indicated in photos. For example, an image featuring a resource manager educating a
user at an outreach event would be coded as a governance system x resource user interaction.
Images that included people were additionally coded for age (adult, youth, mixed group,
or unknown) and gender (male, female, mixed group, or unknown). Given previous research on
skewed representation in environmental agency images (Fairchild & Petrzelka, 2020), the
purpose of these variables was to get a better sense of who is depicted most frequently in images.
Visual focus coded for the specific feature acting as the visual focus of the photo. As
opposed to the thematic level of visual coding, this variable captured data at the denotative level,
the literal content at the center of visual focus and was developed through open coding of a test
sample to determine the most likely objects of focus. Coding this variable required coders to
assess what appeared to be the intended object of visual focus in the photo based on the
composition of the photo. Categories included people, animals, plants, landscapes, buildings,
documents, maps, or other.
Finally, the number of likes received by each photo was also recorded.
The researcher trained one additional coder on the codebook in order to calculate
intercoder reliability. A second set of 54 training images was coded by the researcher and the
coder. Cohen’s kappa averaged .89 across all categorical variables, a satisfactory level of
reliability to allow the researcher to continue coding the remainder of the sample (SES focus k =
.81, SES interaction k = .90, Gender k = .92, Age k = .87, Visual focus k = .94).
Results
Results for each variable were analyzed using chi-square tests to determine whether state
and tribal agencies differed significantly in the content they shared and their overall use of the
photos feature (RQ1). The proportions of categories in each variable were then reported in rank-
61
order from greatest to least to determine if differences in rank-order emerged between
indigenous and state agencies that might be indicative of value orientation differences (RQ2).
Analysis and comparison of likes between state and tribal audiences required a different
approach (RQ3). The number of likes given to an image or image category was partially a
function of audience size. At the time of coding the three state Facebook pages reported a
combined total of 348,223 followers while Ojibwe pages reported a combined total of 8,160
followers. An independent samples t-test showed that state images received significantly more
likes on average (M = 59.78 , SD = 163.86) than Ojibwe images (M = 10.35, SD = 28.15), t(557)
= 4.95, p < .001.) However, the ratio of likes per follower, as a metric of audience engagement
with photos, did suggest that Ojibwe audiences might be more engaged overall with NRM
Facebook photos (.35 likes/follower) than state audiences (.04 likes/follower). Further analysis of
the distribution of likes by state and Ojibwe audiences showed a skewness of 7.95 (SE = .10) and
kurtosis of 76.22 (SE = .21). Following the process other studies have used to address skewed
distributions in social media data (see García-Perdomo, et. al., 2018), logarithmic transformation
was used to normalize the distribution of likes and enable the use of one-way ANOVAs to test
whether certain photo characteristics were favored by audiences. The results of these analyses
are reported below for each variable.
SES Focus
State and tribal agencies demonstrated significant differences in the social-ecological
system elements focused on in their social media images 𝓍² (3, N = 559) = 44.36, p < .001. The
rank order of elements was the same for both agency types, but the proportions suggested that
tribes placed greater emphasis on sharing photos that focused on environmental governance
systems than did states (see Table 1). A one-way ANOVA of state image likes was significant,
62
F(3,278) = 2.74, p = .04; however, a Tukey’s post-hoc test showed no significant differences
between SES focus categories, only a marginal difference in likes given to images of resource
units over resource systems, p = .07. A one-way ANOVA of Ojibwe image likes was not
significant, F(3,273) = 1.62, p = .17.
Table 1
SES focus - Rank order and proportions
State
Ojibwe
Rank
SES Focus
n
1
Governance system
117
2
Resource users
3
4
%
SES Focus
n
%
42% Governance system
187
68%
91
32% Resource users
61
22%
Resource unit
54
19% Resource unit
26
9%
Resource system
20
7%
3
1%
Resource system
SES Interaction
The interaction variable was designed to examine patterns of interaction depicted
between elements of a social-ecological system. Photos coded as ‘No Interaction’ were omitted
from the analysis of this variable. This had a disproportionate effect as 48% of all photos shared
by Ojibwe agencies were scans or images of text-based documents and thus depicted no
interaction. Furthermore, several cells in the interaction matrix contained no images, resulting in
expected counts less than five and a violation of chi-square assumptions. As a result, only
percentages are reported here (see Table 2).
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Table 2
SES Interaction by agency type
Agency Type
State
Ojibwe
n
%
n
%
SES Interaction
User x User
6
2.9%
0
0%
User x Gov.
8
3.8%
10
8.8%
User x Unit
39
18.6%
44
38.9%
User x Sys.
45
21.4%
16
14.2%
Gov. x Gov.
34
16.2%
12
10.6%
Gov. x Unit
6
2.9%
4
3.5%
Gov. x Sys.
23
11%
16
14.2%
Unit x Sys.
42
20%
11
9.7%
Multiple
7
3.3%
0
0%
210
100.0%
113
100.0%
Total
An ANOVA showed that within state images, the type of interaction shown had a
significant effect on likes, F(8,201) = 5.31, p < .001. A Tukey’s post-hoc test revealed that state
audiences liked images showing different combinations of users and natural resource managers
interacting less than all other interaction types except for images showing more than two
elements interacting. Images of resource units (e.g. fish and wildlife) interacting with resource
systems were liked significantly more than images featuring users or managers interacting with
each other (p < .001) or systems (p < .001). An ANOVA revealed no significant effect of SES
Interaction on likes given to Ojibwe images, F(2,272) = 1.88, p = .12.
Genders and Ages
Analysis of genders and ages represented focused on images featuring people. Images
not featuring people and images where ages or genders were not discernable, such as an image
64
featuring the silhouettes of people, were omitted from the analysis of these variables. State and
tribal agencies did not differ significantly in the genders of people depicted, 𝓍² (2, N = 218) =
3.55, p = .17, nor in the ages of people depicted 𝓍² (2, N = 218) = 4.70, p = .095.
A two-way ANOVA was conducted to determine if age, gender, or an interaction of the
two had an effect on the likes received by Ojibwe images. The test revealed no main effect of
no main effects of age F(2,82) = .35, p = .71, or gender, F(2,82) = .62, p = .54, and no significant
interaction between the two F(4,82) = 2.01, p = .10. The same trends held true for state images.
Another two-way ANOVA revealed no main effects of age, F(2,118 = .05, p = .96, or gender,
F(2,118) = 1.15, p = .32. There was also no interaction of age and gender on likes, F(4,118) =
1.00, p = .41.
Visual Focus
Due in part to the large number of categories in this variable, expected cell counts again
violated chi-square assumptions. Simple counts and percentages are reported in Table 3. In
looking at Ojibwe likes, a one-way ANOVA indicated no significant difference between
categories of image focus, F(7,269) = 1.93, p = .07. A one-way ANOVA of state image likes
was significant, F(7,274) = 4.02, p < .001. While not every category of image focus was
significantly different, a Tukey’s post-hoc test revealed that images of animals were liked
significantly more than images of people, p = .008, or landscapes, p = .009.
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Table 3
Visual focus - Rank order and proportions
State
Rank
Visual Focus
Ojibwe
n
%
Visual Focus
n
%
1
Persons
138
48.9%
Documents
132
47.7%
2
Animals
56
19.9%
Persons
96
34.7%
3
Other
35
12.4%
Animals
14
5.1%
4
Landscapes
29
10.3%
Other
12
4.3%
5
Documents
11
3.9%
Plants
10
3.6%
6
Plants
6
2.1%
Maps
7
2.5%
7
Buildings
5
1.8%
Landscapes
3
1.1%
8
Maps
2
0.7%
Buildings
3
1.1%
Discussion
The first goal of the study was to determine whether indigenous and state government
agencies used social media differently. Use can be interpreted according to the intended
purpose of a post, and prior research has shown that information provision and symbolic
presentation of agency work are the two most common purposes of social media use by
government entities (DePaula, Dincelli, & Harrison, 2018; Lee & VanDyke, 2015). For
example, ‘photos’ falling into the category of symbolic presentation might include images of
game wardens talking to hunters, environmental scientists taking water samples, or fisheries staff
giving a tour of a hatchery. Posts falling into the information provision function might include
announcements about beach closures, hunting seasons, cultural workshops, or jobs in
environmental management among others. The content of these ‘photos’ posts containing
announcements or other documents, while maybe not visual in the traditional sense, still convey
important information about how the agency uses social media. Ojibwe agencies shared
documents most frequently while state agencies showed images of people most frequently. Of
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the state images showing people, 49% of the images included someone from the agency or
another governance system. The most frequent theme of these posts for both agencies was
governance, but the difference in denotative content indicates that Ojibwe agencies use the
Facebook “photos” feature primarily for information provision functions by sharing images of
text-based documents related to doing the work of governance, while state agencies used the
feature for symbolic presentation of agency work through the sharing of images.
The second research question asked whether Facebook “photos” content was suggestive
of value orientation differences based on variation in the proportions of content shared. At a
thematic level, both groups shared “photos” with a governance system focus most frequently,
though Ojibwe agencies did so significantly more frequently than states. While this result was
not particularly surprising given the mission of these organizations, the difference in frequency is
telling. The more frequent posting of governance-focused content indicates that indigenous
agencies are using the platform to either emphasize or carry out governance functions to a
greater degree than state agencies. This trend might indicate that Facebook is an important
platform for indigenous agencies to conduct governance, but it may also point to a value
orientation that prioritizes communication about indigenous governance. Such a conclusion
would certainly be congruent with existing literature showing indigenous media producers
prioritize sovereignty, self-determination, and self-governance (Loew & Mella, 2005). In
coverage of the same environmental issues, indigenous newspapers more frequently frame
stories in terms of indigenous governance and tribal sovereignty compared to framing in state
newspapers (Loew & Mella, 2005). While it might be tempting to dismiss the emphasis on
governance in the current study to a function of the agency producing the media, the significant
difference in emphasis between state and indigenous agencies points to other factors that may
67
include a difference in cultural value orientations. The results from the analysis of likes, lends
further support to this conclusion.
The last research question asked whether social media audiences liked certain content
more. Overall, audiences engaged more with content shared by Ojibwe agencies than content
shared by state agencies, lending support to the idea that Facebook may be a key communication
channel for indigenous agencies. In comparing likes given to posts within each agency type,
there were not significant differences in the kinds of content liked by indigenous audiences. For
example, indigenous audiences didn’t indicate a strong preference for images of animals over
humans. Given the heavy use of the photos feature to share announcements and text-based
documents, it was also interesting that audiences did not indicate a strong dislike for this type of
content. On the other hand, audiences of state pages did show a preference for images featuring
resource units, such as fish and wildlife, and resource units in their natural ecosystems, over
images of environmental managers. Taken in the context of the results discussed previously, this
suggests a misalignment between the use of state agencies to show agency work and the value
placed by state audiences on seeing flora and fauna without human intervention. Prior
scholarship has proposed that western-based environmental value orientations exist on a
continuum of idealized human-environment relationships ranging from no-human intervention to
high-human intervention (Buijs, 2009). While it is not particularly surprising that a NRM
agency would fall on the side of valuing heavier human intervention, it is surprising that their
social media audience may fall on a lower end of the continuum. At the very least, these results
suggest that state agencies may be better served by showing more of the environments and
resources they steward than the act of management itself. These trends may not hold true for
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indigenous agencies or audiences due to a potentially greater social value placed on acts of
sovereignty and governance.
Limitations and future directions
One of the key challenges in this study is the lack of existing literature on the use of
social media by indigenous governments. As such, it was difficult to make predictions about
trends in use and content. Indigenous agencies’ use of the “photos” feature to share text-based
content was an unexpected result and made obtaining statistical significance in the visual content
variables challenging. The sample size issue might be addressed by including more indigenous
governments, but such a study would introduce error in the form of greater variance in value
orientations given the great cultural diversity among indigenous nations. Along these lines, the
current study is limited to one culturally-related group of indigenous peoples, Ojibwe nations, in
one geographic location, the upper Great Lakes. The present study can’t be generalized to all
indigenous nations, but it does provide a starting point.
Future studies would do well to separate questions of use from questions of visual
content. The results of this study indicate significant differences in how indigenous governments
use social media that should be explored in greater depth. Value orientations are only one factor
that may contribute to the constellation of influences on social media content and use. By
separating questions of use and content, future studies can look specifically at representations in
visual content. Based on the challenges of sample size construction, future studies may also
consider using a five-year sampling frame, as opposed to a multi-nation sampling frame. While
limited by the above considerations, the present study makes a significant step towards greater
understanding of the use of social media visuals in environmental governance and provides a
69
foundation for future research on the value orientations of indigenous and state science and
environmental agencies.
Conclusion
For both social media researchers and NRM agency staff these results have two
implications. First, social media may be an important tool for indigenous governance and
deserves additional scholarly focus beyond the specific agencies studied. The unique legal status
of indigenous peoples suggests this could be a complicated area in which traditional models of
public engagement may not apply. As more indigenous agencies develop their communication
practices, finding models that work within these contexts will become imperative, particularly as
these agencies work to co-manage resources with non-indigenous governments. Conflict
between indigenous and state governments has been a persistent theme for several decades, and
the results of this study also suggest that those conflicts may be exacerbated by agency
communication that intentionally or unintentionally devalues indigenous sovereignty. Ultimately
more work is needed to fully understand how social media is used by indigenous governments
and how cultural and organizational values influence the content shared.
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CHAPTER 3
ENVIRONMENTAL COMMUNICATION IN THE INDIGENOUS DIASPORA:
INVESTIGATING THE FLOW OF INDIGENOUS ENVIRONMENTAL INFORMATION IN
THE SOCIAL MEDIA ERA
Introduction
Native American and indigenous nations prioritize the careful stewardship of local,
national, and global ecosystems (NCAI, 2015), and as these nations exercise, affirm, and fight
for their rights to manage their own ecosystems, more communities create their own
governmental structures and agencies to manage natural resources, conduct science, and
advocate for environmental policy (Nesper & Schlender, 2007). These resource management
agencies combine scientific, cultural, and traditional knowledge to manage their resources in
ways reflective of indigenous traditions and values, often resulting in healthier ecosystems than
non-indigenous managed lands (Waller & Reo, 2018). A key part of managing any ecosystem
includes thinking beyond environmental characteristics and biological systems to consider what
scholars call the “human dimensions” of environmental and natural resource management, or
those ways in which human attitudes, beliefs, actions, and decisions affect ecosystems (Decker &
Chase, 1997; Gibson, Ostrom, & Ahn, 2000; Brondizio & Moran, 2008). Communication,
whether through interpersonal or mediated channels, is critical to managing these human
dimensions (Shanahan, Decker, & Pelstring, 2001); however, little scholarship has examined
what this looks like for indigenous environmental management agencies in the digital age. Like
their non-indigenous counterparts, many of these agencies that manage air, water, wildlife, and
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forests have a public communication function, yet no scholars have explored what it means to
have a mediated relationship between indigenous citizens and their traditional environments.
A growing indigenous diaspora paired with easier access to new media technologies
(Alia, 2010), challenges assumptions about the mechanisms through which environmental
information is produced and shared among indigenous communities. Approximately 78% of
people who identify as Native American were living away from reservation or trust lands as of
the 2010 U.S. Census (U.S. Census Bureau, 2012). With such a large population of indigenous
people living in locations that prevent them from learning through daily first-hand experiences
about ecosystems and issues, mediated communications play an important role in the flow of
information to and from this population. Preliminary research has already shown that indigenous
communities turn to the internet and social media platforms to maintain cultural and community
ties (Molyneaux, O’Donnell, Kakekaspan, Walmark, Budka, & Gibson, 2014), particularly as
rural access to the internet increases (Stenberg, 2018). Furthermore, the lower cost of media
production technologies enables indigenous peoples from around the globe to share images and
stories about their communities with others who may not be able to see them first-hand (Alia,
2010). The combination of these trends in indigenous resource management, diaspora, and
media production highlight the need to understand how environmental information flows and
functions within indigenous communities that are geographically dispersed.
The holistic way that indigenous communities approach environmental issues presents a
conceptual challenge for new research in this area. Research on indigenous communication and
the environment has largely been bifurcated into areas of cultural communication, mostly related
to traditional ecological knowledge (TEK), and political communication, mostly focused on
advocacy or journalism related to environmental problems. Indigenous agencies may occupy a
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unique space drawing from both these traditions in their communication programs, and
indigenous citizens may view environmental communication within their communities as
encompassing both cultural knowledge and political goals by necessity. As such, the current
study uses the concept of ‘environmental information’ to encompass these multiple types of
communication content. The following section brings together the literature on both cultural
environmental knowledge and the use of media by indigenous communities in working towards
their environmental goals to explore how environmental information might flow to and through
the indigenous diaspora.
Literature Review
Indigenous ecological knowledge and the problem of learning from afar
Traditionally, knowledge of environmental issues in indigenous communities was derived
from first-hand observations and experiences with the landscapes and ecosystems. Often
through story, and passed from generation to generation, knowledge about the local environment
is accumulated and passed on (Cajete, 2000: 74; LaDuke, 1994). This accumulated knowledge
of ecosystems is referred to as traditional ecological knowledge or TEK (Berkes, Colding, &
Folke, 2000). Berkes et. al. (2000) defines TEK more precisely as “a cumulative body of
knowledge, practice, and belief, evolving by adaptive processes and handed down through
generations by cultural transmission, about the relationship of living beings (including humans)
with one another and with their environment.” This definition draws several important
conceptual distinctions. First, TEK is not a static object, rather it is a dynamic process of
knowledge creation and maintenance practiced through environmental interactions and filtered
through cultural beliefs and values. Second, TEK requires a means through which to
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communicate ecological knowledge, which scholars traditionally assumed to be via interpersonal
communication that was inseparable from physical presence in a given ecosystem.
The movement of individual indigenous people, from original territories commonly
referred to in diaspora literature as “homelands” into a global indigenous diaspora, should not be
taken to automatically preclude this population from being able to engage in the production and
dissemination of environmental information and ecological knowledge. Physical and social
distance presents a significant concern, particularly in cultures that have long established
methods of learning about environmental issues through direct observation and interaction with
the natural world (Rudiak-Gould, 2013). Concerns over how indigenous people of living away
maintain a connection to their home landscapes and communities have long been the domain of
diaspora studies and present useful frameworks for thinking about how dispersed indigenous
peoples might solve this challenge. Given the focus on environments and landscapes, the present
study will refer to these original territories as “home lands”, with full recognition that this is a
complicated and diverse concept for citizens in the global indigenous diaspora.
Ramirez (2007) suggests that indigenous people in this diaspora create and maintain
“hubs,” physical and digital spaces that support indigenous community, identity, culture, politics,
and belonging, that facilitate the sharing of information through the establishment of social
networks. Hubs can be geographic, tied to a real physical location, or virtual, existing only on
the internet. Virtual hubs seem to play a key role in connecting indigenous people with their
home cultures, communities, and landscapes offering one possibility for the sharing of
environmental information. Ramirez (2007) further argues that travel also plays a critical role in
maintaining connections between indigenous people in diaspora and their home lands. By
traveling to one’s home community and traditional landbase, connections to culture and
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environment are created and strengthened. According to this theory of hubs, indigenous
environmental information might be generated by the physical hubs within tribal communities
and shared via virtual hubs with indigenous people living in the diaspora, acquired more
traditionally through travel back to physical landscapes, or a combination of both. Articulating
the distinctions among physical environments, social environments, and virtual environments
provides a useful way to conceptualize the potential for environmental information flows for
indigenous people.
Digital environments and learning about indigenous environmental issues
The increased accessibility of mass communication production and distribution
technologies, such as smart-phones and web-based video sharing platforms, has resulted in a
globally-connected communication network composed of indigenous peoples using new media
technologies to amplify their voices and reach a global audience (Alia, 2010). What were once
discrete stories about environmental issues within individual indigenous cultures, have now
become part of a larger pan-indigenous narrative through the sharing of common experiences
across this global media network (Alia, 2010). While indigenous-produced media narratives are
nothing new (see Carstarphen, 2012), the ability to quickly and cheaply reach a globally
connected indigenous audience has opened up new questions about the possibilities of virtual
and visual media narratives in helping to achieve the goals of indigenous nations. Scholars
argue that visual media narratives can be used to digitally reproduce and share cultural
ontologies about human / environment relationships (Srinivasan, 2006), preserve and promote
oral traditions (Cunsolo Willox, Harper, Edge, ‘My Word’: Storytelling and Digital Media Lab,
Rigolet Inuit Community Government, 2012), or raise awareness awareness of how indigenous
people view environmental and natural resource issues (Loew and Mella, 2005). These studies
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suggest that visual media can offer indigenous communities a potent tool to help achieve
contemporary environmental and natural resource management goals.
While many people in indigenous communities learn about environmental issues through
traditional channels such as first-hand observation or storytelling (McGregor, 2004),
environmental information is also shared through mainstream and social media channels. Some
scholars have found that mediated communication can even have greater effects on attitudes and
beliefs about environmental issues than first-hand observations (Rudiak-Gould, 2013). Not
surprisingly, some indigenous resource agencies have created formal environmental news
publications to keep their members informed. For example, the Mazina’igan, a quarterly
magazine about natural resources management in the member tribes of the Great Lakes Indian
Fish and Wildlife Commission, publishes stories about culture and natural resources science
taking place in indigenous nations around the Great Lakes (Willow, 2011). Alia (2010: xii)
argues that “old traditions flow into new technologies,” and that such adoptions are not
anomalous or odd but a natural progression for storytelling cultures.
Contrary to popular-press narratives that have suggested television and other media
accelerate cultural disappearance (eg. Mander, 1991), media technologies have supported a wave
of cultural resilience and regeneration (Wilson & Stewart, 2008). Many indigenous nations run
their own radio stations and newspapers to tell indigenous stories in ways that frame
environmental issues according to the principles of indigenous sovereignty and selfdetermination (Loew & Mella, 2005). Compared to mainstream media coverage that tends to
focus on social issues, indigenous produced news focuses on environmental and natural resource
issues including water quality, hunting rights, and the protection of sacred sites. In 2004, at the
time that Loew & Mella (2005) interviewed residents of four indigenous nations in Wisconsin,
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tribally produced newspapers were reported as the single most important source of
environmental information.
As access to new media technologies has increased in indigenous communities, so has
their use for environmental communication, but what follows from the scholarly literature is that
communication about indigenous environmental issues seems to be highly dependent on how
well media producers understand the issues and how they frame the relationship of indigenous
people to the environment. Indigenous people are best positioned to create useful media content,
and reliance on mainstream coverage of issues may be problematic due to the introduction of
stereotypes and inaccurate representations (Baylor, 1996). The litany of literature on indigenous
stereotypes in the media (see Carstarphen & Sanchez, 2012) lends significant credence to this
conclusion and underscores the need for indigenous stories to be told through indigenous
produced media. For example, some scholars have worked with indigenous communities to
create and share media narratives about environmental issues, such as climate change, as means
of promoting and revitalizing TEK and storytelling traditions (Consolo Willox, et. al., 2012).
Others have worked with indigenous communities to create digital spaces that more accurately
reflect and reproduce indigenous worldviews and knowledge (Srinivasan, 2006). One group of
scholars worked with an indigenous resource management authority to develop an interactive
mobile application to help community members determine the health risks of eating different
species of fish based on their potential exposure to environmental contaminants (Dellinger,
Olson, Clark, Pingatore, & Ripley, 2017).
In a survey of social media use by indigenous communities in northern Canada, scholars
found that residents used social media on a regular basis to communicate within the community,
with other indigenous communities, and with community members living outside of the
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community (Mollyneaux, et al., 2014). Approximately half to two-thirds of residents reported
using social media on a daily or weekly basis to communicate with people living outside of the
indigenous community. The results from Mollyneaux et. al. (2014) might suggest that social
media communication reduces the need for travel, but researchers found a significant positive
correlation between the frequency of social media use and the frequency of travel. These
findings provide evidence that social media serve as an important conduit for information flows
within indigenous communities and function to strengthen both social and physical connections.
Coupled with the findings from Ramirez (2007), there is strong evidence to suggest that social
media might play a critical role in the flow of environmental information to indigenous people
living in diaspora.
What kinds of environmental change can be achieved through media storytelling?
Stories are frequently viewed as a means through which indigenous communities record
and transmit environmental knowledge (eg. Cruikshank, 2012; Van Eijck & Roth, 2007; Iseke,
2013), but stories can serve a multitude of purposes beyond cultural information sharing.
Indigenous scholars Corntassel, Chaw-win-is, and T’lakwadzi (2009), argue that storytelling
plays a critical role in both affirming the foundations of indigenous governance and in
contributing to the cultural and political resurgence of indigenous communities. Within
indigenous communities, oral storytelling has long been an integrated component of the
production and dissemination of environmental knowledge that continues today (Cajete, 2000;
108).
The importance of this continued tradition is evident in indigenous peoples’ uses of story
to lobby for local, national, and global policy change. For example, as the United Nations
worked toward a Universal Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous People that included
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significant recognitions of the need to include traditional ecological knowledge in environmental
policy decision-making, the collective of indigenous non-governmental organizations selected
the name “Voices of the Earth,” an invocation of the relationship between environment and oral
storytelling (de Kort, 1997). Tinker (1996: 173) makes this connection explicit by calling for an
indigenous response to environmental justice predicated on the sharing of many new
environmental stories that move beyond narratives of conquest and victimization to tell stories of
community, existence, and indigenous life. In addition to the production and transmission of
TEK, scholars of indigenous environmental movements have shown that these narratives also
function to connect and mobilize indigenous groups for the purpose of increasing political power
and influencing environmental policy (Minde & Nilsen, 2003: 299).
The literature supports the idea that the communication engaged in by indigenous
governments and agencies is best examined through a holistic lens that allows for an exploration
of multiple purposes and channels. What remains to be examined is what mediated
environmental communication networks look like to people living in the indigenous diaspora,
and whether these citizens believe that new media storytelling can indeed persuade audiences,
change policy, and ultimately help manage indigenous environments. As such, the study asks
the following research questions:
RQ1: How do people living in the indigenous diaspora receive environmental
information from their traditional territories?
RQ2: What role do indigenous governments and environmental agencies play in
creating and sharing environmental information?
RQ3: How do indigenous people feel about sharing environmental information
through multimedia storytelling?
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Method
Present Study
The present study used semi-structured interviews to investigate 1) how people living in
the indigenous diaspora learn about the environment and environmental issues in their home
community, 2) the role that indigenous governments might play in producing and sharing
environmental information, and 3) the beliefs that indigenous people hold about what could be
achieved by creating and sharing stories through media. Qualitative interviews provide a robust
method for exploring indigenous communication networks and allowing the nuance of holistic
worldviews to emerge.
Participants
Participants in this study were recruited using snowball and convenience sampling. In
the first step, research sites were identified based on the presence of indigenous community
centers and/or organizations. Many large public institutions of higher education have indigenous
student and community centers on campus that serve as social hubs for indigenous people living
away from their home communities. Some larger metropolitan areas, like Chicago and New
York, also have indigenous community centers that serve similar functions. Initial outreach was
conducted with the leaders of four community centers with the request to share recruitment
materials with their communities. There are several factors that made this type of sampling
desirable and necessary. First, this population is more consistent with typical science and
environmental media audiences who tend to be more educated and demonstrate greater
information seeking behaviors (Anderson, Brossard, & Scheufele, 2010). Second, due to the
small and close-knit nature of indigenous communities, snowball sampling methods allow for
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more organic relationship building that can also lead to better trust among the researcher and
community members.
The goal in delimiting participation was to obtain a sample representative of the multiple
and complex relationships between indigenous people in the diaspora and the environments in
their traditional lands. Sample size was also determined through theoretical saturation, a state
reached when new interviews no longer provide substantial new themes. Except for tribal
affiliation, identifying information about participants was removed from the data collected.
Participants in this study are identified as citizens or descendants of their actual indigenous
nation. Participants included 21 Native American or indigenous community members living
away from their home lands sampled from four separate field sites in the Midwest. Participants
represented 18 distinct indigenous nations with territories across the U.S. and Canada. It was
important to include participants from a diverse sample of indigenous nations as differences in
federal recognition status, land base, and economic resources might lead to different information
flows, media use patterns, and perceptions of environmental issues.
Procedure
Semi-structured interviews lasting approximately one hour each were conducted with
study participants. Each interview was conducted in a semi-private, one-on-one setting at a
Native American or indigenous community center. Participants were given the option of
meeting in a location of their choosing. Participants were provided with a study information
sheet at the start of the interview, and asked for permission to record audio. Interviews were
conducted using an interview guide with a list of key topics and follow-up questions (see
Appendix 10).
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Interviews were divided into three discrete sections. The first section focused on
participants’ experiences related to land, environment, and natural resources as a way to spark
thinking about the landscape and any potential issues they might have encountered. The second
section focused on how the participant learned about new or ongoing environmental issues both
within their community and within other indigenous communities. The third section used visual
elicitation methods. Participants watched a four-minute video featuring a Native American
narrator talking about his tribe’s management of their forestry resources which served as a
prompt to talk about emotional experiences when seeing indigenous people in environmental
narratives and as a cue to recall similar media. Harper (2002) has argued that the use of visual
imagery within interviews can help produce different information due to the feelings and
memories evoked by the medium. While many elicitation studies used still photographs, the
method has been expanded to make use of video and other moving images to evoke memories
and emotions connected to the interview topic (Gross & Levenson, 2008). Participants in this
final section were asked to describe the thoughts and emotions they experienced while watching
the example film, and then to consider if their own community had already told or could possibly
tell similar environmental stories. Probing questions were used to elicit more detailed responses
from participants and to check interviewer interpretation of reported information.
Analysis
Interview recordings were transcribed and analyzed using Max QDA, a qualitative data
analysis software. Glaser’s (1965) constant comparative method was used to code and analyze
the data. In this method the researcher first assigns categorical codes to significant instances in
the data. With each new instance, the researcher compares the instance with other instances and
determines if it fits within an existing code or requires a new code. Codes and their aggregate
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properties are then compared to determine whether codes should be collapsed or if they are
suggestive of a unique phenomenon. This constant comparison of instances, codes, and their
properties eventually reveals a theoretical pattern as new comparisons result in fewer and fewer
changes to the coding structure. Notes and memos are used to record thoughts and rationales
behind the coding structure. The results of this structured analytic process is reported in the
following section.
Results
Family, friends, and Facebook
The first research question asked how people living in the indigenous diaspora receive
environmental information about their traditional territories, and the majority of respondents
answered with a version of family, friends, and Facebook. As one Oji Cree respondent
explained…
My dad tells us stories about the landscape from where he grew up. It was one of
the only areas around the river where all of the berries would grow. Then from
social media and connecting with extended family, we also know that Canada has
been putting up power lines throughout our territory, which is hindering the way
the moose and other animals are able to migrate, and it's actually killing off a lot
of the berries in our traditional lands.
Environmental information sources were most frequently family and friends, with a smaller set
citing political leaders as sources. This pattern was similar for respondents who had recently
moved from their traditional lands as well as for those who had never lived in their traditional
territories. The former tended to have more expansive networks of friends and family still living
in their traditional territory while the later relied mostly on one or two key family members. In
either case, respondents who had greater knowledge of environmental information attributed it to
having a family member or friend who either worked in an area connected to environmental
management or who was an active participant in resource use, such as hunting or fishing.
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Follow up questions focused on unpacking the channels through which environmental
information was obtained. Almost all respondents cited direct mediated communication via
phone, email, or Facebook posts and messages as key channels through which they received
environmental information. As one Shoshone-Bannock respondent stated…
I really find out a lot of stuff through Facebook now. Which is interesting to me.
My tribe is on Facebook now, and I’ve got several of the council members that I
follow...
Interaction with family and friends via Facebook was almost universally cited as one of the most
important ways respondents received environmental information and stayed informed about their
traditional communities. A smaller set of respondents cited political leaders on Facebook, but
this was most frequently cited when the indigenous nation itself did not have a formal Facebook
page. Another set of respondents discussed their membership in Facebook “Groups” related to
their homelands. The majority of participants also talked about travel to traditional and
reservation land bases as providing key opportunities for in-person interaction and direct
communication with friends and family about environmental issues, though most acknowledged
the opportunity for this type of communication was limited and reiterated the importance of
social media in staying connected.
Traditional media, such as television, newspapers, and radio, were infrequently cited as
sources of environmental information about respondent’s communities. Newspapers and
newsletters published by respondents own indigenous nations, both in print and digital formats,
were the most common among these traditional media channels. The few respondents whose
nations published independent or semi-independent newspapers spoke highly of these
publications, but perception of government published newsletters as reliable sources of
environmental information was uneven. Some respondents viewed these publications as only
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presenting the biased opinions of current political leaders while other participants viewed them
as a useful way to stay informed.
U.S. national and some pan-indigenous media outlets were not viewed as good channels
for obtaining environmental information about respondents’ own communities, but they were
viewed as particularly helpful in learning about other indigenous nations and the environmental
issues that were common across many indigenous nations, such as water quality. As one
respondent remarked…
We’ve been dealing with water quality issues for a long time, and so I don’t think
it became more important [after Standing Rock]. Water quality was already
something we were dealing with because we couldn’t shower without getting
cancer. It was hard to see that this is part of a bigger issue across turtle island.
A majority of respondents indicated they felt they had a greater breadth of knowledge
regarding indigenous environmental issues at a national or global level but a greater
depth of knowledge regarding issues in their home lands. Several participants attributed
this trend to living in a pan-indigenous community and the information sharing that takes
place through interpersonal communication within that network. Others discussed the
availability of mass media coverage from pan-indigenous news outlets such as Indian
Country Today, the Native Report, and the First Nations Experience television channel.
Political leaders, rarely government agencies
The second research question sought to understand the role of indigenous governments
and their environmental agencies in the production and dissemination of environmental
information. Participants were asked probing questions about environmental agencies and
perceptions of environmental leadership within their nations. Approximately two-thirds of
respondents had at least some knowledge of their governments’ environmental agencies, and
one-third were uncertain or had no knowledge. For those respondents who indicated they had
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some knowledge of their governments’ agencies, six cited indigenous environmental agencies as
sources of environmental information. For one of these respondents, information was obtained
through personal interaction with natural resource enforcement officers while hunting. For
another, information was obtained through mass media news sources reporting on the
environmental work of the nation. Four respondents talked about receiving information through
the communication activities of an inter-tribal resource management agency, the Great Lakes
Intertribal Fish and Wildlife Commission (GLIFWC), citing the agency’s activity on Facebook
as an important factor.
Respondents were rarely able to cite agencies within their governments as sources of
environmental information, but one trend to emerge was that political leaders in legislative
positions, or those running for political office, were frequently cited. Several respondents
discussed following political leaders or candidates for office on social media as a way they
obtained information about the environmental issues facing their nations, but this was often
dependent on whether the politician publicly shared their views on the issues. Sometimes this
information was obtained directly from politicians, other times it was filtered through family and
friends. As one Cherokee respondent explained…
I’m staying with some friends right now who are pretty plugged in to what is
going on in the tribe politically and talking with them about particular council
members and what’s on their agendas.
For respondents whose governments did not have or maintain an official digital media presence,
following political leaders on social media served as a stand-in for these communication sources.
Several respondents relied on these political leaders to inform them of which environmental
issues were most pressing for their communities.
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A few respondents expressed frustration over the ability of political leaders to
communicate via social media and the perceived inability of environmental agencies to
communicate via the same channels. Some attributed this to political leaders misunderstanding
the channel as one respondent articulated…
A lot of our tribal council… I don't think they understand that you don't have to
make everything public, you can make private profiles or you can select or choose
what articles you put in or you can select and choose what you write and put into
those forms of media.
Other respondents attributed the disparity to overly-restrictive social media policies implemented
by governments. The patterns and policies discussed by respondents suggested a common
theme, political information about environmental issues was easier to access than cultural or
ecological information.
Cultural revitalization, coalition building, and policy change
The third research question sought to understand how citizens living in the indigenous
diaspora feel about sharing environmental information through multimedia storytelling.
Analysis of this question can be split into two sections with one set of responses focused on the
feelings associated with seeing and hearing indigenous environmental stories and the second
section focused on what respondents felt could be achieved by sharing their own multimedia
stories with others.
Several respondents commented on positive feelings at seeing and hearing indigenous
voices share environmental information. After watching the elicitation video featuring a
Menominee forest manager, one Puyallup citizen remarked…
I feel proud of them. I feel, I guess excited is a good word – to see tribes being in
control of their own land is so – it makes me happy… because there are so many
times that we are not given our own voice or not given our own autonomy that
someone else is always deciding for us what is best… that when you see a tribe
that is able to take care of their lands all at the same time teaching future
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generations the Menominee way of life or that tribe's way of life I think that is
beautiful.
The three emotions noted in the above quote were repeated by a majority of respondents.
Probing questions explored why respondents felt this way, with responses indicating that seeing
and hearing indigenous voices in multimedia narratives was a relatively novel experience. Most
respondents were not able to recall any multimedia stories about environmental practices or
issues on their own nations, but they were able to recall stories about other nations, specifically
political issues such as protests over the Dakota Access Pipeline on the Standing Rock Sioux
reservation.
On the second related theme regarding what respondents felt could be achieved through
multimedia storytelling, cultural revitalization was a top goal. As evidenced by the quote in the
above paragraph, respondents reacted to elements of the narrative that evoked ideas of
intergenerational ecological knowledge transmission. Respondents wanted to hear and see
stories about traditional landscapes and the cultural significance of plants, animals, and
ecosystems. Some respondents talked about these stories as furthering their personal edification,
others wanted their children to have access to such material, and some wanted external audiences
to know more about the cultural significance of these elements. One respondent, who had
previously spent time living on their traditional land base, discussed the fact that they, their
friends, and their families knew little about the environments and resources around them. Most
respondents viewed media storytelling as an extension of tradition and a key vehicle for
maintaining and revitalizing indigenous ecological knowledge.
Growing and sharing ecological knowledge was viewed as foundational in advancing
indigenous political status and policy influence. As one Cherokee respondent explained…
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I absolutely think that all Native and indigenous nations should be really focused
on revitalizing and teaching those lessons on our environmental knowledge
systems... and asserting that into the global domain, because I think it is a place
that we can lead from. It is a way for us to advance sovereignty.
While the top priority for many respondents was creating stories to serve the needs of their
immediate communities, they also recognized the need to share indigenous perspectives and
values with external audiences. Respondents felt multimedia storytelling could be a vehicle for
pan-indigenous coalition building and policy change. Learning about the environmental beliefs,
values, and issues facing other indigenous nations was identified as an important function of
media storytelling. Several respondents suggested that learning about the environmental values
and efforts of other indigenous nations could greatly help their own communities. Others viewed
this exchange of environmental information as a way to identify common issues and collectively
work towards solutions.
The final theme to emerge in this area was the need for media storytelling that would
reach non-indigenous audiences and garner understanding and support for indigenous
environmental policy. As one respondent, who asked not to be identified by nation, stated...
I don't think [our leaders] realize that making our own videos and working with
media sources could in the long run give us a better positive standpoint within the
public eye.
Probing questions revealed that several respondents thought that it was particularly important to
use visual media to show the resources and landscapes affected by environmental policy.
Respondents also indicated that media storytelling could bring an emotional component to the
environmental issues by connecting political issues to the people within indigenous communities.
Overall, respondents felt that multimedia storytelling was an important vehicle for both cultural
maintenance and political advocacy.
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Discussion
Through a series of semi-structured interviews, the present study sought to understand
how environmental information reaches citizens living in the indigenous diaspora, the perceived
role that indigenous government communicators play in this communication network, and the
way citizens felt about sharing environmental information through multimedia storytelling.
Furthermore, one of the assumptions of this study was that indigenous ecological knowledge and
environmental issues would be intertwined in discussions with respondents and thus were
conceptualized as inseparable parts of the environmental information moving through indigenous
networks. Results strongly supported this assumption along with providing evidence for the
importance of interpersonal networks, the limited perceived role of government communicators,
and the potential of multimedia storytelling for cultural revitalization and political agency.
The flow of environmental information
The first goal of this study was to explore the flow of environmental information to
people living in the indigenous diaspora. Themes that emerged from analysis of the interview
data indicated that friends and family living on home lands serve as perhaps the most important
nodes in the flow of environmental information, supporting the findings from Ramirez (2007)
and Mollyneaux et. al. (2014) and confirming the hypothesis that social media plays a critical
role in maintaining these connections. While this study was more focused on the movement of
information to citizens in diaspora from their individual homelands, there was also evidence
supporting Ramirez (2007) theory of hubs on two fronts. First, social media may be allowing the
creation of virtual hubs based on shared connection to indigenous homelands as several
participants discussed membership in Facebook groups related to their home communities.
Second, the physical hubs of pan-indigenous communities helped participants gain a breadth of
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understanding of environmental values and issues. Several respondents discussed the value of
learning about other nations as a way to help their home communities.
Newspapers and newsletters still play an important role as Loew & Mella (2004) found,
though perhaps now slightly diminished by social media. Social media certainly hasn’t eclipsed
these more traditional forms of mass communication, and respondents indicated they still held
value for communicating more detailed environmental information about their home lands,
particularly in the absence of coverage from other mass media outlets. Respondents did indicate
that mass media played an important role in conveying information about environmental issues
in other indigenous nations, but again, this was tempered by the acknowledgement that
interpersonal communication within their current diaspora community was also a significant
contributor. These results also provide support for the relevance of network theory over
hierarchical models of communication such as two-step flow, though both are still relevant as
others have found (Hilbert, Vásquez, Halpern, Valenzuela, & Arriagada, 2017).
Perhaps one of the more interesting findings was that environmental agencies were not a
prevalent source of environmental information. Scholars have found that social media can be a
useful tool for citizen engagement, especially for smaller governments and entities (Haro-deRosario, Sáez-Martín, & del Carmen Caba-Pérez, 2018), with governments and agencies of all
types moving quickly to adopt these channels (Sobaci 2016). Yet the results of this study
indicate that not all governments follow this trend. Respondents perceived a high degree of
ambivalence by governmental leaders to use social media for the communication of
environmental information that may be related to the type of information shared. Political
information tied to official office holders and candidates for office were most readily available
on social media while cultural information seemed to be more restricted. Public managers
91
naturally lean towards more conservative communication policies out of a desire to avoid
adverse publicity (Graber, 2003: 11), but the problem may be compounded by the well
documented history of the problematic relationship between indigenous people and mass
communication (Baylor, 1996) and greater risks to indigenous nations that are associated with
poor publicity. The fact that respondents also viewed cultural ecological knowledge as the basis
for political arguments indicates that any government communication policy that restricts one but
not the other will prove deeply problematic for indigenous people.
The role of indigenous government communicators
Since the 1970’s, indigenous nations have been growing their environmental
management capacities (Nesper & Schlender, 2007), but the results of this study suggest a
possible contrast between the environmental work of nations and public perception. Government
communication scholars, drawing from the field of public relations, would describe this as a
disconnect between organization identity and public image (José Canel & Sanders, 2012). One
of the most common uses of social media by governments is to communicate organizational
identity by presenting the work of the government or its agencies (DePaula, Dincelli, &
Harrison, 2018). In the present study, two-thirds of respondents knew their nations had
environmental agencies, but only one third had knowledge of specific programs or
responsibilities of these organizations. Government organizations tend to always score lower on
reputation rankings than private sector organizations (Wæraas & Byrkjeflot, 2012), but the
results of this study provide evidence of a possible gap. Little is known about the desired
identity of these organizations, their existing reputation management work, the barriers to such
work, or the image held by publics both on and off indigenous homelands. Furthermore, no
theoretical work has looked at the contingency factors or contextual conditions unique to the
92
public communication work of indigenous governments. Such research may prove invaluable to
indigenous governments and agencies with nascent communication programs.
Prior research had found that inter-tribal agencies also play an important role in
communicating environmental information (Willow, 2011), and the results of the present study
underscored these findings. Of the respondents who indicated knowledge of their governments’
environmental agencies and programs, four gained this information from a single inter-tribal
organization, the Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission. The emphasis on this one
organization is not surprising given that interviews were conducted in the Great Lakes region,
but respondents’ relationship to the organization provides a useful case study in considering how
other regional, national, and transnational agencies might function. Respondents indicated that
some of their nations may rely on the communication programs of intertribal agencies rather than
pursue their own programs. Such a trend begs the question of the communication relationships
between indigenous nations and pan-indigenous environmental organizations, and whether there
is a nation-specific information gap depending on the information gatekeeping engaged in by
these organizations. Again, little is known about the communication practices of inter-tribal
agencies and how their editorial decisions are made.
The power of storytelling
The final research question asked how participants felt about multimedia storytelling as a
mechanism for sharing environmental information. Should indigenous nations pursue their own
environmental communication programs, citizens living away would welcome media storytelling
that connects ecological knowledge, cultural values, and political goals. The results of this study
largely echo the arguments of Corntassel et. al. (2009) in that storytelling related to land and
culture provides the basis for contemporary political action. Results showed that multimedia
93
storytelling by indigenous agencies would be a useful tool for both cultural revitalization and
broader environmental policy change.
Conclusion
As with any interview-based dataset, the present study reflects only the experiences of a
small handful of citizens, limiting the generalizability of these conclusions. The fact that
recruitment was done through community centers in the Great Lakes region of the U.S. further
skews the data towards indigenous citizens, mostly from a single geographic region, who have
already self-selected into another physical hub facilitating pan-indigenous connection. However,
the diversity of experiences, beliefs, values, and resources across indigenous nations, combined
with limited prior research on the environmental information networks within and among these
nations, necessitates this exploratory approach. While generalizability is limited, the trends in
this study provide a starting point for further theorizing the environmental information networks
of indigenous communities, inclusive of their citizens in the global diaspora.
The way in which environmental information moves to citizens living in the indigenous
diaspora has some parallels with the classic two-step flow model of mass communication, in
which news is processed by opinion leaders and passed to general readers. Family and friends
obtain and process both cultural knowledge and its connection to contemporary environmental
issues. Through direct interpersonal communication or mediated through Facebook, that
information is passed to citizens living abroad. Occasionally the process works in reverse, with
citizens in the diaspora sharing cultural knowledge and environmental issues and passing that
back to homeland communities. Fewer people receive their information directly from
newspapers, newsletters, political leaders, and government agencies, but for those who do, they
value those means of communication, and there is a near universal desire for nations to leverage
94
new media technologies to show the plants, animals, and ecosystems at the heart of indigenous
cultures as a way to continue intergenerational knowledge sharing and reaffirm the basis for
policy action and advocacy.
95
CONCLUSION
MOVING INDIGENOUS SCIENCE AND ENVIRONMENTAL COMMUNICATION
RESEARCH FORWARD
Indigenous science and environmental communication (ISEC) remains an understudied
and fractured area of scholarship. Elements of it can be found in mass communication,
anthropology, and law, but rarely have these literatures been brought together to build a more
comprehensive understanding of the phenomenon. Some scholars have examined environmental
communication in indigenous journalism while others have looked at the way indigenous
environmental knowledge is created and transmitted within communities and across generations.
The present dissertation sought to fill a substantial hole in the scholarship by focusing on ISEC
as conducted by indigenous governments and their environmental agencies. The concept of
indigenous sovereignty is poorly understood by the general public and by scholars alike, possibly
contributing to this gap. Yet whether sovereignty is understood by others hasn’t stopped
indigenous nations for pushing forward and exercising their rights as nations to govern their
environments and resources. Along with the development of agencies to manage human
relationships with air, water, land, minerals, and animals, comes the need to communicate. The
purpose of this dissertation was to lay the groundwork for a research agenda on mass media
communication and the human dimensions of indigenous environmental management with an
eye towards how better use of new media technologies might help indigenous governments
achieve their environmental goals.
96
Both citizens and governments have a strong desire to engage in better communication
bridging cultural ecological knowledge with environmental science, but incorporating cultural
information into social media and mass communication messages raises serious concerns that are
still being worked through. The survey of environmental professionals revealed a significant
degree of ambivalence about incorporating cultural information into media messages with
respondents indicating this was largely due to uncertainty over what they would be allowed to
share according to policy set at higher levels of government. Interviews with citizens echoed the
same pattern. Several interviewees mentioned having family or friends who worked in
government and were subject to highly restrictive or contradictory communication policies,
particularly around social media. These policies aren’t surprising given the long history of
problematic indigenous representation in media and the rising risk of ecological knowledge
being appropriated by non-indigenous entities. However, some nations do seem to have found a
path forward.
One route may come from the leadership of inter-tribal or pan-indigenous agencies tasked
with coordinating environmental governance across multiple nations. These agencies seem to
play a key role in providing information to citizens, and governments may rely on these agencies
rather than engage in their own communication programs. For example, the Great Lakes
Intertribal Fish and Wildlife Commission (GLIFWC) was mentioned by several interviewees as a
key source of science and environmental information particularly due to their activities on
Facebook. The second chapter of this dissertation looked specifically at the visual content
posted by GLIFWC and its member nations. The fact that not all member nations had a social
media presence lends some credence to this possible explanation. As agencies like GLIFWC
take a leadership role sussing out the relationship between cultural information and media, it is
97
also possible that other agencies will begin to implement their own communication plans and
programs.
The need for culturally relevant ISEC plans and programs led by indigenous nations
came through clearly in the data. Professionals and citizens both expressed a desire for more use
of social media and a greater emphasis on content bridging cultural and scientific knowledge.
Professionals expressed a desire to better understand their audiences and the kinds of messages
they would respond to. However, media storytelling isn’t going to replace traditional
interpersonal networks and hands-on experience. Overall, environmental professionals and
citizens believe in the ability of media narratives to change public attitudes and behaviors and it
can be tempting to believe easy access to new media technologies will eventually overshadow
traditional modes of environmental communication, but environmental professionals were quick
to point out the value of maintaining traditional modes of environmental communication.
Several respondents indicated that any communication plan should not immediately prioritize
mediated channels over traditional in-person interaction. Even citizens living away repeatedly
discussed the role of travel back to their home lands as a critical conduit for the passage of
environmental information. Taken together these results suggest that any ISEC model needs to
incorporate both traditional and contemporary environmental communication channels.
The studies in this dissertation also contain recommendations for the types of content
agencies might focus on or avoid. Data from the content analysis of indigenous agency
Facebook photos suggests that social media content is already being created with some different
values compared to their state level counterparts. One of the more interesting results from this
chapter was that state audiences had a negative reaction to seeing environmental managers and
symbols of governance while indigenous audiences were open to all types of content. A follow
98
up study will need to be conducted, but it's possible that indigenous audiences value seeing
environmental governance in action and interpret it as a symbol of sovereignty. However, the
negative reactions of state level audiences also lead to the prediction that images of indigenous
environmental professionals may be received even more negatively by non-indigenous
audiences. While indigenous citizens indicated that cultural ecological knowledge provided
important foundations for political arguments made to non-indigenous people, the results from
this content analysis suggest caution in how those narratives are constructed and who is featured
when communicating with non-indigenous audiences.
At the heart of this dissertation is a goal to reduce conflict over natural resources. The
studies discussed within lay the groundwork for a future research agenda on the ISEC plans and
programs that indigenous governments might undertake. Government communication already
has been shown to require different models of strategic communication than private sector
entities. Complex political relationships colored by fraught histories of colonization suggest that
indigenous governments require yet another conceptual model. The work done here indicates
that indigenous governments face two additional constraints compared to their non-indigenous
counterparts, 1) the need to communicate cultural ecological information that comes close to the
core of indigenous identity, and 2) the need to minimize the risks associated with sharing such
information. These two considerations seem to be inherently at odds with one another, and many
governments have erred on the side of minimizing risks by restricting the information that may
be shared via media. However, these decisions have had consequences. As both professionals
and citizens pointed out, cultural knowledge and beliefs are foundational to any persuasive
attempt to change environmental policy at state, national, and global levels. Additional research
will need to explore the models and decisions used by agencies that have a larger media presence
99
in addition to the message content that has been successful in reaching both indigenous citizens
and non-indigenous stakeholders.
The themes in this dissertation are more than just an academic exercise, and there is one
story that helps illustrate how complicated, interconnected, and personal these phenomena really
are. In the morning, after my coffee and before I start writing, I read the newspaper, check the
weather, and scan social media for news. I came across a post by my own tribe’s natural
resources department advertising a public talk about plants and the indigenous relationship with
plants in my home territory. In the course of the two years I have been working on this
dissertation, the department went from no Facebook page to a robust social media presence with
daily content featuring images of plants, animals, and landscapes along with captions describing
the traditional relationship between these beings and the Ojibwe people. Later in the day I called
in via my mobile phone and listened to the virtual talk. Hearing about landscapes that I knew
intimately and the plants within them made me immediately smile. I felt connected, and I
learned a few things along the way. The presenter, an ecologist working for our tribe’s natural
resources department, shared narratives intertwined with biology, ecology, and culture. Every
plant has a story. Traditional stories are only part of the narrative. Contemporary science has
helped us understand the stories of other living beings better, and media have helped us tell these
stories in new ways. I hope that through continuing to tell these stories, more people will come
to understand the foundations of indigenous environmental governance.
100
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Nations declaration on the rights of indigenous peoples (Vol. 4).
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perspectives on environmental justice (pp. 1–28). Orbis Books.
Whyte, K. (2016). Indigenous Experience, Environmental Justice and Settler Colonialism. SSRN
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The ethics of cultural appropriation (pp. 269–289).
118
APPENDIX 1
Survey study - Initial recruitment email
Aaniin, siyo, yá'át'ééh, greetings,
My name is Ryan Comfort, I’m a member of the Keweenaw Bay Band of Lake Superior Ojibwe,
and I am a graduate student at Indiana University. I’m working in partnership with the Native
American Fish and Wildlife Society (NAFWS) to conduct a survey. We are interested in
learning more about people’s attitudes, needs, and practices related to the communication of
natural resources information, with the goal of helping indigenous nations improve their efforts.
We are specifically looking for people working for Native American nations in jobs that deal
with natural resources management. You do not have to be a member of NAFWS to participate.
The survey will ask you some basic questions about yourself, about your job, and about your
attitudes, beliefs, practices, and needs related to communications and media. It should take
approximately 20 minutes to complete, but you may stop at anytime. Eligible participants have
the option of being entered in a drawing to win a $500 Amazon gift card.
If you choose to participate in this survey, please click the link below.
https://iu.co1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_eOJwbp24ULjrpJj
Chi miigwech (thanks in Ojibwe), and if you have any questions or comments, please feel free to
contact me at rcomfort@indiana.edu
119
APPENDIX 2
Survey study - Follow-up recruitment email
Aaniin, siyo, yá'át'ééh, greetings again,
I’m writing to follow up on a survey invitation sent to you a week or so ago. We value your
input and hope you will consider participating in this survey of natural resource professionals
working for indigenous communities. Here are the details again.
My name is Ryan Comfort, I’m a member of the Keweenaw Bay Band of Lake Superior Ojibwe,
and I am a graduate student at Indiana University. I’m working in partnership with the Native
American Fish and Wildlife Society (NAFWS) to conduct a survey. We are interested in
learning more about people’s attitudes, needs, and practices related to the communication of
natural resources information, with the goal of helping indigenous nations improve their efforts.
We are specifically looking for people working for Native American nations in jobs that deal
with natural resources management. You do not have to be a member of NAFWS to participate.
The survey will ask you some basic questions about yourself, about your job, and about your
attitudes, beliefs, practices, and needs related to communications and media. It should take
approximately 20 minutes to complete, but you may stop at anytime. Eligible participants have
the option of being entered in a drawing to win a $500 Amazon gift card.
If you choose to participate in this survey, please click the link below.
https://iu.co1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_eOJwbp24ULjrpJj
Chi miigwech (thanks in Ojibwe), and if you have any questions or comments, please feel free to
contact me at rcomfort@indiana.edu
120
APPENDIX 3
Survey study - Follow-up call script
Hi,
I’m calling to follow up on a survey invitation sent a week or so ago.
My name is Ryan Comfort, I’m a member of the Keweenaw Bay Band of Lake Superior Ojibwe,
and I am a graduate student at Indiana University. I’m working in partnership with the Native
American Fish and Wildlife Society (NAFWS) to conduct a survey. We are interested in
learning more about people’s attitudes, needs, and practices related to the communication of
natural resources information, with the goal of helping indigenous nations improve their efforts.
We are specifically looking for people working for Native American nations in jobs that deal
with natural resources management. You do not have to be a member of NAFWS to participate.
We value your input and hope you will consider participating in this survey.
It should take approximately 20 minutes to complete, but you may stop at anytime. The survey
will ask you some basic questions about yourself, about your job, and about your attitudes,
beliefs, practices, and needs related to communications and media. Eligible participants have the
option of being entered in a drawing to win a $500 Amazon gift card.
If you choose to participate in this survey, I would be glad to resend the survey link, and please
let me know if you have any questions. Thank you for considering this request.
121
APPENDIX 4
Survey study - Study information sheet
IRB STUDY# 1910654319
INDIANA UNIVERSITY STUDY INFORMATION SHEET FOR
Communication in indigenous natural resources management
You are invited to participate in a research study of environmental and natural resource
communication in Native American and indigenous communities. You were selected as a
possible participant because of your affiliation with an indigenous nation, group, or organization.
We ask that you read this form and ask any questions you may have before agreeing to be in the
study.
The study is being conducted by Ryan N. Comfort (KBIC Ojibwe), a doctoral candidate, and
James Shanahan, a faculty member at Indiana University’s Media School. It is an unfunded
study.
STUDY PURPOSE
The purpose of this study is to better understand how natural resource professionals working for
indigenous nations think about and use media communications in their work. We are
particularly interested in how you interact with media, how you communicate about
environmental and natural resource issues with different audiences, and what the communication
related concerns, needs, or problems may be for you and your organization.
PROCEDURES FOR THE STUDY:
If you agree to participate in the survey, you will be one of up to 250 participants, and you will
do the following things:
Complete an online survey. The survey will include questions about you, your professional role,
your attitudes about media, and your uses of communications media in your job. The survey will
take approximately 20-30 minutes.
RISKS AND BENEFITS
The risks of participating in this research are minimal. There is also a risk of loss of
confidentiality. You are not expected to personally benefit from participating in this research.
However, your participation may help improve future environmental and natural resource
communications in indigenous communities.
CONFIDENTIALITY
Efforts will be made to keep your personal information confidential. We cannot guarantee
absolute confidentiality. Your personal information may be disclosed if required by law. Your
identity will be held in confidence in reports in which the study may be published and databases
in which results may be stored. Researchers will have access to survey responses which will be
stored on a password protected server in the Media School’s Institute for Communications
Research.
122
Organizations that may inspect and/or copy your research records for quality assurance and data
analysis include groups such as the study investigator and his/her research associates, the Indiana
University Institutional Review Board or its designees, and (as allowed by law) state or federal
agencies, specifically the Office for Human Research Protections (OHRP), who may need to
access your research records.
PAYMENT
You have the option to enter a drawing for a $500 Amazon gift card. Participation in the
drawing is not mandatory. Participants must be eligible to complete the survey to enter the
drawing, but completion of the survey is not required for entry as participants may withdraw
from the survey at any time. To enter the drawing after withdrawal from the survey, please
contact the study coordinator listed below. Odds of winning will equal to or better than 1:250.
CONTACTS FOR QUESTIONS OR PROBLEMS
For questions about the study, contact the researcher Ryan N. Comfort at (608) 921-2764 or
rcomfort@indiana.edu
For questions about your rights as a research participant or to discuss problems, complaints or
concerns about a research study, or to obtain information, or offer input, contact the IU Human
Subjects Office at (317) 278-3458 or [for Indianapolis] or (812) 856-4242 [for Bloomington] or
(800) 696-2949.
VOLUNTARY NATURE OF STUDY
Taking part in this study is voluntary. You may choose not to take part or may leave the study at
any time. Leaving the study will not result in any penalty or loss of benefits to which you are
entitled. Your decision whether or not to participate in this study will not affect your current or
future relations with Indiana University.
123
APPENDIX 5
Survey study - Questionnaire
INDIANA UNIVERSITY STUDY INFORMATION SHEET FOR RESEARCH
Communication in Indigenous Natural Resources Management
IRB STUDY# 1910654319
About this research You are being asked to participate in a research study. We hope this study
will help indigenous nations improve their communication on environmental and natural
resource issues.
This form will give you information about the study to help you decide whether you want to
participate. Please read this form, and ask any questions you have, before agreeing to be in the
study.
Taking part in this study is voluntary You may choose not to take part or may leave the study
at any time. Your decision whether or not to participate in this study will not affect your current
or future relations with the researchers, The Media School, or Indiana University.
This research is intended for individual 18 years of age or older. If you are under age 18, do not
complete the survey.
Why is this study being done? The purpose of this study is to better understand how
environmental and natural resource professionals working for indigenous nations think about and
use media in their jobs. You were selected as a possible participant because of you affiliation
with an indigenous nation, group, or organization.
The study is being conducted by Ryan N. Comfort (KBIC Ojibwe), PhD candidate; and James
Shanahan, Dean of The Media School at Indiana University. It is not funded.
What will happen during the study? If you agree to be in the study, you will do the following
things:
Complete an online survey. The survey involves answering questions about you, your
professional role, you attitudes about media, and the way you use communication in your job. If
you do not wish to participate, you may leave the survey at any time for any/no reason.
In total, the survey should take approximately 20 minutes to complete. You may only complete
the survey once.
What are the risks and benefits of taking part in this study? The risks of participating in
this research are minimal. You will be answering questions that focus on your work and your
opinions about issues related to your work. This everyday type of activity should elicit no short
term or long term adverse impacts.
We don’t expect you to receive any personal benefit from taking part in this study, but we hope
to learn things which will help indigenous nations.
124
How will my information be protected? All research includes at least a small risk of loss of
confidentiality. Efforts will be made to keep your personal information confidential and
anonymous. We cannot guarantee absolute confidentiality. Your personal information may be
disclosed if required by law. Your identity will be held in confidence in reports in which the
study may be published.
Organizations that may inspect and/or copy your research records for quality assurance and data
analysis include groups such as the study investigator and his/her research associates, the Indiana
University Institutional Review Board or its designees, and any state or federal agencies who
may need to access your research records (as allowed by law).
Will I be paid for participation? You have the option to enter a drawing for a chance to win
one (1) of five (5) $100 Amazon e-gift codes (1 in 80 chance). Participation in the drawing is
not mandatory. You may withdraw from the survey at any time, but you must complete the
survey to be eligible to enter the drawing. Odds of winning will be 1:80 or better. You may only
enter the drawing once.
Who should I call with questions or problems? For questions about the study, contact the
researcher Ryan Comfort at rcomfort@indiana.edu. For questions about your rights as a research
participant or to discuss problems, complaints or concerns about a research study, or to obtain
information, or offer input, please contact the IU Human Subjects Office at 800-696-2949 or at
irb@iu.edu.
Form date: December 11, 2019
o I have read the above and wish to participate in this study. (1)
o I no longer wish to participate. (2)
End of Block: SIS
Start of Block: Screening Questions
SCR01 What type of organization are you employed by?
o Federally recognized tribe (1)
o State recognized tribe (2)
o Intertribal agency (3)
o Federal agency (4)
o Environmental advocacy organization (non-governmental organization) (6)
o Unemployed (7)
o Other (8)
SCR02 Are you at least 18 years old?
o Yes (1)
o No (2)
125
End of Block: Screening Questions
Start of Block: Section 1 - Employment
EMP00 This first section asks a few basic questions about your job and the agency or department
you work for.
EMP01 In which areas of natural resources or environmental management do you work? (check
all that apply)
▢
Fisheries management (1)
▢
Wildlife management (11)
▢
Forestry (2)
▢
Community planning and development (3)
▢
Rangelands management (4)
▢
Agriculture (5)
▢
Oil, gas, and/or mineral development (6)
▢
Energy (wind, solar, hydro, etc.) (8)
▢
Water, air, and/or environmental quality (9)
▢
Recreation (10)
▢
Other (7) ________________________________________________
EMP02 How would you describe your primary job duties?
o Enforcement (1)
o Science, monitoring, and/or research (2)
o Administrative (clerical) (3)
o Administrative (leadership) (4)
o Community outreach / Education (5)
o Communication, media relations, or public Information (6)
o Resource technician, manager, or specialist (7)
o Planning or policy specialist (8)
o Other (9) ________________________________________________
EMP03 How many years have you worked in your current job?
________________________________________________________________
126
EMP04 How many years have you worked in the field of environmental or natural resources
management?
________________________________________________________________
EMP05 In your best estimation, how many people work for environment and natural resource
departments within the tribe or organization you work for?
________________________________________________________________
EMP06 Please click or tap the region where you are currently employed.
End of Block: Section 1 - Employment
Start of Block: Section 2 - Communication Attitudes - Part 1
ATT00 The next section will ask you a few questions about your attitudes and beliefs related to
communication and your job.
In this survey we define "communication" very broadly. Communication might include any
type of writing, emailing, capturing and sharing photos or videos, posting on social media, public
speaking, or mass media relations.
ATT01
This question is particularly important to understanding how professionals like you think about
the role of communication in environmental and natural resource management. What kinds of
environmental or natural resource communication efforts should tribes focus on and why?
________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________
127
ATT02 Thinking about the environmental values that you hold, how important or unimportant is
it for tribal members to see photos or videos of...
Very
Moderately
Neither
Moderately Very
unimporta unimportant unimportant important
important
nt (11)
(12)
nor
(14)
(15)
important
(13)
Tribal landscapes
(1)
o
o
o
o
o
Tribal waters (4)
o
o
o
o
o
Fish and wildlife
on tribal lands
(2)
o
o
o
o
o
Tribal forests (7)
o
o
o
o
o
Tribal members
hunting, fishing,
or gathering (9)
o
o
o
o
o
Tribal land and
property
development (10)
o
o
o
o
o
Tribal personnel
managing
resources (6)
o
o
o
o
o
Tribal scientists
studying
resources (14)
o
o
o
o
o
Environmental
problems on
tribal lands (3)
o
o
o
o
o
128
Environmental
problems off
tribal lands (11)
o
o
o
o
o
ATT03 How effective or ineffective is social media in communicating environmental or natural
resource information with...
Very
Moderately
Neither
Moderately
Very
ineffective
ineffective
effective nor effective
effective
(11)
(12)
ineffective
(15)
(18)
(13)
Tribal
members (1)
o
o
o
o
o
Other
departments
within your
tribe (2)
o
o
o
o
o
Other tribal
agencies
outside your
tribe (8)
o
o
o
o
o
Inter-tribal
agencies (7)
o
o
o
o
o
State
agencies (3)
o
o
o
o
o
Federal
agencies (4)
o
o
o
o
o
Non-tribal
members (5)
o
o
o
o
o
129
ATT04 In general, how effective or ineffective is communication at changing peoples' opinions
about the environment?
o Very effective (59)
o Moderately effective (65)
o Neither effective nor ineffective (66)
o Moderately ineffective (67)
o Very ineffective (68)
ATT05 In general, how effective or ineffective is communication at changing peoples'
environmental behaviors?
o Very effective (52)
o Moderately effective (53)
o Neither effective nor ineffective (54)
o Moderately ineffective (55)
o Very ineffective (56)
End of Block: Section 2 - Communication Attitudes - Part 1
Start of Block: Section 2 - Communication Attitudes - Part 2
ATT06 In answering the next series of questions, please think about the environmental values,
beliefs, and practices of the tribe or agency you work for.
ATT07 How appropriate or inappropriate would it be for you to share information about
traditional cultural beliefs on social media?
o Very appropriate (11)
o Moderately appropriate (12)
o Neither appropriate nor inappropriate (13)
o Moderately inappropriate (14)
o Very inappropriate (15)
ATT08 How appropriate or inappropriate would it be for you to share information about
traditional cultural beliefs in traditional media, such as in newspapers or on television?
o Very appropriate (11)
o Moderately appropriate (12)
o Neither appropriate nor inappropriate (13)
o Moderately inappropriate (14)
o Very inappropriate (15)
130
ATT09 How appropriate or inappropriate would it be for you to share information about
traditional cultural practices on social media?
o Very appropriate (11)
o Moderately appropriate (12)
o Neither appropriate nor inappropriate (13)
o Moderately inappropriate (14)
o Very inappropriate (15)
ATT10 How appropriate or inappropriate would it be for you to share information about
traditional cultural practices in traditional media, such as in newspapers or on television?
o Very appropriate (11)
o Moderately appropriate (12)
o Neither appropriate nor inappropriate (13)
o Moderately inappropriate (14)
o Very inappropriate (15)
ATT11 How appropriate or inappropriate would it be for you to share information about current
environmental or resource management practices on social media?
o Very appropriate (11)
o Moderately appropriate (12)
o Neither appropriate nor inappropriate (13)
o Moderately inappropriate (14)
o Very inappropriate (15)
ATT12 How appropriate or inappropriate would it be for you to share information about current
environmental or resource management practices in traditional media, such as in newspapers
or on television?
o Very appropriate (11)
o Moderately appropriate (12)
o Neither appropriate nor inappropriate (13)
o Moderately inappropriate (14)
o Very inappropriate (15)
ATT13 How appropriate or inappropriate would it be for you to share information about current
environmental or resource management science on social media?
o Very appropriate (11)
o Moderately appropriate (12)
131
o Neither appropriate nor inappropriate (13)
o Moderately inappropriate (14)
o Very inappropriate (15)
ATT14 How appropriate or inappropriate would it be for you to share information about current
environmental or resource management science in traditional media, such as in newspapers or
on television?
o Very appropriate (11)
o Moderately appropriate (12)
o Neither appropriate nor inappropriate (13)
o Moderately inappropriate (14)
o Very inappropriate (15)
End of Block: Section 2 - Communication Attitudes - Part 2
Start of Block: Section 3 - Use and Practice
U&P00 The following section will ask you a few questions about the roles that different types of
communication play in your work.
U&P01 As part of your job, about how frequently do you communicate with...?
Daily (11)
Weekly (12) Monthly
Yearly (14) Never (15)
(13)
Tribal
members (1)
o
o
o
o
o
Other
departments
within your
tribe (2)
o
o
o
o
o
Other tribal
agencies
outside your
tribe (8)
o
o
o
o
o
Inter-tribal
agencies (7)
o
o
o
o
o
132
State agencies
(3)
o
o
o
o
o
Federal
agencies (4)
o
o
o
o
o
Non-tribal
members (5)
o
o
o
o
o
Mass media
organizations
(9)
o
o
o
o
o
U&P02 How frequently do you share work related information using the following
communication media?
Daily
Weekly Monthly
Yearly
Never
(14)
(15)
(16)
(17)
(18)
Email list (22)
o
o
o
o
o
Public presentations (21)
o
o
o
o
o
Print newsletter (2)
o
o
o
o
o
Digital newsletter (3)
o
o
o
o
o
Printed flyer or poster (19)
o
o
o
o
o
Organization website (4)
o
o
o
o
o
Blog (5)
o
o
o
o
o
Television program (18)
o
o
o
o
o
Radio program (16)
o
o
o
o
o
Podcast (6)
o
o
o
o
o
133
Facebook (8)
o
o
o
o
o
Twitter (9)
o
o
o
o
o
YouTube (10)
o
o
o
o
o
Instagram (15)
o
o
o
o
o
Other video sharing website
(11)
o
o
o
o
o
Other photo sharing website
(12)
o
o
o
o
o
U&P04 Have you ever been interviewed by a journalist, reporter, or radio host for a story about
tribal environmental or natural resources issues?
o Yes (1)
o No (2)
Display This Question:
If Have you ever been interviewed by a journalist, reporter, or radio host for a story about
tribal... = Yes
U&P04.1 Was the media outlet producing the story a local (tribal or city publication), regional
(state or multi-city publication), or national outlet?
o Local (1)
o Regional (2)
o National (3)
Display This Question:
If Have you ever been interviewed by a journalist, reporter, or radio host for a story about
tribal... = Yes
U&P04.2 Was the media outlet producing the story a tribal-specific publication (e.g. The
Cherokee One-Feather), a pan-indigenous publication covering multiple tribes or indigenous
peoples (e.g. Indianz.com), or a non-indigenous publication (e.g. NPR).
o Tribal-specific (1)
o Pan-indigenous (2)
o Non-indigenous (3)
134
Display This Question:
If Have you ever been interviewed by a journalist, reporter, or radio host for a story about
tribal... = Yes
Q44 What type of media outlet was it?
o A newspaper or newsletter (1)
o A radio program (2)
o A television program (3)
o A film (4)
o A blog, podcast, YouTube channel, or other digital outlet (5)
End of Block: Section 3 - Use and Practice
Start of Block: Section 4 - Communication Challenges and Barriers
CH01 What could be done to improve communication with tribal members on issues related to
environmental or natural resource management?
________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________
End of Block: Section 4 - Communication Challenges and Barriers
Start of Block: Section 5 - Socio-Demographic
SD00 This final section asks just a few basic demographic questions.
SD01 What is your age?
________________________________________________________________
SD02 What is your gender?
o Male (1)
o Female (2)
o Non-binary (3)
o Prefer not to answer (4)
135
SD03 What is your primary race/ethnicity?
o Native American / Alaskan Native (1)
o Hawaiian Native / Pacific Islander (5)
o Other indigenous (2)
o African American (3)
o Hispanic / Latino (4)
o Asian / Asian American (6)
o White (7)
SD04 What is the highest level of education you have achieved?
o Below high school (7)
o High school / GED (1)
o Associates or two-year technical degree (2)
o Bachelors degree (3)
o Masters degree (4)
o Doctoral degree (5)
End of Block: Section 5 - Socio-Demographic
136
APPENDIX 6
Content Analysis Codebook
Instructions for coders
Code each image in the sample according to the following codebook. If necessary, use photo
captions and descriptions to determine how a variable should be coded. In the included
spreadsheet, code only the number for each variable, not the text.
Variable 1 - Source Agency
Coders should record whether the image was presented on a state or tribal agency facebook page.
Source Agency has two levels...
1. State
2. Tribal
Variable 2 - Image Focus
The variable, Image Focus, refers to the primary subject of the image. What is your eye
naturally drawn to first? If people are present, they are usually the primary focus, but sometimes
it is what the people are holding. Any image where the emphasis is primarily on the textual
information presented within the image itself should be coded as a document. For example,
information graphics or images with significant editing and text overlay that advertise events or
programs should be coded as documents. The variable has the following levels...
1. Person or People
2. Animal(s)
3. Plant(s)
4. Building(s)
5. Landscape
6. Document
7. Map
8. Other
Variable 3 - Interaction
The variable, Interaction, refers to the explicit or implicit interaction at the focus of the image.
Except for documents, every image contains an interaction. An image should be coded
Human/Human interaction if the image contains one or more people primarily interacting with
each other. For example, a game warden presenting at an educational fair would be coded as
human/human interaction. If this interaction is present, code the sub-variable to describe the
actors within the interaction. Users are resource users, for example, an attendee at an educational
fair or a hunter. NR Managers are any person who may be involved in resource management,
conservation, enforcement, and/or science.
An image should be coded Human/Animal interaction when one or more people in the image are
present with an animal (alive or deceased). Images where one or more people in the image are
actively engaged in hunting or fishing activities should also be coded as human/animal
interaction whether or not an animal is present since interaction in implicit. For example, an
image with a silhouette of a fisherman on a lake should be coded as human/animal interaction
since the focus of the image is on the act of fishing, even though the landscape and tranquil
137
environment might be a sub focus. Again, code who is interacting with the animal, a resource
user, a resource manager, or both.
Images with one or more people interacting with the landscape or environment, such as taking a
walk through a park, should be coded as Human / Environment interaction. Again, code the
people in the image as users, managers, or both.
Images that focus on multiple animals interacting should be coded as Animal - Animal
interaction. Images that feature one or more animal interacting with the landscape, deer grazing
for example, should be coded as animal - landscape.
The levels of Interaction are….
1. Human / Human Interaction
a. 1 User - User
b. 2 User - NR Manager
c. 3 NR Manager - NR Manager
2. Human / Animal Interaction
a. 1 = 4 User - Animal (ex. A hunter with a harvested animal)
b. 2 = 5 NRM Manager - Animal (ex. A scientist collecting fish eggs)
c. 3 = 6 User & Manager - Animal (ex. A hunter checking an animal with a warden)
3. Human - Environment
a. 1 = 7 User - Environment
b. 2 = 8 NRM Manager - Environment
c. 3 = 9 User & Manager - Environment
4. 10 Animal - Animal
5. 11 Animal - Environment
6. 12 Other
7. No interaction
Variable 4 - Image Purpose
The variable, “Image Purpose,” refers to the apparent reason why the image was shared. If the
image shows people using a resource, such as hiking a trail, hunting, or gathering, code the
image as “Promotes Resource Use.” If the image shows people engaged in actions that involve
directly managing a resource, such as trimming trees, clearing brush, or participating in
controlled burning, or indirectly managing a resource, such as engaging in enforcement or public
outreach and education activities, code the image context as “Promotes Resource Management.”
If the people in the image are engaged in activities that involve studying or learning more about
the status of a resource, such as tagging wildlife, harvesting fish eggs, using electrofishing
equipment, then code the image as “Promotes Resource Science.” Images that show landscapes
or animals alone will typically be coded as “Promotes Resource Appreciation” unless the
emphasis is on human modifications to the landscape or habitat, then code the image as “Shows
resource management.” The levels of “Image Purpose” are as follows...
1. Promotes Resource Use
2. Promotes Resource Management (includes enforcement actions, education, and outreach)
3. Promotes Resource Science
138
4. Promotes Resource Appreciation
5. Other
Variable 5 - Subject(s) Gender
Coders should use visual cues to discern subject gender. Multiple Mixed should be used when
one or more male, and one or more female subject appear in the same image. Unknown should
only be used when subjects appear too dark or are too obscured by other objects to discern
gender. Gender contains the following levels...
1. Male
2. Female
3. Multiple Mixed
4. Unknown
Variable 6 - Subject(s) Age
Coders should consider all subjects in an image to determine subject(s) age. Age will be
recorded as a nominal variable with four levels. Subjects who appear to be teens and below
should be coded as “Youth,” all others should be coded as “Adult.” Images that contain one or
more adult and one or more youth should be coded as Multiple Mixed. Unknown should only be
used when either 1) subjects appear too dark to discern physical size or features, or 2) an image
contains subjects that are mostly obscured by objects or other people in the image making
discernment of physical size and or features impossible. The levels of Subject(s) Age are as
follows...
1. Adult
2. Youth
3. Multiple Mixed
4. Unknown
Variable 7 - Likes
“Likes” is operationalized as the number of people, as of coding, who have “liked” the image
using the Facebook feature. All versions of a “like” are counted as one. Coders should simply
record the number associated with the post.
139
APPENDIX 7
Interview study - Verbal recruitment script
(rev. 9/21/18)
Good (morning, afternoon, evening),
My name is Ryan Comfort. I’m a researcher in the Media School at Indiana University, and I’m
currently working on a study aimed at better understanding how Native American and
indigenous people learn about environmental and natural resource issues affecting their
communities. I’m particularly interested in investigating the role that media plays, or should
play, in communicating about these issues.
I’m looking for Native American or indigenous students, staff, faculty, or community members
would be willing to participate in an approximately one-hour interview with me. As part of the
interview, you’ll watch a short, approximately 4-minute, video about an environmental issue and
then discuss your reactions. I am looking for approximately 30 participants.
There is no compensation for participation in this study, and participation is entirely voluntary,
meaning you shouldn’t feel compelled to participate and you can withdraw at any time. Neither
your name nor identifying information, aside from your tribal affiliation, will be associated with
your responses.
If you might be interested in participating, I’ll pass around a sheet to jot down your name and
email. This doesn’t mean you have agreed to participate, only that you want me to contact you
individually with more information and to talk about participating. Or you can email me at
rcomfort@indiana.edu if you would rather not sign up on the sheet of paper.
Thanks, and if you have any questions, feel free to contact me. [researcher email is provided
verbally and written on a whiteboard or chalkboard if available].
140
APPENDIX 8
Interview Study - Scheduling Email
Greetings________________,
Thanks for your interest in participating in this research study designed to better understand how
Native American and indigenous audiences learn about natural resource issues in their home
communities, and the role that visual media does or should play in this process. I’ve attached a
study information sheet that should give you a little more detail.
I’m emailing to see if you are willing to participate in this study. If you are, we can schedule a
time and location convenient for you to conduct an approximately 1 hour in-person interview,
including viewing a 4 minute video on an environmental issue. I will ask you if I may audiorecord the interview, but will only do so if you agree to be recorded.
Here are the dates and times I currently have available. If the dates, times, or locations don’t
work, feel free to propose alternatives…
[Date] at [Time] at [Location]
If you have any other questions, feel free to contact me.
[Include researcher name, title, contact information including phone and email]
141
APPENDIX 9
Interview Study Information Sheet
IRB STUDY #1808921512
INDIANA UNIVERSITY STUDY INFORMATION SHEET FOR
Natural Resource Communication - Indigenous Audiences Project
You are invited to participate in a research study of environmental and natural resource
communications in Native American and indigenous communities. You were selected as a
possible participant because of your affiliation with an indigenous nation, group, or organization.
We ask that you read this form and ask any questions you may have before agreeing to be in the
study.
The study is being conducted by Ryan N. Comfort, a doctoral student, and James Shanahan, a
faculty member at Indiana University’s Media School. It is an unfunded study.
STUDY PURPOSE
The purpose of this study is to better understand how Native American and indigenous audiences
learn about natural resource issues in their home communities. We are particularly interested
role that media plays in learning about resource issues and your thoughts on the role that media
should or could play in communicating about these issues in Native American and indigenous
communities.
PROCEDURES FOR THE STUDY:
If you agree to be in the study, you will be one of approximately 30 participants, and you will do
the following things:
Participate in an in-person interview with one of the researchers. The interview will include
watching a short, approximately 4 minute video on an environmental issue, and discussing your
reaction to the video. The interview will last approximately 1 hour. After the interview, brief
follow-up questions may be asked by phone or email.
RISKS AND BENEFITS
The risks of participating in this research are minimal. There is also a risk of loss of
confidentiality. You are not expected to personally benefit from participating in this research.
However, your participation may help improve future environmental and natural resource
communications in indigenous communities.
CONFIDENTIALITY
142
Efforts will be made to keep your personal information confidential. We cannot guarantee
absolute confidentiality. Your personal information may be disclosed if required by law. Your
identity will be held in confidence in reports in which the study may be published and databases
in which results may be stored. Researchers will have access to audio recordings of interviews
which will be stored on a password protected server in the Media School’s Institute for
Communications Research. A secure transcription service may also have access to recorded
interviews. All personal identifying information about you will be removed from the transcripts,
and the original recordings will be erased after the study ends.
Organizations that may inspect and/or copy your research records for quality assurance and data
analysis include groups such as the study investigator and his/her research associates, the Indiana
University Institutional Review Board or its designees, and (as allowed by law) state or federal
agencies, specifically the Office for Human Research Protections (OHRP), who may need to
access your research records.
PAYMENT
You will not receive payment for taking part in this study.
CONTACTS FOR QUESTIONS OR PROBLEMS
For questions about the study, contact the researcher Ryan N. Comfort at (608) 921-2764 or
rcomfort@indiana.edu
For questions about your rights as a research participant or to discuss problems, complaints or
concerns about a research study, or to obtain information, or offer input, contact the IU Human
Subjects Office at (317) 278-3458 or [for Indianapolis] or (812) 856-4242 [for Bloomington] or
(800) 696-2949.
VOLUNTARY NATURE OF STUDY
Taking part in this study is voluntary. You may choose not to take part or may leave the study at
any time. Leaving the study will not result in any penalty or loss of benefits to which you are
entitled. Your decision whether or not to participate in this study will not affect your current or
future relations with Indiana University.
143
APPENDIX 10
Interview Guide
I.
II.
Review Purpose: The purpose of this study is to better understand how Native American
and indigenous audiences learn about natural resource issues in their home communities. I
am particularly interested roles that media play, or could play, in this process, and how you
react when viewing stories about indigenous natural resource or environmental issues.
Review SIS: Highlight confidentiality section, voluntary participation. Obtain consent to
interview and audio record. ***If permission is granted, begin recording***
III.
Background: First I have just a few basic demographic and background questions I’d like
to ask you.
A. (interviewer notes participant gender)
B. Do you mind sharing your age with me?
C. What is the highest level of education you have completed?
D. What is your tribal affiliation?
E. Is it federally recognized, state recognized, or seeking recognition?
F. Does your tribe have its own reservation or other land base?
1. Where is it located?
2. Did you live there for any period of time? (Also, How long did you live
there and how long have you lived away?)
3. How would you describe the landscape?
4. Do you ever go hunting, fishing, gathering or participate in cultural
practices that use natural resources?
G. What are the major industries that employ people from the tribe?
1. Do you have a sense of what people do for work?
2. How important do you think the environment or natural resources are to
the local economy?
3. Do you think natural resources important to your tribe for other reasons,
beyond economic ones?
H. On a scale of 1-7, how important are environmental and natural resource issues to
you personally?
IV.
Learning about environment and natural resource issues
A. How do you typically learn about environmental and natural resource issues that
affect native and indigenous people?
1. How do you decide which sources of information to trust?
2. Which issues are you most concerned about?
3. How did you become concerned?
4. Are there other issues you wish you knew more about?
B. How do you usually find out about environmental or natural resource issues in
your tribal community?
1. Do you have a sense of what your tribe is doing to manage its land and
natural resources?
144
2. If yes… How did you learn about it? How do you feel when you read or
see media stories about science in your community?
3. If no… How might you find out?
C. Do you feel like you know more about indigenous environmental and natural
resource issues outside of your community?
1. Why do you think that is?
V.
Role of visual media
A. Transition: I want to transition a little to talking specifically about visual media
dealing with natural resource in indigenous communities. I have a short video I
would like to show you about forestry management in the Menominee Nation.
Afterwards I’ll ask you a few more questions about your thoughts, reactions, and
memories about other media it might have sparked. (cue
http://climatewisconsin.org/story/forestry )
B. Let’s talk a little about your thoughts and reactions (leave video up for
reference)…
1. Are there particular moments in the video that stood out to you?
a) Why?
b) What did it make you think of?
2. Have you seen pictures or videos like this before?
a) If yes… Can you tell me about them?
b) If yes… Was it about your own community or another indigenous
community?
c) If yes… What do you think makes it memorable to you?
d) If no… Why do you think that is?
3. People often experience a wide range of emotions while watching videos.
Did you notice any emotions you experienced while watching?
a)
C. Do you think it is important to be able to see the issues, land, and people
involved?
1. Why do you feel that way?
2. Are there things that are more important to show?
VI.
Conclusion
A. If you could ask your tribe to produce one video to share with others, indigenous
or not, about your community’s natural resources, environmental issues, or
science, what story would you want them to tell?
1. Why do you think this is an important story to tell?
B. Is there something I haven’t asked you that I should have?
C. Do you know anyone else who I could talk to? Would you mind if I used your
name as a reference?
D. Thanks so much for your help, and I’ll let you know if I have any follow up
questions.
E. **** Stop Recording ****
145
Ryan N Comfort
The Media School
Indiana University - Bloomington
Education_____________________________________________________________________
Indiana University - Bloomington
May 2021
Ph.D Media Arts & Sciences
Minor in Environmental Studies
Dissertation: Owaabanda’aan dibaajimowin: Images, story, and social media in
indigenous environmental governance
Committee: James Shanahan (Chair)
Lesa Major
Jennifer Midberry
Eduardo Brondizio
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
M.A. Mass Communication
Concentration in Visual Communication
Thesis:
Portraits of the Boundary: Stories of Cherokee Language,
Culture and Sovereignty
(cherokeeportraits.ryancomfortmedia.com)
Advisor: Pat Davison
2014
University of Wisconsin - Madison
B.A. English & Psychology
Minor in Native American Studies
Thesis: Agency through treaty: The treaty making process of the
Lake Superior Ojibwe from 1832 to 1854.
Advisor: Ned Blackhawk
2007
Publications (Peer reviewed)_____________________________________________________
Articles
Midberry, J., Comfort, R., & Roskos, J. E. (2019). Celebrating life or adversity? The
redefinition of features in the Pictures of the Year International contest. Journalism,
18(1). https://doi.org/10.1177/1464884919841134
Chapters
Comfort, R. (forthcoming 2021). Challenging the nation-state: Indigenous nations in
science and environmental communication. In B. Takahashi, J. Thaker, J. Metag, & S.
Evans Comfort (Eds.), ICA-Routledge Handbook of International Trends in
Environmental Communication. Routledge.
Works in Progress______________________________________________________________
Comfort, R. (manuscript in preparation). Same land, different values: How Facebook
photos reflect organizational and cultural differences between indigenous and U.S. state
governments.
Geiger, N., & Comfort, R. (manuscript in preparation). Source effects: Conveying shared
motives and interpersonal warmth can boost support for environmental policy.
Comfort R., Thompson, E., Shanahan, J., & Gazley, B. (manuscript in preparation). It’s a
mean world after all: Use of traditional media predicts greater perceived harm from both
climate change and major disease outbreaks.
Midberry, J., Kilgo, D., Potter, R., & Comfort, R. (manuscript in preparation). Effects of
image pairings in solutions journalism stories (working title).
Comfort, R. (data analysis). Communication attitudes and practices in indigenous
environmental management: A survey of environmental professionals working for
indigenous nations (working title).
Comfort, R. (data analysis). Mapping environmental information flows between
indigenous nations and their citizens in diaspora (working title).
Presentations (Peer reviewed)____________________________________________________
Comfort, R. (2019). Who sets the environmental agenda in Indian Country? Mapping
information flows and identifying missed opportunities for sovereignty in storytelling.
Paper accepted for oral presentation at the Conference on Communication and the
Environment, Vancouver, B.C.
Comfort, R.., Geiger, N., Yan, H., & Shanahan, J. (2019). Seeing Native American
scientists: Implicit and explicit attitudes towards Native American sources in science
news. Paper accepted for oral presentation at the International Communication
Association annual conference, Washington, D.C.
Comfort, R., & Yan, H. (2018). Trust in stereotypes: Implicit and explicit attitudes
towards Native American sources in science news. Abstract accepted for oral
presentation at the Annual Summer Science Communication Symposium, Ames, I.A.
Comfort, R. (2014). The Process of Media Production as a Mechanism for Increasing the
Success, Satisfaction, and Mental Health of Latina/o students in Higher Education. Paper
accepted for oral presentation at the International Communications Association annual
conference, Seattle, W.A.
Comfort, R. (2013). Hazelwood’s footnote seven: Judicial deference in defining
legitimate Pedagogical Concerns at Public Colleges and Universities. Paper accepted
for oral presentation at the AEJMC Southeast Colloquium, Tampa, F.L.
Comfort, R. (2010). Learning in 4-Directions: An indigenous model for multicultural
teaching and learning. Abstract accepted for oral presentation at the National
Conference on Race and Ethnicity in American Higher Education, Washington, D.C.
Presentations (Invited)__________________________________________________________
IU series on systemic racism and protest - Panelist
2020
Arts and Humanities Council, IU-Bloomington
Owaabanda’aan dibaajimowin: Visual communication in indigenous
environmental governance
School of Journalism, Michigan State University
2020
A discussion of indigenous film and documentary - Panelist
Center for Documentary Studies, Duke University
2014
The new frontiers of indigenous sovereignty - Panelist
Department of History, UNC-Chapel Hill
2013
Crafting indigenous infused curriculum: A student collaboration
Widening the Circle Conference, UW-LaCrosse
2012
The tree of peace: Rethinking American Indian image, identity, and representation
Race, Religion, and Representation Symposium, Plenary, UW-Madison
2012
Grants, Honors, & Awards______________________________________________________
President’s Diversity Dissertation Completion Fellowship
2020-2021
IU - Bloomington
Top Paper
Visual Communication Division - AEJMC 2018
2018
Roy H. Park Fellow
School of Journalism and Mass Communication – UNC Chapel Hill
2012-2014
American Indian Graduate Fellow
American Indian Graduate Center
2012-2014
Summer Research Grant
Center for the Study of the American South – UNC Chapel Hill
2013
Award of Excellence – Multimedia Website
2014
Documentary: “Cherokee Portraits: Stories of Language, Culture and Sovereignty”
College Photographer of the Year
Finalist – Online Film & Video, Documentary Series
Documentary: “The Ways: Great Lakes Native Language and Culture”
The Webby Awards
2014
People’s Voice Award – Online Film & Video, Travel and Adventure Series
Documentary: “Living Galapagos”
The Webby Awards
2014
Silver - Large Group Multimedia Project
Documentary: “What Matters 2 Us”
College Photographer of the Year
2013
Teaching______________________________________________________________________
Instructor of Record
MSCH-C 207: Introduction to Media Industry & Management
Spring 2020
1 section, 125 students, 2 graduate assistants
MSCH-C 207: Introduction to Media Industry & Management
1 section, 125 students, 2 graduate assistants
Spring 2019
MSCH-C 207: Introduction to Media Industry & Management
1 section, 60 students
Fall 2018
MSCH-C 217: Image Cultures
1 section, 35 students
JOUR 226: Introduction to Multimedia Production
3 sections, 22 students each
JOUR 180: Introduction to Photojournalism
1 section, 10 students
Teaching Assistant
MSCH-C 208: Introduction to Public Relations
JOUR 410: Introduction to International Communication
JOUR 440: Issues in Latino Media
JOUR 410: Introduction to International Communication
JOUR 440: Issues in Latino Media
Spring 2018
Fall 2015
Summer 2014
Fall 2019
Spring 2014
Fall 2013
Spring 2013
Fall 2012
Service_______________________________________________________________________
Office of the Provost - Campus naming review committee
2020 - 2021
IU-Bloomington
Bloomington Faculty Council - Diversity and Affirmative Action Committee
IU-Bloomington
2017 - 2018
Office of the Vice Provost - Faculty Retention Task Force
IU-Bloomington
2016 - 2018
Office of the Provost - Global Corp Task Force
IU-Bloomington
2016
First Nations Education and Cultural Center - Advisory Board
IU-Bloomington
2016 - 2018
IU NAGPRA Office - Advisory Board
IU-Bloomington
2016 - 2017
American Indian Recruitment Initiative - Advisory Board
UNC-Chapel Hill
2013
Indigenous Arts and Sciences Initiative - Advisory Board
UW-Madison
2012
“The Ways,” American Indian Documentary Project - Advisory Board
Wisconsin Education Communications Board
2011 - 2012
American Indian Student and Cultural Center - Governing Board
UW-Madison
2010 - 2012
Board of Directors
Wisconsin Indian Education Association
2011 - 2012
Tribal Histories Documentary Broadcast Series - Advisory Board
Wisconsin Public Television
2011 - 2012
Commencement Ceremony Marshall
UW-Madison
2011
Committee on Academic Staff Issues
UW-Madison
2010 - 2011
American Indian Access to Success Task Force
University of Wisconsin System
2012
Professional Experience_________________________________________________________
Director of Diversity and Inclusion
2016 - 2018
Indiana University – Bloomington, IN
College of Arts and Sciences
● Assessed needs of the College regarding diversity, inclusion, and equity.
● Analyzed quantitative data to identify potential strategic focus areas.
● Advised senior leadership on diversity strategy and conceptualization.
● Built a broad campus coalition to support strategic diversity initiatives.
Video Producer/Consultant
Ryan Comfort Media – Bloomington, IN (www.ryancomfortmedia.com)
● Produced, filmed, and edited documentary and promotional videos
for non-profit and government clients.
● Assisted clients in planning and budgeting for media production.
● Consulted with clients about effective ways to use visual media to
support organizational goals.
2012 - 2017
American Indian Curriculum Consultant
University of Wisconsin – Madison, WI
School of Education
● Designed and implemented American Indian studies curriculum to meet
university, state, and national standards.
● Delivered direct instruction to university students about American Indian
history, culture, and tribal sovereignty.
2008 – 2012
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