| Affiliation with other organizations: |
The American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) and the CBC work together with local and Indigenous partner organizations that provide training and development for Indigenous peoples and their capacity building, institution strengthening, and preservation of traditional knowledge and cultural heritage across Central Asia, North America, and the Pacific. This includes Center for Support of Indigenous Peoples of the North (CSIPN), Hopi Office of Cultural Preservation, and Solomon Islands Community Conservation Partnership (see further details below). The CBC is currently coordinating the Action Group on Knowledge Systems and Indicators of Wellbeing (see further details below) together with UNESCO, the Secretariat to the Convention on Biological Diversity and a number of Indigenous Peoples Organizations including Center for Support of Indigenous Peoples of the North, Forest Peoples Programme, Indigenous Women and Biodiversity Network, Indigenous Peoples Major Group for Sustainable Development, International Indian Treaty Council, and Te Kopu. We are applying to attend the 17th Session of the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues to facilitate the participation of representatives from our regional Indigenous partners in Russia. We have further submitted a request to host a side event together with UNDP-Equator Initiative and others. |
| Confirmation of the activities of the organization at the regional, national or international level: |
The Anthropology Division at the AMNH is concerned with all aspects of human behavior, past, present, and with an eye to the future. In Asia, the AMNH has had reciprocal exchanges with native peoples of Siberia since the early 1990s; material in the AMNH collection has been studied by both native scholars and artisans and through these links have acquired contemporary materials inspired by century-old pieces in our collection. We recently completed a project involving work on Siberian materials collected 100 years ago, consulting with Siberian scholars and providing training to a post-doctoral fellow who is a native Sakha. Our database has been used as a resource by indigenous peoples of Taiwan in similarly reviving traditional handicrafts. In North America, AMNH curatorial research focuses on Native North American cultures both ethnographically and historically. The AMNH staff have worked with the Hopi of northern Arizona, since 1980. Recent Hopi work includes a collaborative project (funded by the National Science Foundation’s Endangered Languages program) on Hopi place-names and landscape concepts, with colleagues at the Hopi Office of Cultural Preservation and the University of Arizona. AMNH staff have also worked with the Cayuga and Akwesasne Mohawk of upstate New York, and are preparing a history of the Cayuga in the aftermath of the Revolutionary War. The AMNH has also worked in field and archival research with the Rio Grande Pueblos, the Hupa of northwestern California, Coast Salish of western Washington, and the Choctaw and Chickasaw of Oklahoma and Mississippi. At the Center for Biodiversity and Conservation (CBC), we are exploring how using biocultural approaches—which explicitly start with and build on local values, knowledge, and needs, and recognize the feedbacks between human well-being and ecological health—can help align external sustainability-seeking processes with locally-relevant and locally-embraced approaches to support community well-being in the face of environmental, social, and economic change. Indigenous and local communities often face an assortment of externally-codified development and sustainability goals, regional commitments, and national policies and actions that are designed, in part, to foster adaptation and resilience at the local level. However, these externally-created metrics often do not appropriately consider local realities. Currently, this work is focused on native communities in the Solomon Islands, with the participation of other people from throughout the Pacific. The CBC is working together with UNESCO, the CBD, and a number of Indigenous Peoples Organizations and leaders from Indigenous communities across multiple regions (including the Kumandy of Altay, the Itelmen of Primorsky Kray, and the Yukagir of Yakutiya) to jointly lead the Action Group on Knowledge Systems and Indicators of Wellbeing. The Action Group will engage participants (including Indigenous and local community members, researchers, and conservation practitioners) in a cross-cutting exploration of knowledge and wellbeing themes across multiple regions. We are specifically interested in better understanding how to synthesize and harmonize across efforts to design indicators that encompass both biological and cultural wellbeing. There is a critical need to support place-based, culturally relevant indicators for managing and monitoring resources and planning for the future at the local scale, and the Action Group will explore synergies and opportunities for Indigenous communities to articulate measures of success, as the global arena codifies international metric systems. The outcomes will be presented at the Nature-Culture Summit at the CBD COP 14. The Action Group will meet April 21-22, over the middle weekend of the UNPFII. We are applying to attend the UNPFII to facilitate the participation of representatives from our regional Indigenous partners in Russia. |
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