About this Webinar:
Karuk Tribal Forestry and Wildland Fire Data Sovereignty offers an example of how Indigenous Data Sovereignty can guide research, management, and policy in fire-adapted landscapes. As forestry and wildland fire projects increasingly rely on diverse data–from paleoclimate reconstructions and Fire History to ethnographic knowledge, forestry sampling, remote sensing, and modeling ignitions informed by Indigenous knowledge)–Tribal Nations face complex decisions about how these data are collected, governed, shared, and protected. Some information could be made publicly accessible, while other forms of knowledge should be confidential, proprietary, or culturally sensitive, requiring Tribal authority and careful governance.
This webinar examines how the Karuk Tribe navigates these considerations in collaboration with federal partners, highlighting the implications of Free, Prior, and Informed Consent, the CARE Principles, and Indigenous-determined governance frameworks. By centering Tribal leadership, cultural fire relationships, and sovereignty-driven protocols, this session demonstrates why data governance is essential for ethical research and effective natural/cultural resource management in wildfire-prone regions. We will also explore how working with forestry, wildland fire and fuels information, Indigenous Fire Stewardship, and cultural burning practices could promote greater awareness of Tribal data governance.
Featured Speakers:
Frank Kanawha Lake (Karuk and Yurok descendent) is a Research Ecologist, and the Tribal Liaison/Climate Change contact for the Pacific Southwest Research Station, USDA Forest Service. His research involves wildland fire effects, indigenous knowledge, tribal agroforestry, Climate Change, and ethno-ecology with an emphasis on cultural management and fire ecology of forest, shrub, grassland and riparian environments in the Klamath-Siskiyou and Pacific Northwest regions. Other projects and research include: American Indian Tribes and Climate Change; Agroforestry practices of Indigenous and tribal people, Indigenous Fire Stewardship/Cultural burning, and Wildland Fire effects on Heritage and Cultural Resources. He mentors and serves as a graduate committee member for several students working on tribal food security, wildland fire, and forest management. Frank is a Fire Line Qualified Resource Advisory (REAF), working on wildland fires with agencies and tribes, and is the Forest Service PSW coordinating scientist to the Western Klamath Restoration Partnership and for the Yurok Redwood Experimental Forest. His current focus is on Indigenous Knowledge data governance regarding the Co-production of Knowledge for research and resource management.
Sierra Hicks (they/them) is a Euro-American settler and Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Natural Resources and the Environment at Cornell University. Their dissertation research, conducted in partnership with the Karuk Tribe Department of Natural Resources (KDNR) is titled “Tribal Data Sovereignty for Environmental Stewardship”. They are a fellow with the Karuk Tribe, Indigenous Data Alliance, and National Science Foundation.
This webinar is a collaborative effort involving the Indigenous Data Alliance (IDA), the Collaboratory for Indigenous Data Governance, the Indigenous Data Exchange (IDX), the IndigeLab Network, the Indigenous Data Law Lab at NYU, and the Sovereign Soils Research Collaborative.