EMBRACE-EAR-SEED: CORE: Creating Opportunities to Read Environments: Weaving Western GEOScience with Indigenous Knowledge through Lake Cores

The College of Menominee Nation, Menominee Tribal Enterprises, and the Continental Scientific Drilling Facility at the University of Minnesota aim to develop a vegetative and fire timeline of the past regional and seasonal climate within Menominee ancestral homelands (Upper Great Lakes, USA) by building research capacity to sample and analyze lake cores at a tribal college. Lake sediment coring is a valuable scientific technique employed to unravel the environmental history and geologic evolution of lakes and their surrounding landscapes.

In Menominee Ancestral Lands, lake cores can provide a window through time back to glaciation and throughout the Holocene (~12,000-years)–with signatures of past climate and water regimes, the forest and species composition, and adaptations over times. For Menominee living on ancestral lands continuously since the last glaciation, the landscape and associated Indigenous Knowledge (IK) hold an intricate portfolio of lifeways practiced through this time period (including a history of Indigenous fire, food, forest, and species management).

By building scientific research capacity at tribal colleges, this project provides transformational change for research done by and for tribes in climate science.

Project participants will become trained in Coring; Core Description; Sub-Sampling; and Charcoal Analysis. The project will employ a core barrel system to collect sediment samples from the lake bottom–using the manual coring device to retrieve the sediment cores. Cores are capped, labeled, and stored in a temperature- controlled environment.

The core will be analyzed for an initial core description to characterize sediment layering with both macrosopic and microscopic features–particularly pollen and charcoal. This process includes collecting geophysical data on the Geotek Multisensor Core logger (MSCL-S) with images at 200 pixels/cm to see sediment layering. We also begin to engage in a community-engaged research framework in ecocultural calendars to see how Indigenous Knowledge and western scientific knowledge can work together to inform adaptation and management decision-making to climate change(s).

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.