Centring care as part of Indigenous environmental stewardship: Collective learning through cultural plants

Abstract Stewardship is broadly defined as ‘universal responsibility of humanity to care for the planet, to ensure that it can continue to provide the essential natural resources for life’. Stewardship practices shape ecosystems, create diverse biocultural landscapes, and can enhance the productivity, availability and health of plants used by Indigenous Peoples for traditional foods, fibres and medicines. In this paper, we argue that care is one key component that differentiates Indigenous stewardship from other forms of resource management and has the potential to cross cultural and institutional boundaries. We consider how care, which includes many of the principles, motivations and intentions behind Indigenous stewardship, is applied in cultural plant‐rich ecosystems maintained by Indigenous communities in Southwest Alaska, Northern California and Coastal Maine. This work emerged from collaborations among allied researchers, Indigenous gatherers, and Indigenous scholars, spanning three cultural plant‐focused projects. Collectively, we conducted 109 interviews with Indigenous plant stewards, many out on the landscape. We use qualitative coding analysis and discussion to identify key elements of care in Indigenous environmental stewardship. Our results highlight the many, sometimes subtle and nuanced, ways in which aspects of care motivate and shape stewardship. We group these components of care into themes that are part of our proposed conceptualization of care as a central tenet of Indigenous plant stewardship. We focus on responsibility and relationship as key elements of care; these are precursors to the privilege of harvesting cultural plants. Plants are cared for as family members, and there are transferable elements of care among human and plant kin. Care transcends time, being received from ancestors and carried out for those yet to come. In some places where colonization has interrupted care practices, Indigenous caretaking today is part of healing and reconciliation. Our conceptualization of care as one part of Indigenous environmental stewardship has the potential to shift collaborative work, community dynamics and societal worldviews related to environmental stewardship. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.