Paul Burow is a PhD student in the sociocultural anthropology and environmental studies combined program. His dissertation examines the cultural dynamics of environmental change. He is a member of the Native Land Research Initiative, an inter-collegiate research group that studies the impacts of land displacement and climate change on Indigenous communities.
What is your research about?
I mostly do ethnographic and historical work. I’ve been working with Numu or Northern Paiute communities in the Western Great Basin of California and Nevada, the US Forest Service, and livestock ranchers. I’ve been investigating how climate change, land use practices, and settler colonialism are impacting Indigenous nations and rural communities and the Great Basin. This involved spending a lot of time out in the field with people for participant observation and interviews. I do a lot of archival research, as well as some surveys and sociodemographic and ecological mapping. I also invest a lot of time on community-led projects – these are things that don’t appear in publications but are part of being an engaged scholar and serving locally-driven priorities. This could be anything from historical research to support advocacy to ethno-geographic mapping or even planting trees in a native plant garden.
What Indigenous groups have you worked with the most?
I principally work with the Bridgeport Indian Colony, which is based in Bridgeport, California, in Mono County, and most of the community members there are Numu or Paiute, but there are also some Washoe and Miwok Tribal members.
I also do work with the Washoe Tribe. particularly on forest related projects. There are a lot of other people that I talk to regularly, and I participate in a couple of different working groups. One of them is the Bi-State Tribal Natural Resources Committee, a consortium of Tribal governments, and interested Native community members who get together to talk about land management issues in the region.
The Sweetwater Forest Resilience Project will be one of my post-PhD projects. I spent a lot of my dissertation descriptively looking at the effects of climate-related forest destruction, and I became really interested in what we can do to restore culturally important forests. The working group includes the Bridgeport Indian Colony, the Washoe Tribe, and the US Forest Service. One of the things we are really keen to do is open up a space for our Indigenous partners to bring some of their Indigenous ecological practices back on the land. We’re at the very beginning of this project, but we have funding from the state of California, and we’ll be experimentally trying some different activities on the ground in the years ahead.
There’s a big historical and institutional dimension to this project, and I’m working on the social science elements of it. There’s a lot of sensitivity among Native communities about their knowledge being extracted and used without their involvement as has been the case for many disciplines such as anthropology over the past two centuries. We are very aware of this and have spent a lot of time with our Indigenous partners talking about data and knowledge sovereignty, and how they can control information that belongs to the community. There have been recent policy changes in the US on the federal level making co-stewardship of public lands with Tribal nations a priority, and so we’re making sure that the communities are given a prominent role in leading these collaborative efforts so we can learn how to do this kind of work better and create spaces for Indigenous communities to lead and be stewards of their homelands.
What are some challenges you’ve faced in your research?
Some of the big changes that have been occurring during my field work were the wildfires in California. Some of these were million-acre fires that burned from one side of the Sierra Nevada to the other, but it’s also the smaller ones happening year after year that I think have some of the biggest impacts on communities. People lose their houses and livelihoods. It’s been very challenging for Indigenous nations in the Great Basin, and particularly for pinyon pine, which is a very culturally important tree species. The Washoe Tribe of Nevada and California has lost tens of thousands of acres of woodlands that are really important to the community. Drought induced forest mortality has been a huge problem. Both are linked to climate change.
But it’s also about land use practices, and what’s been happening in these landscapes. You have a lot of different land uses such as livestock grazing, for example. A lot of the ranchers I’ve talked to view environmental change as something that’s always been part of this landscape, but the grazing causes issues for Indigenous communities by impacting traditional foods. So there’s been a lot of contention and discussions of how to balance these different land uses.
One of the big projects in Mono County, California—an area I work in—has been trying to ecologically restore landscapes that have been used primarily for grazing. There has been a long running tension between land managers and ranchers about how much grazing is appropriate on the landscape, and there are also environmental groups and Tribal nations that are advocating for changes in these land uses.
Collaboration on these contentious issues is really hard. I work with a couple of different communities, and sometimes they are at loggerheads on different issues. As an ethnographer, I try to really know people and spend a lot of time with them so I can understand where they are coming from, and I share that in my work. I have my own opinions, like anyone, but I try and be faithful to the perspectives people bring because that is how you make sense of environmental politics at the community level.
How did environmental humanities help shape your research?
I think the exposure to different disciplines approaching environmental questions in different ways is really valuable. I do a lot of archival work, and my training in environmental history has been valuable for that. One only has so much capacity to be an expert, so sometimes you’re dabbling in other spaces. And that can influence your thinking in a very productive way. What I’ve appreciated about environmental humanities is understanding how scholars and different humanities disciplines are approaching similar questions, often using different methods or sources. That has really opened up my thinking about a lot of these questions in a very generative way.
The humanistic perspectives I’ve encountered are extraordinarily valuable for this kind of work, and I’ve found that a lot of my colleagues really appreciate what I bring to the table. I think the environmental humanities is really important to thinking about the climate crisis, the environmental crises that we’re living through, and how we might address some of these problems, including through creative approaches that are not about empirical explanation. Sometimes it’s about beauty, or some other affective orientation, and getting someone to think about nature in an unfamiliar way.
What do you seek to capture in your landscape photography?
I have taken tens of thousands of photographs out in the field. I’m always thinking about ways to convey to people the places I describe in my writing. I do repeat photography—I have different sites I go back to year after year to photograph them, and it helps me see some of the more subtle changes on the landscape even as I am critical of this mode of representing landscape change. There’s one particular place down in the Inyo Mountains that I really love going to, and I’ve been watching the progression of forest mortality with a sense of gloom. Most of the trees there were fairly healthy five years ago, and then, over time, you see a lot more death than disease in the forest. Sometimes I wander around and remove mistletoe from the trees or plant some seeds, hoping to help that place along. The photographs become a kind of record of that change. I find that to be a really valuable tool for thinking about change over time.
I also take a lot of photographs when I’m with people out in the field to give people a sense of the everyday life in these landscapes. There’s so much happening on these landscapes day to day, hour by hour that people don’t realize. Many people visit these landscapes a couple of times a year, but it’s different when somebody lives there and spends time there every day. Photography becomes a way that you can show the public what land use looks like on the ground.
What’s the most interesting thing you’ve learned about during your studies?
I didn’t really know anything about pinyon jays when I started this project. They are birds that inhabit the woodland, and they’re important to pinyon trees because they help propagate the seeds. Their beaks are perfectly designed for being able to extract pine nuts from the pinyon cones and then they plant these caches all over the place, some of which emerge as seedlings. They’re really interesting birds, and very culturally important, too.
One time I was sitting out in the forest one morning, and there was this loud cacophony of squawking birds that I could hear through the trees, and I came across fifty or sixty birds spread out across the trees moving gradually through the forest. That was the first time I became aware of pinyon jays through personal sensory experience. I’ve never forgotten that sound.
The birds have not been doing too well because of the loss of all these forests, and so that’s one of the things I’m starting to think about from a humanistic perspective. I’m working with some ornithologists to learn about the birds and think about what we can do to provide spaces for those birds to persist. That’s one fun moment from field work that grew into something much larger over time. It gives me hope for the future.