NMNH-Smithsonian Institute Recovering Voices Project with UHM Biocultural Initiative
PI: Emerson Lopez Odango (Pacific Resources for Education and Learning), Alexander Mawyer (UHM Center for Pacific Islands Studies) Joshua A. Bell (NMNH Smithsonian Institution)
This pilot project examined contemporary atake “homegardens” as dynamic ethnobotanical spaces of local ecological knowledge in Chuuk Lagoon islands, Federated States of Micronesia (FSM). The project sought to investigate the status and transmission of language-encoded biological and ecological knowledge in the face of ongoing and intensifying migration and diaspora, and to extend and enhance the reciprocal value of Smithsonian Institutes collections to homeland (source) communities. Our work was further contextualized by heightened local concerns about small island ecological and cultural resilience and food security in the wake of Typhoon Maysak in March 2015. Drawing on methods from anthropology, linguistics, and ethnobotany, we sought an interdisciplinary understanding of biocultural diversity in domestic contexts thoroughly entangled in various sorts of human and non-human mobilities. Our research team consisted of cultural anthropologists from the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa and the Smithsonian Institution of the National Museum of Natural History, and a linguist from the Pacific Resources for Education and Learning.