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Biocultural Initiative Recent News

Group photo of the BCIP team eating snacks
People walking a shallow stream
A person walking through grassland
People sitting at round tables during the ISE Congress
Person giving a presentation
Group photo of the BCIP team at night
BCIP team presenting in front of the crowd at ISE Congress
Another picture of BCIP team presenting in front of the crowd at ISE Congress
Presenter in front of a poster board
four people smiling at camera in the forest
Picture of audience at ISE Congress
Three people smiling at camera
Room of people at ISE congress watching presentation
Picture of Leah Bremer at the grocery store holding packaged bagels. She is surrounded by colleagues also looking at the bagels. In the foreground Gary is holding a peanut butter jar.
BCIP presentation on the big screen at the conference

Pacific Island students carry island-rooted research to the world stage

UH Institute for Sustainability and Resilience Biocultural Initiative of the Pacific cohort brings biocultural scholarship from Hawai‘i, Tahiti, Yap, Sāmoa, and the Marianas to the International Society of Ethnobiology Congress in Cairns, Australia

Since its founding in 2010, the Biocultural Initiative of the Pacific (BCIP) has sought to facilitate research that not only crosses disciplinary boundaries but also challenges the barriers erected between “science” and “traditional” knowledge. Biocultural research examines the relationships between people, culture and the living world, relationships that Pacific Islanders have sustained for millennia and that today underpin community resilience, wellbeing and biodiversity conservation. Yet the field remains under-represented and underfunded in the Pacific, and the people doing the work are often isolated from one another.

With support from Nia Tero, an international nonprofit supporting Indigenous Peoples, BCIP was able to support seven emerging Pasifika scholars to attend the International Society of Ethnobiology (ISE) Congress in Gimuy (Cairns, Australia), July 27-29. The Congress experience began with a Pre-Conference field trip on Country to experience a cultural burn led by the Traditional Owners, the Buluwai Rangers, alongside Tagalaka man Victor Steffensen. This special introduction to the land and aboriginal practices allowed the BCIP hui to become grounded in place and people, and this theme of resilience, adaptation, and reconnecting Indigenous Peoples with place carried throughout ISE. The BCIP faculty and students had various presentations and posters throughout the week, culminating in a a 90-minute “yarning circle” (talk story) entitled: “Rooted in Islands, Connected Across Oceans: Building Networks to Support Biocultural Research in the Pacific.” To a packed room of nearly 100 people the seven students described their own journeys through the biocultural space in the Pacific—outlining a field in the midst of a significant cultural shift. 

Shania Tamagyongfal, whose master’s research in Heritage Management at UH Hilo addressed traditional seafaring knowledge and the sawei exchange system of Waʻab (Yap), remarked that “meaningful scholarship does not require me to choose between my academic and cultural values; it can embody both.”

James Bamba, a UH Mānoa Botany undergraduate major and master weaver from the Mariana Islands, was encouraged to see evidence at the Congress of Indigenous knowledge being “elevated to what it truly is: knowledge. Not some secondary, lesser system, not anecdata, or ‘folk’ taxonomy.”

Botany doctoral student Maile Wong, who studies the restoration of Kānaka ʻŌiwi agroforestry, framed the emerging hui of biocultural scholars as practitioners of community research which is “legible to the academy but accountable to our people.”

What comes next

The Congress produced immediate, tangible outcomes: an invitation to develop a special issue of the Journal of Ethnobiology featuring the cohort’s collective work, plans for a writing retreat, and a set of proposals from the participants themselves for sustaining the network, including: cross-Pacific exchanges, mutual mentorship, and pathways for undergraduates to attend future gatherings.

About the Biocultural Initiative of the Pacific

The Biocultural Initiative of the Pacific is an interdisciplinary network at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa working to cultivate a community of practice across Hawaiʻi and the Pacific that supports the linked wellbeing of peoples and places. BCIP spans botany, natural resource management, Pacific Island studies, marine biology, political science and linguistics, and is affiliated with the UH Mānoa Institute for Sustainability and Resilience. Current faculty leads: Rachel Dacks (Natural Resources & Environmental Management), Gary Holton (Linguistics), Alexander Mawyer (Center for Pacific Island Studies), Aimee Sato (Hawai‘i Institute of Marine Biology), Tamara Ticktin (School of Life Sciences), Kawika Winter (Hawai‘i Institute of Marine Biology). Learn more about the faculty leads here.

About Nia Tero

Nia Tero works in solidarity with Indigenous peoples who sustain thriving territories and cultures, providing financial and technical support toward Indigenous-led stewardship.