The Yellowstone Altai-Sayan Project (YASP) brings together student and professional researchers with Indigenous communities in domestic (intermountain western U.S.) and international (northwest Mongolian) settings. Supported by a National Science Foundation grant, MSU and tribal college student participants performed research projects in their home communities (including Crow, Northern Cheyenne, Fort Peck Assiniboine & Sioux, and Fort Berthold Mandan, Hidatsa and Sahnish) during spring semester 2016. In the spirit of reciprocity, these projects were then offered in comparative research contexts during summer 2016, working with Indigenous researchers and herder (semi-nomadic) communities in the Darhad Valley of northwestern Mongolia, where our partner organization, BioRegions International, has worked since 1998. In both places, Indigenous Research Methodologies and a complementary approach called Holistic Management guided how and what research was performed, and were in turn enriched by Mongolian research methodologies. Ongoing conversations with community members inspire the research questions, methods of data collection, as well as how and what is disseminated, and to whom. The Project represents an ongoing relationship with and between Indigenous communities in two comparable bioregions*: the Big Sky of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, and the Eternal Blue Sky of Northern Mongolia.
*A ‘bioregion’ encompasses landscapes, natural processes and human elements as equal parts of the whole (see http://bioregions.org/).
Funders
NSF
Funding Program:
IRES, EXP PROG TO STIM COMP RES
Award Number:
1261160
Funding Amount:
$247,356.00
TEAM MEMBERS
Clifford Montagne
Co-Principal Investigator
Lisa Lone Fight
Co-Principal Investigator
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