Background: Today, well over half of American Indian and Alaska Native (AI/AN) People in the US live in cities, a growing trend since the mid-20th century. Indigenous food sovereignty is a concept and process rooted in Indigenous self-determination of food, health, and nutrition. Objective: While often considered in the context of rural or reservation-based AI/AN communities there is burgeoning consideration of Indigenous food sovereignty and its unique manifestation in cities. In this paper we ask: How are AI/AN Peoples making and building community around food in urban spaces? How does this contribute to our understanding of Indigenous food sovereignty in process and definition? Methods: Our study is informed by lived experience and/or planning discussions of authors from two urban spaces in the US: Anchorage, Alaska, and Baltimore, Maryland. Authors include Indigenous and non-Indigenous researchers and community leaders engaged in community-based participatory research. Most authors have personal experience living in Anchorage or Baltimore. Results: We find unique or amplified challenges like high cost of living, poor access to land, smaller or different community and family networks, more challenging access to traditional foods, and centering AI/AN community ethics and values in urban policies. However, AI/AN innovation counters urban challenges to Indigenous food sovereignty and community is a keystone component of these innovations. Conclusions: We conclude with recommendations for future research, outlining important and impactful work to be done to support urban Indigenous food sovereignty. This includes quantitative and mixed methods studies, social networks analysis, and consideration for environmental health related to traditional foods and Indigenous land stewardship in cities.

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 bio-cultural 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.

Berries are the most harvested and valued plant food in Arctic and sub-Arctic communities and are cultural keystone species in the North. Despite deep cultural significance and sustained use across generations, the relationships among berries and people in Arctic regions continue to be underexplored in published research. In this paper, we consider the ways in which people relate to berries and promote berrying in ‘cold’ places using a case study from a sub-Arctic community: Dillingham, Alaska. We posit that the environmental elements of cold climates and the ways that climate extremes shape plant stature and growth ultimately shape the ways people steward plants and landscapes. Interviews with 42 berry pickers identified 29 different practices of berry stewardship. We found the ways Yup’ik people express and enact care and responsibility towards berry plants is different from other Indigenous communities that have been widely documented in the Pacific Northwest of Canada and the United States. Stewardship is enacted through a deep respect for the bounty that landscapes naturally provide, cultural values of mindfulness on the landscape, sharing and reciprocity, spirituality and tradition, sustainability and access, and individual acts of biophysical stewardship and adaptation. We show how stewardship and berry relationships are shaped by the climatic and ecological conditions of a specific place, and we identify aspects of berry stewardship and relations unique to northern and cold regions.

Community-based food cultivation by and for rural Alaskans has never been stronger. Rural gardeners, many Indigenous, provide their families and communities with affordable access to high-quality fruits and vegetables and other locally grown foods. Despite these emerging trends, there is sparse examination of gardening as a complementary, diversification, or adaptation strategy in wild food-centered systems and the interchange of values and worldviews among practices. Findings from interviews and surveys in Dillingham, Alaska, and interviews with community-focused gardens throughout the state, inform our research questions about the role of gardening in rural Alaska and the links between food cultivation practices and wild food traditions. In this study we find that home gardeners are essential pillars of food sovereignty and security in their communities, providing both gardened foods and high volumes and more diversity of wild foods. Gardening households increase the diversity of shared food resources in the community and serve as sinks of gardening knowledge and supplies for other community members. Traditional food practices and ethics are interwoven into gardening and have become part of annual food rounds and celebrations. Locally, cultivated foods are often described as a complement to age-old foodways that draw on histories and values connected to Indigenous agriculture and horticulture in the United States and Canada. Policies, practices, and programming of food and nutrition security and food sovereignty must consider the holistic food system and strategies that communities desire and invest in.

Almost 200 different species of berries are used for food and medicine by Indigenous Peoples, with unparalleled nutritional and cultural significance among plant foods. Environmental and land-use change is increasingly compromising access to, availability of, and consumption of berries. In this review, I consider (a) how climate and land-use change are impacting cultural use berries across species and places, as documented by Indigenous Peoples and in the scientific literature, and (b) how stewardship practices are being applied to promote resilience and sustainability in berrying landscapes experiencing stress. Climate impacts on Arctic and subarctic berry species include earlier ripening, changes in taste, or increased variability in abundance. These same regions are experiencing a proliferation of shrubs, while forests throughout the lower 48 and Canada are suffering from suffocating fuel loads and stand densities that are not conducive to berry habitat for many species. In the Pacific West, berries are influenced by prolonged droughts and increasing spring and summer temperatures. Climate change impacts are amplified by shifts in land use for forestry and agriculture. Biocultural stewardship practices, like low-intensity fire, thinning, transplanting, and cultural care, can be used to mitigate these impacts and promote berry microclimate habitats. There is opportunity for intertribal networking and knowledge sharing around berry stewardship practices that will support local and regional climate change responses.

In the Klamath River Basin (KRB) of northern California and southern Oregon, climate-related changes, such as more intense droughts, varied and concentrated precipitation, earlier spring and later fall conditions, extreme temperatures, and decreased snowpack have contributed to increasingly unpredictable plant reproduction and harvest cycles. In this study, we explore contemporary relationships between plants and Indigenous People in the KRB, identifying benefits of cultural ecosystem services (CES) derived from Indigenous stewarding and gathering of culturally significant plants, and discuss how these services may change based on climate change observations and experiences. This study contributes to the conceptualization of Indigenous Cultural Ecosystem Services (ICES), providing a framework for the incorporation of Indigenous concepts, approaches, and perspectives into assessments of ecosystem services (ES) and, particularly, CES. It highlights the value of Indigenous perspectives and observations of climate change effects on plant reproduction and productivity, as well as their contribution to cultural ecosystem resilience and adaptation under changing climate conditions. We propose that incorporating Indigenous concepts and approaches to assessing CES and ES could lead to more holistic management decisions and better-informed climate adaptation initiatives with greater ES for all.