2025 Webinars
#4. Code-Switch: translating stewardship practice across cultures
Date: TBA
Presenter: Jonaki Bhattacharyya (PhD), Elemental Stewardship Consulting
Jonaki Bhattacharyya (PhD), is an ethnoecologist who does applied stewardship with Indigenous-led initiatives. She combines experience and training in field ecology, wildlife management, cultural ethnography, research, and facilitation to do work that is rooted in and driven by communities. Jonaki’s current work with Tsilhqot’in communities supports Dasiqox Nexwagwez?an (their Indigenous-led Protected Area initiative), community mapping and stewardship, cultural burning, and wildlife monitoring. She has also supported other First Nations and Indigenous Guardian programs throughout Western Canada in their planning, stewardship, and restoration work. When she can escape deskwork, she prefers to be outdoors doing fieldwork, walking in forests, riding horses, or gazing wistfully at other people’s dogs.
How does stewardship work when small, Indigenous-led teams take a relational approach, rather than a prescriptive one? We’ll walk through boots-on-the-ground examples of Indigenous Protected and Conserved Areas (IPCA) establishment, cultural burning, and wildlife monitoring from BC’s southern interior, taking note of nuances and lessons learned. From Indigenous practice to trail cameras, stories to sample design – it turns out that cultural and methodological agility are as important as a good pair of field pants.
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