Earlier this year, Indigenous peoples from across interior Alaska and northern Canada gathered in Fairbanks for three days of conversation and knowledge-sharing about the future of Indigenous-led stewardship. The gathering, Building Connections to Strengthen Guardians & Indigenous-led Stewardship, brought close to 100 people together at Pike’s Waterfront Lodge to explore how Indigenous Guardians programs can expand across the region.
Indigenous Guardians programs employ community members to monitor and protect their traditional lands, waters, and cultural resources, combining Indigenous Knowledge with scientific methods and maintaining community ownership over the data they collect. For many, they represent a meaningful alternative to extraction-based economies. As one participant and environmental justice advocate who grew up in Alaska described it, Guardians are about Indigenous and rural communities “taking the research, science and the environmental monitoring into their own hands.”
ACF’s Northern Latitudes Partnerships program helped organize and convene the gathering alongside the Native American Fish & Wildlife Society, Alaska Sea Grant, Alaska Climate Adaptation Science Center at UAF, Permafrost Pathways, and Spruce Root. Music, storytelling, and presentations by people doing this work in their own communities filled the program. Topics ranged from developing and sustaining Guardians programs to food sovereignty, wildland fire, climate adaptation, and tools for Tribal self-determination.
Canada’s network of over 1,500 Guardians offered hard-won lessons about what these programs look like in practice. The Kaska land guardians in British Columbia, for example, collar bison, monitor river ice and water quality, study bird migrations, collect hunter observations, and conduct first aid and water rescue trainings in their communities. Programs like theirs demonstrate that Indigenous-led stewardship is not just a vision, it is a functioning model with real outcomes for lands, waters, and people. As Guardians programming gains momentum across Alaska, the wisdom and experience of established Canadian programs has had an immediate impact on how these efforts are being shaped. There is a growing movement to expand such programs throughout the state, building on the foundation that Indigenous-led stewardship can and does work.
During the closing talking circle, several people called it the best gathering they had ever attended. One Elder reached out to organizers afterward, grateful for the energy of the young people in the room, their openness and willingness to listen and lead. He told organizers that seeing that gave him reassurance that the next generation would carry things forward in a good way, and that it allowed him to rest a little easier.
Participants left wanting more and planning for it. NLP’s Northwest Boreal Partnership is pursuing an on-the-land retreat in Yukon Territory this summer and working on funding proposals to deepen cross-border Guardians connections.
Guardians programs create rural jobs grounded in caring for the land, generate critical ecological data in under-monitored regions, and as countless participants and program members across Canada and Alaska have attested, reconnect people to their lands and practices in ways that matter deeply. The momentum is already underway. This gathering was one step in continuing to build it here.
