Building community-capacity for contaminated riverscapes: Relational care-based approaches to Duwamish River stewardship

Abstract

Urban communities in Seattle's Lower Duwamish River have been underserved and overstudied. Enduring legacies of settler-colonialism, industrialization, and redlining reduced ecosystem functions, harmed human and more than human communities, and disrupted a myriad of biocultural relationships to place. Tribes, grassroots groups, and residents enact a range of stewardship practices through activism, policy, and community projects, holding agencies accountable for Superfund cleanup and restoration. The Duwamish Valley Research Coordination Network (DVRCN) supports stewardship capacity building through co-created, community-driven assessment, visioning, dissemination and co-learning across academic, Indigenous, and local knowledges. Weaving together a range of tools and methods including community-led environmental monitoring, mapping, contaminant testing, and storytelling, we mobilize polyvocal ways of knowing and interpreting watershed health to generate research priorities among networked organizations, as well as help contextualize situated and inform future stewardship practices. We focus on two cases of community-led contaminant cleanup and ecological revitalization in the Lower Duwamish River. We explore how this approach can enable biocultural research projects to challenge power dynamics, reshape knowledge politics, and reconfigure collaborations towards justice in the face of a changing climate.