SMEA students support Indigenous voices in video storytelling project
SMEA professor Patrick Christie and SMEA graduate students were featured in a UW College of the Environment article, titled SMEA students support Indigenous voices in video storytelling project. The article describes a collaboration between SMEA, the Jackson School of International Studies (JSIS) and Chief Leschi Schools (CLS) that resulted in transformative storytelling videos about the Salish Sea and Indigenous culture centered on student voices.
The project sought to create leadership opportunities for students and cultivate a lasting partnership between the academic community and the largest of seven tribal schools in the state of Washington. “This was not a unilateral education project,” said Christie in the article. In 2021, he met with CLS to discuss what a collaboration might look like and aimed to emulate the concept of reciprocity while exploring participatory research, perspectives of Indigenous peoples and environmental justice. With support from Washington Sea Grant, the Jackson Foundation and UW’s Center For Human Rights, they created a trust document featuring eight principles to abide by while working together to ensure that CLS students would maintain ownership of their stories and feel protected in the process.