S3 E1: Research as Ceremony with Michael Buck

In this episode of FieldSound, we hear from Michael Buck, an enrolled member of the Confederated Tribes and Bands of the Yakama Nation and a graduate of the UW School of Marine and Environmental Affairs. 

Buck’s path in science has been guided by the traditions, stories, practices and knowledge of his community. His research is not just academic; it’s a living practice, deeply rooted in the concept of relationality and “research as ceremony,” where self-reflection, ceremony and reciprocity form a foundation for his work.

Buck is passionate about passing on Indigenous Ways of Knowing to future generations, and infusing oral histories of the Pacific Northwest together with documented histories — offering a fuller, more nuanced understanding of our region’s unique ecology.

Related links:

https://smea.uw.edu/currents/the-lost-fish-indigenous-traditional-ecological-knowledge-and-translocation-for-the-ancient-pacific-lamprey/ 

https://environment.uw.edu/podcast

Transcript

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Sarah Smith
One from the University of Washington College of the Environment. This is FieldSound.

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Sarah Smith
in the Pacific Northwest Mountains, meet rivers and a deep connection exists between the land

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Sarah Smith
and people.

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Sarah Smith
Michael Buck embodies this connection. As an enrolled member of the Confederated Tribes and bands of the Yakama Nation and a graduate of the School of Marine and Environmental Affairs at the University of Washington.

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Sarah Smith
Buck's work infuses the history and knowledge of the Columbia River tribal people

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Sarah Smith
in addressing the environmental challenges of today.

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Michael Buck
I grew up in White Swan, Washington. It's like a little logging town, very rural, at the edge of the reservation before you get to Mt. Adams.

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Michael Buck
But I was I was also raised traditionally in the Columbia River Plateau, ways of knowing, I guess you could say, and customs, language, Sahaptin.

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Michael Buck
I did my undergraduate work at Heritage University, which is a private university on the reservation, and I started the research that I'm doing now at University of Washington, and I started it as an undergraduate working with Yakima Nation Fisheries

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Sarah Smith
Buck's path in science has been guided by the traditions, stories, practices and knowledge of his community. His research is not just academic. It's a living practice

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Sarah Smith
deeply rooted in the concept of relationality and research.

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Sarah Smith
A ceremony

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Michael Buck
Yakima Nation Scholarship. And

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Michael Buck
I applied at Heritage University in

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Michael Buck
I thought about being a dietitian,

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Michael Buck
you know, were, you know, occupational therapy or something,

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Michael Buck
but I made some new friends

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Michael Buck
and most of them were in environmental studies

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Michael Buck
There's a lot of grants, There was a lot of extra classes, There was a lot of internships, there was a lot of working outside.

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Michael Buck
And so I took an internship with

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Michael Buck
Columbia River Inter-tribal Fish Commission,

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Michael Buck
and

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Michael Buck
that was an awesome job.

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Michael Buck
I was kind of independent,

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Michael Buck
you know, doing water samples and water quality

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Michael Buck
ecological response

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Michael Buck
And it was right on the reservation

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Michael Buck
where I grew up. So it was

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Michael Buck
things that I never looked at before,

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Michael Buck
So I switched from

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Michael Buck
biomedical to environmental studies and

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Michael Buck
the internship for Columbia River Intertribal.

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Michael Buck
This commission

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Michael Buck
ended early and I still had

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Michael Buck
hours to fulfill

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Michael Buck
And so I was transcribing elder interviews about a traditional food item that I grew up gathering

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Michael Buck
and it was a project started by Yakima Nation Fisheries Pacific Lamprey Project.

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Michael Buck
The internship that I was doing on Stream Health was in the context of Pacific Lamprey reintroduction

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Michael Buck
to a native fishery.

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Michael Buck
See these Pacific lamprey

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Michael Buck
were completely blocked.

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Michael Buck
And even Bonneville and The Dalles Dam and the John Day Dam were

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Michael Buck
completed

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Michael Buck
there was limited passage for

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Michael Buck
all the salmon species.

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Michael Buck
But

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Michael Buck
in the greater

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Michael Buck
perspective,

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Michael Buck
an indigenous worldview

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Michael Buck
and a historical

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Michael Buck
perspective, we lost way more

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Michael Buck
than just the salmon.

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Michael Buck
We lost

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Michael Buck
the sucker fish,

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Michael Buck
the movement of sturgeon,

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Michael Buck
the movement of

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Michael Buck
steelhead in a rainbow trout,

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Michael Buck
the freshwater eel, the Pacific lamprey, especially

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Michael Buck
I began to learn all these things from the elder interviews that I was transcribing.

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Michael Buck
And I was like, wow,

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Michael Buck
there's an environmental history

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Michael Buck
nobody even talks about except for the people that lived through those phenomena that I've been witnessing thousands and thousands and thousands of different species rushing up the Columbia River in the early 1900s,

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Michael Buck
that time.

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Michael Buck
And that

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Michael Buck
history

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Michael Buck
has been erased.

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Michael Buck
through colonization.

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Michael Buck
But the elders of the Yakama and the Columbia River tribes know that history.

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Michael Buck
They've seen it in witnessed it,

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Michael Buck
and now the injustices and disparities that exist

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Michael Buck
with those elders

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Michael Buck
and with our people

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Michael Buck
at the Columbia River

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Michael Buck
are

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Michael Buck
very visible.

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Michael Buck
this type of history and colonization and removal of traditional diets that was healthy, you know, and the introduction of alcoholism

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Michael Buck
rations from the government and,

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Michael Buck
forced removal, forced acculturation

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Michael Buck
where we weren't able to practice ceremony.

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Michael Buck
You know, those are actual policies put in place. And there's an oral history about this to the Grand Prix.

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Michael Buck
it rid of all the other native fish so we can make room for more salmon?

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Michael Buck
The logic of the uninformed is what one of the elders said,

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Michael Buck
And so most other species weren't accounted for.

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Michael Buck
Coming up the river.

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Michael Buck
And we're still suffering from this logic

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Michael Buck
we're still scarred by by those policies that were put in place

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Michael Buck
the lost fish is also

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Michael Buck
like a lost people,

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Michael Buck
you remove that traditional dietary

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Michael Buck
staple

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Michael Buck
and then you enforce policy and law

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Michael Buck
that those people can't practice the gathering of that traditional dietary staple,

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Michael Buck
they lose their culture, and then they also lose their

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Michael Buck
physical health.

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Michael Buck
And when the physical health goes

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Michael Buck
and you can't practice ceremony that goes along with gathering that traditional

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Michael Buck
you lose your identity.

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Sarah Smith
Buck is passionate about passing along indigenous ways of knowing to future generations and infusing oral histories of the Pacific Northwest together with documented histories, offering a fuller, more nuanced understanding

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Sarah Smith
of our region's unique ecology.

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Michael Buck
So my research now is taking a look at what's not working in the Western science. Well, so understanding that there's things that are working and the human dimension of restoration where according to the elders of Columbia River, was that you're directly interacting with the species.

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Michael Buck
I don't know how many scientists and fisheries managers I know haven't even into the river.

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Michael Buck
Most of their work is done in the office.

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Michael Buck
when you start implementing time, specific time and fisheries management plans to interact with the species itself and to get to know the people and the history and those those types of human dimensions is like relationship building with the land and the river,

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Michael Buck
Robyn, while Cameron and I got to meet her, he, she signed my braiding sweetgrass book

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Michael Buck
I always quote her

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Michael Buck
it's not the land that is broken. It's man's relationship to the land that is broken.

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Michael Buck
real sustainability takes place between generations. So when you're talking about big problems like fish passage and bringing down the Snake River dams and bringing back sustainability

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Michael Buck
native species,

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Michael Buck
you're not going to solve those problems in your lifetime.

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Michael Buck
developing a relationship with the river, developing a relationship with the species, and developing a relationship with young people and teaching them about that relationship.

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Michael Buck
so those younger people, the next generation can understand relationality and what it means to

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Michael Buck
to fish the Columbia River and camp next to those traditional fishing sites

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Michael Buck
to swim in the Columbia,

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Michael Buck
and to

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Michael Buck
catch a salmon

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Michael Buck
cook it right next to the river and then sing those traditional songs that our grandmothers and grandfathers sang and practice the rituals of,

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Michael Buck
gathering and sharing and ceremony and those ceremonial values.

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Michael Buck
When you teach them to the young people and they listen and learn and they develop that love for the river

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Michael Buck
and the stories, the oral tradition that goes along with those traditional foods, that relationship will carry on through them.

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Michael Buck
the practices of bio cultural sovereignty, biological and cultural knowledge that goes beyond just one generation.

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Michael Buck
ceremonial values

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Michael Buck
interacting with the river and developing relationships with the land itself.

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Michael Buck
And it's it's valuable to not just native people to reintroduce to our children, but it's also valuable

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Michael Buck
to all communities,

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Michael Buck
cultural revitalization is taking place not only with the Columbia River tribes, but tribes all over the country, all over this nation, have found ways to turn cultural genocide to cultural revitalization and reawaken their native language as it's happening all across the country.

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Michael Buck
And it's beautiful.

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Michael Buck
in your when you're going to these different ceremonies and you start understanding why those ceremonies were done

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Michael Buck
and you start understanding indigenous language

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Michael Buck
I mentioned I worked in archives when some of the transcriptions were done of the treaty signers of 1855,

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Michael Buck
The way they speak in English is like directly from their heart. You see that word a lot. My heart is this way, my heart is that way.

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Michael Buck
And I studied indigenous languages or languages of the heart. You're not a trustworthy person if you don't speak with your heart. And

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Michael Buck
in research for me and for a lot of natives that I know, we approach

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Michael Buck
research and the scientific method with that same kind of mentality.

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Michael Buck
And so care and relationality, which means that everything has meaning,

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Michael Buck
and relationality is like we have a relationship with, like I said, a river. You actually

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Michael Buck
you make time to go there.

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Michael Buck
You have a relationship with the species, you actually gather it and nowhere where it swims and you know

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Michael Buck
the migration patterns that it follows and you know, the history of the tributaries.

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Michael Buck
having a relationship with history and places and the river

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Michael Buck
people and and in ceremony,

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Michael Buck
everything has a meaning.

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Michael Buck
And when you talk in the English language as each researching ceremony, that means you approach the scientific method in that same ceremonial mindset where everything has meaning and everything can to be important to the research,

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Sarah Smith
At the intersection of tradition, knowledge

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Sarah Smith
and the natural world,

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Sarah Smith
Michael Buck weaves together the past and the present

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Sarah Smith
For the future benefit of both people

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Sarah Smith
and the environment.

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Sarah Smith
A big thank you to our guest, Michael Buck.

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Sarah Smith
if you'd like to learn more about his work,

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Sarah Smith
can visit our website at Environment.UW.edu.

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Sarah Smith
From all of us at FieldSound. Thanks for listening. See you next time.