The environment is changing and indigenous communities need to be part of the decision-making process, locally and internationally, from start to finish, to ensure resource security in the future.

That's the core of a new report released by the Alaskan arm of the Inuit Circumpolar Council this month addressing the issue of food security in the Arctic.

"You always hear people talk about stakeholders," said Carolina Behe, indigenous knowledge and science advisor for ICC-Alaska and one of the report's authors. "But we're not here to get a piece of the pie. It's already our home."

At more than a hundred pages long and written by almost 150 contributing authors from four regions and 19 communities in the state, this report is substantial.

It takes a holistic view of food security in the far north, evaluating key barriers to security, the main drivers of both security and insecurity, the necessary conceptual framework, and recommendations for moving forward.

What sets it apart from past research, though, is that it's an entirely Inuit-led endeavor.

"How the project unfolded is really based off of us having a need to do things in an Inuit way," Behe said. "That means we don't just start with a question and then go ask people to answer it; the question has to be driven by our elders and our community."

The council holds an assembly every four years in which the leadership from Alaska, Canada, the Chukotka region of Russia, and Greenland come together to establish priorities for the coming years.

In 2010, the council named food security as a focus for council member countries. Delegates returned to their home communities and developed independent projects to address that concern.

However, when the leadership first started talking to community members about the project, the buzzwords were money, calories, and nutrients, which missed the mark for participants at the local level.

"A lot of times we hear people using the word subsistence which is a legal term. So, that definitely isn't encompassing all of what we're talking about," said Behe. "On the other hand, we hear people use the words food security and they're talking about if you have enough money to go to the store and buy your food, if you are getting enough nutrients and enough calories. Those are important but they leave out huge parts."

The Alaska branch of the council decided to establish an advisory committee comprising local residents and traditional specialists from around the region that could better identify directions to explore for the report.

They include representatives from Inupiaq, St. Lawrence Island Yupik, Central Yup'ik, and Cup'ik communities surrounding the hub communities of Bethel, Nome, Kotzebue, and Barrow.

Committee members included indigenous knowledge holders Percy Ballot, of Buckland, John Goodwin Sr., of Kotzebue, Austin Swan Sr., of Kivalina, Inupiaq hunter and cultural anthropologist Qaiyaan Harcharek, of Barrow, youth representative from the North Slope Nicole Kanayurak, of Barrow, and youth representative from the Northwest Arctic Denali Whiting, of Kotzebue.

Then, representatives went into the villages and held community and school meetings and spoke with indigenous knowledge holders who had been identified by local tribal councils and their peers. They defined what the report's themes would be.

"Inuit were and are responsible for taking care of the resources we have," said Whiting. "Young people today need to understand what is happening and learn from our elders and other community members ways that we can help maintain our resources in a way that is respectful to our cultural traditions."

The committee developed the cultural framework for assessing food security through the lens of traditional knowledge and values with food sovereignty and environmental health as primary drivers.

"When we talk about environment, we're talking about everything around us, so our culture is part of that," said Behe. "We're not looking at humans over here and everything else over there."

For that reason, the project expanded well past the scope of just food security and went on to include everything from dealing with the history of colonialism to collaborative international management.

Within the framework of the report are six key dimensions of food security including availability, culture, decision-making power and management, health and wellness, accessibility, and stability.

The authors saw a lack of inclusion of traditional knowledge in the decision-making process as an integral component of insecurity in Alaska today.

"It's important to get people to truly understand that indigenous knowledge is a systematic way of thinking that holds methodologies," said Behe, "because at this point it seems like they continuously try to put it in a box."

She said it's imperative that both hard science and historical knowledge are used cooperatively from start to finish—from defining the question to developing the methods for gathering data and doing research to analyzing the information and suggesting adaptive strategies.

"If you were a researcher wanting to learn more about an ice seal—what food it preferred, where it has traveled throughout the year, how healthy it was, what changes in the water it saw, and the seal suddenly was able to talk and explain all of the things to you, the scientist, firsthand, you would listen," said Whiting. "The seal is there; the seal knows where it has been, how it's environment has changed. Just like the seal, we, the Inupiaq people are part of the environment, living and breathing with volumes of knowledge of our ecosystem. The difference is that unlike the seal, we actually can talk. And there is absolutely no reason for others to dismiss our knowledge."

In a way, it's a continuation of colonialism, said Behe, and for there to truly be a holistic approach to solving the problems of a changing environment with everyone's concerns taken into consideration, that intellectual inequality needs to be balanced.

"Whoever holds the knowledge has the most power because they get to make the decisions," said Behe. "And so people having access to information and people having equality and not being marginalized is going to have a huge impact on food security."

Inuit communities are already practicing adaptive management strategies that can be scaled up to both a national and international level.

For example, communities that have been fishing and processing that fish for generations are already aware of changing seasons, warming temperatures, diminished ice, and shifting precipitation patterns. Therefore, they know that sometimes they should wait a few days before fishing so that the sun will be out and they can properly dry the fish so it doesn't mold or get bugs and go to waste.

Thinking on a state and federal level, practices like those can be adapted to meet the needs of hunting and harvesting regulations to best care for the resources and the people involved.

Likewise, elders and youth need to communicate both information and priorities with each other to ensure the continuation of traditions for generations to come.

"In order for us to thrive, we need to work together," said Whiting. "Just as the traditional knowledge and western science has information to share and things to teach each other, so does each generation within our community. We cannot maintain our resources and have healthy communities without this collaboration."

Moving forward from the report, the council hopes to take this study to an international audience. The council holds consultative status with the United Nations Economic and Social Council and is a permanent participant of the Arctic Council.

On a local level, it can be used to begin conversations with state and federal agencies along the lines of future co-management of resources.

The framework outlined in the report can also be used to develop guiding processes in other areas as well. One community plans to use this as an example when it moves forward in discussions with a resource extraction company working on its land, said Behe.

But most importantly, she hopes it will help to insure a place at the decision-making table for Inuit people in the coming years.

"We have to make decisions through an ecosystem-based approach where we're considering all of the cumulative impacts of our actions, we're considering all those relationships, but we have to ensure that we're not so rigid that we can't adjust very quickly the way the decision is being made for the good of not just Inuit food security but everything."