Stanford Graduate School of BusinessEp. 45, Indigenous Stewardship for Sustainability
Stanford Graduate School of Business
A Conference on Indigenous Stewardship 0:05
Bill Barnett and Millian Chen host Professor Tadashi Fukami and PhD candidate Raven Alcott to discuss a Stanford conference on indigenous stewardship for sustainability. The organizers chose to open with local tribes near Stanford, the Muwekma Ohlone and the Amah Mutsun tribal band, before bringing in international voices from Chile and New Zealand. They designed the event with panel discussions between sessions so speakers could build community and coalitions around a shared vision of land stewardship.
What Makes Indigenous Stewardship Different 4:31
Fukami shares an example from speaker Jacqueline Beggs of Aotearoa New Zealand, where a tribe given back an island did not simply take exclusive control but invited collaboration with the government and other communities, reflecting a view of land ownership that differs from Western ideas. He notes indigenous communities often have long track records of sustainable living and want to share that knowledge rather than shut others out. Alcott points to farmer and doula Chassity Salvador, a Pueblo woman from Acoma Pueblo, whose work ties farming to medicine and shows sustainability rooted in land, food, and intergenerational care.
Land Return, Justice, and Revitalization 9:32
Millian Chen recalls a speaker describing a fifty-year fight to regain access to an island, only to find it littered with used car batteries and other damage, showing how difficult reclaiming land can be. Fukami raises Veronica Figueroa Huencho's idea of responsibilization without justice, where Mapuche communities in Chile are expected to lead sustainability efforts despite the harm industrialization caused them. Alcott explains revitalization as reconnecting land and culture after histories of forced separation, describing it as a path toward healing, while Fukami links this to Robin Wall Kimmerer's concept of reciprocal restoration, where restoring people's role in the landscape restores the landscape itself.
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