TRS is collaborating with the University of Montana’s Flathead Lake Biological Station to complete and pilot a non-market valuations survey for the research project entitled “Co-development of a survey instrument to elicit Native American preferences for preventing dreissenid mussel invasion of Flathead Lake Montana”.

The primary outcome of this research is a final survey instrument that will be used in a subsequent study to estimate tribal members willingness-to-pay to avoid dreissenid mussel introduction into Flathead Lake.  This project will contribute to the non-market valuation field through a peer-reviewed paper on how we assessed and addressed indigenous ways of knowing and land governance to develop a culturally relevant survey instrument.

Across North America, Indigenous people are seeking to reclaim traditional knowledge. In the last three centuries, industrialization, colonial religions, and social pressure have initiated an adaptation of Indigenous people’s economies, social structures, and conceptualization of time.Within the last fifty years, the Salish community of Western Montana has made substantial efforts to reclaim some traditions in the areas of language, arts, and science. Largely absent from these efforts are a reclamation of traditional concepts of time and subsequently, its association with astronomical knowledge.

This project highlights current research being conducted on Salish astronomy. This research relies on archival documents and ethnographic interviews to develop a review of Salish astronomical knowledge to provide a greater understanding of traditional perceptions of this information and how it was operationalized historically to shape temporal thought in economic, social, and spiritual activities.

The Indigenous STEM project is intended to develop guidelines and processes for the incorporation of Indigenous knowledge and knowledge practices in undergraduate instruction. The project involves engagement of students and community members (elders and other traditional knowledge holders) in a continuous investigation of the world understood fundamentally as the totality of relationships that determine individual and community health and well-being. The project encourage students to identify traditional narratives about events, processes and particularly the relationships that underlie events and natural processes.

This project intends to engage Native undergraduate students in all disciplines in the process of exploring and developing the use of Indigenous knowledge practices to generate understanding and promotes use of these practices in promoting individual and community health and well-being as they are defined by the communities themselves. The project engages community members as active participants in the process of identifying and sharing local and traditional knowledge.

The WILLOW Alliance for Graduate Education and the Professoriate is a collaboration between University of Montana in Missoula, Salish Kootenai College in Pablo, Montana, and Sitting Bull College in Fort Yates, North Dakota, to develop, implement, and study a model for the professional success of faculty and instructional staff in science, technology, engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) who are enrolled in, and/or descendants of, Native American tribes. The WILLOW Alliance project is funded by the National Science Foundation and aims to increase success of Native American STEM Faculty and advance knowledge about issues impacting their career progression in STEM fields. The WILLOW Alliance project includes: