Learning by Doing: Collaborative practice with the Native Village of Point Lay and regional partners on an NNA Track 1 project

Funded in 2019, the NNA Track1 project, Landscape Evolution and Adapting to Change in Ice-rich Permafrost Systems (NNA-IRPS) aspired to work with the Native Village of Point Lay and several regional partners to determine the best ways to engage the community in research and to ensure the research questions themselves and the data produced will be useful at the local and regional level. There is no roadmap for building trust, but by learning from researchers who came before, writing a framework for collaboration into the management plan and budget, and drafting a collaboration agreement with the Tribe in the first year of the project, we started to develop relationships during the first two “pandemic years” of the project when travel was not possible. In Year 3, our collaborative practices continue to evolve as we continue to learn by doing.