Buckets of listening: Dr. Ryan Comfort, Ojibwe social scientist and storyteller
Exploring the intersections of environmental and health communication within and about Indigenous communities
This week for Healthy Media, I interviewed Dr. Ryan Comfort, an assistant professor in The Media School at Indiana University. Dr. Comfort and I met more than a decade ago as fellow graduate students at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Since then, he has taken off with a career examining the ways in which visual media narratives may help Indigenous communities meet their environmental and resource management goals.
Dr. Comfort is from a band of Lake Superior Ojibwe. He first got the itch to think about a career in the social sciences after working for the University of Wisconsin. He had a staff position there teaching the public about the history, culture, and sovereignty of tribes in Wisconsin.
“That job came out of an unfunded state mandate to try to solve some of the conflicts over natural resources,” Comfort tells me. “So, my whole job was really designed to prevent conflict over how we manage and use natural resources in the state.”
“There was one moment where I was scanning through a New York Times article. And I'm like, you know what, I'm out here trying to tell stories about natural resources and Indigenous work. And I was looking at this photo of a tractor in a farm field. And I thought, you know what, maybe I need to get behind the camera. Maybe I need to be the person who's laying out the dirt and making this media. That was kind of a moment. I think I decided to to get into this in both a professional and and academic context.”
And now, you won’t find Dr. Comfort too far from his laptop or from his camera, documenting the work of Indigenous folks who are stewards for their environment, food, and culture. He’s a pretty decent water skier, too, although he would never tell you that.
One of the things I love so much about Dr. Comfort’s research is that the personal and the political are never too far apart. He quotes the Commerce Clause of the U.S. Constitution in our interview, putting it in the broader context of the Marshall Court era. The self-determination of Native peoples in the U.S. is often overlooked in news stories and other media about the environment. To help remedy this, Dr. Comfort aims to show audiences the unexpected.
“There's a whole class of folks out there: Biologists, limnologists, atmospheric scientists, you know, you name it, who are working for tribal nations and trying to steward these environments in ways that reflect both traditional knowledge and contemporary science.”
“And there are tons of really cool stories out there. The idea of a Western trained, Indigenous biologist who’s translating traditional knowledge and using Western science and merging these things together really violates a lot of expectations about the way we've traditionally seen native people in media.”
Social media platforms are also a promising place to share these stories of Indigenous environmental stewardship. However, there are caveats to this social sharing, too. “Broadly speaking, there's a fear that social media spreads information too quickly and too easily into places where folks feel like they've lost control of it,” notes Dr. Comfort.
“Indigenous communities have had a very well documented problem with cultural appropriation, with theft of resources. We can talk about social media and the fears that it generates. But, the more I dig into the scholarship and the history, the more I'm finding it's it's not a new issue. This is something we've been grappling with, and with different mediums for 200 plus years.”
Since this is a blog about health, we talked about that in our discussion, too. In particular, Dr. Comfort highlights the importance of food sovereignty. The U.S. Department of the Interior defines it as follows: “the ability of communities to determine the quantity and quality of the food that they consume by controlling how their food is produced and distributed.”
Wild rice is an important traditional crop in traditional Ojibwe society, and Dr. Comfort notes how returning resources toward growing it can improve physical, mental, and spiritual health of his and other native communities. “It's about moving towards these culturally significant foods, the foods that were part of our original diets that were healthier for us before we were kind of forced into dependency on government commodity foods. Community health outcomes and the stewardship of the natural resources are both really tightly intertwined.”
While the wild rice may nourish community members, Dr. Comfort is often thinking about the scientists hard at work behind the scenes, too. “We've got scientists out there monitoring pollutants in the water to ensure that the crop can survive,” he says. “They're there monitoring silt and different sediment build ups. So, we can tell this really great story of of science that's tied to the resource that's tied to the culture.”
There are many other insights and thought-provoking ideas from Dr. Comfort in our interview below. At the end, he left me thinking about buckets. When telling stories about Indigenous science and environmental stewardship, Dr. Comfort faces a particular challenge.
“The vast majority of information about Indigenous folks that you probably grew up with is wrong,” he notes. “We've got this added problem of having to dump out people's pre-existing knowledge buckets before we can start refilling him with accurate information.”
A teacher at heart, Dr. Comfort offers us all advice for learning more about Indigenous peoples and their cultures. “I want to teach our students how to be cultural travelers, how to enter into a new culture with a process or an approach to just being open to asking questions.”
Me: “Yeah, listening.”
Dr. Comfort: “Yep, yeah: Buckets of listening.”
Check out the full interview below. Thanks for reading and watching!