Author: kadsand

Section 1: Research Questions
Explain what specific problem or issue you are addressing. Be sure to do this work in consultation with your partners. What research questions do you have about the problem? What do you want to test? What can you feasibly act upon?

Our main goal is to have more inclusion of Indigenous knowledge which is currently lacking within the Missouri Botanical Garden. Our current idea/project is to make a Self-Guided Indigenous Plant Tour. In this tour, we plan on having information on plants Indigenous to the Midwest. We plan on exhibiting the medicinal, communal, and ritualistic uses of the plants within the different tribes that use them. Information that will be needed for this project is: an interview from Robbie, articles based on plants that are Indigenous to the Midwest, and with that how that plays into the communities. We would love to talk to someone who has an insight from the indigenous community to help us with what limits to put on what we share. It is very important to remain ethical and keep all point of views in mind.

Section 2: Geographic Focus and Stakeholders
This could be as specific as the docents at MOBOT or as broad as the Tower Grove Neighborhood. Explain why you have chosen the focus and who your key stakeholders are. Tell us what you know about them and what you still need to know. Explain the role and level of involvement of each stakeholder.

We need help from our mentors at the Garden to get the information we need and connect us to others at the garden. We need to know which Indigenous plants we should implement our QR codes on in order to make our idea work. The visitors of the garden are our stakeholders because we need to ensure that they understand our message of Indigenous knowledge. We do not know who exactly our mentor is yet, but we know we will at least need to talk to Robbie Hart or Carolina to figure out what plants would work best. The visitors are who we are focusing on. We want to make sure they have something to take away from our project.

Section 3: Data Collection
What data do you need to answer your question: secondary research, interviews, surveys, focus groups, oral histories, ethnographies, scientific experiments? Drawing on your experience from your other CODES courses, develop plans for specific data sets that need to be collected. Each member of the team will be responsible for collecting and curating one data set. Raw data should be maintained in a shared drive accessible to the entire team. Determine what data you will need to collect and who will be responsible for the work. For each data collection activity in your plan, consider why you are collecting it, how and from whom you will collect it, and what methods will be most effective.

-Robbie interview
– Oral history (someone who represents Indigenous story about the plants)
– website data about plants that are indigenous to the midwest
-Tropicos
-ethnography on the indigenous knowledge already being told at the Garden

Section 4: Implementation

What will be the outcome of your research? Will you develop an exhibit, engage students in a learning activity, or design a digital project? Why is this the best plan for implementation? What do you need to know to make the implementation successful? How will it meet the needs of your audience? Who will do each part of the work? How will you assess its success?

The outcome of our Research is aiming to inform visitors about plants from an indigenous perspective. We want to carefully examine what plants we could highlight in our tour, and which ones connect with the indigenous people. We hope the signage around the gardens will help people engage and learn more about how indigenous people maintained plants. We will have QR codes to help the visitors explore the whole garden instead of just skimming through it. Implementing more of an indigenous perspective will help people understand from a nonwestern voice. We all plan to collaborate in an efficient way by all setting a time to meet together to conduct a website that will display the information of indigenous plants. We want to make sure the indigenous people are also being heard.

STEP ONE: SURVEYS

These surveys have been through the ringer. It was a difficult task to get responses on them for multiple reasons. In the end it took over a month to get responses on the surveys. The purpose of the survey was to have a specific audience based on the greater research question. The final goal was to ask these specific groups questions to gain their insight on progress that the research teams have made so far. The survey questions were about Indigenous knowledge and where this wicked problem currently places within the multitude of wicked problems present at MOBOT.

One of the questions asked was “Based on your answer to the prior question, how have you seen the Garden portraying Indigenous knowledge?” For some context, the previous question pertained to what the phrase Indigenous knowledge meant to them. One of the responses to this question was moving. The response was “We could be doing more. I actually have a hard time thinking of examples when the Garden has handled this topic well. I can actually think of more examples of times the Garden missed opportunities to present local knowledge and didn’t promote them very well through social media and local TV/radio spots (Kwanzaa, Indigenous Peoples Day, Japanese Festival).” This response shows one of the main HUGE aspects about a wicked problem that takes forever to be known. What I am speaking of is ACKNOWLEDGING THE PROBLEM!! Based on the other responses, no one else acknowledged or shed light on the fact that more needs to be done.G

STEP TWO: FOCUS GROUPS

The next step that was supposed to happen was that based on the survey responses, we were supposed to take a deeper dive into the responses that we received. We were then supposed to build a different set of questions to help us understand why one group of answers on the survey were what they were. In the end, what ended up ACTUALLY happening was the survey responses were not received until a month after they were needed so the research teams just had to take the deep dive without the background information, and actually just based on what we each thought would be a good idea to build on for the in person focus groups/interviews.

The focus groups happened on April 3, and they went relatively smoothly in my opinion. All research groups were set up in an auditorium room and the staff that could make it were there. To be fair, most of the opinions that were given that day were quite insightful, however, some of the responses felt roboticized. For example, when our research group met with one of the researchers, the responses were good they really were, but when they spoke it almost felt like they were showing the best sides of MOBOT and would never speak bad on the Garden.

DATA CLEANING/ VISUALIZATION

“Data cleaning is the process of preparing data for analysis by removing or modifying data that is incorrect, incomplete, irrelevant, duplicated, or improperly formatted” (What Is Data Cleaning?, n.d.). To ensure that there were no flaws in our data, we went through and transcribed our interviews, then cross referenced this with the notes and survey responses. This was then inserted into a website called Voyant. Voyant allows files of words to be inserted, then this information is transformed into a pretty photo based on most used words.

Resources

“What Is Data Cleaning?” Sisense, https://www.sisense.com/glossary/data-cleaning/. Accessed 12 Apr. 2024.

Source 1-

The Himalayas cover a vast mountain range of over 2,500 miles located in China, Bhutan, India, Nepal, and Pakistan (Himalayas – an Overview | ScienceDirect Topics). This specific part of the world has been described as “one of the most botanically rich alpine areas in the world” (Martin). The Missouri Botanical Garden had a group of botanists travel to track the change of temperatures among the plants within a 1-1-meter plots and comparing these plants to the same plants from past years. “[The locals] can’t find the plants they normally gather for medicine, incense, or food… because the plants aren’t growing in the same place, aren’t blooming at the same time of year, or are declining in quality” (Martin).

This study done by MOBOT has proven helpful for locals because through this study a threatened wild plant have a sustainable substitute plant found. This substitute plant would be checked by local people and doctors to ensure the cultural value is the same.

This source is important because it shows the rest of the world how real climate change is and to give solid evidence instead of just feelings.

The audience for this source is peoples who are interested in Indigenous knowledge and ethnobotany.

One note I had made from this article is that I found it kind of odd that all of the direct quotes were made from the same person, Robbie Hart. The garden has pushed for the inclusion of outside voices, but when there is an opportunity for those voices and opinions to be included, the only voice that is given is by a white man that appeared to be in charge of the entire process.

Himalayas – an Overview | ScienceDirect Topics. https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/earth-and-planetary-sciences/himalayas#:~:text=The%20Himalaya%20constitutes%20an%20impressive,abode%20of%20snow%E2%80%9D%20in%20Sanskrit. Accessed 13 Feb. 2024.

Martin, Catherine. “Highs and Lows: How Climate Change Is Impacting People and Plants in the Himalayas.” Missouri Botanical Garden, 8 Dec. 2023, https://discoverandshare.org/2023/12/08/highs-and-lows-how-climate-change-is-impacting-people-and-plants-in-the-himalayas/.

Source 2-

A library located in Vancouver made the decision to change the way that books were categorized in their library. The Xwi7xwa (whei-wha) aims to better reflect Indigenous knowledge peoples instead of from a colonial bias. These librarians of the Xwi7xwa want to get to know visitors on a “physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual level” (Worth). From the standard Dewey Decimal Classification system, Indigenous books are categorized with the folklore and fairytales compared to biblical information which is located in the nonfiction section. The work of the Xwi7xwa librarians has been revolutionary in the Indigenous community for the better.

This source allows the voices of the Indigenous to be heard compared to the previous article that only allowed one voice to be over powerful compared to the voices that needed to be heard.

This source teaches us that the opportunities to put the correct point of views to light helps round the story and take a full grasp of its entirety.

The source’s main claim is that from the first classification of book organization in libraries (Dewey Decimal Classification) “the systems also can’t easily incorporate Native American languages that use non-Roman characters in the spelling of certain words” (Worth).

Worth, Sydney. “This Library Takes an Indigenous Approach to Categorizing Books – YES! Magazine Solutions Journalism.” YES! Magazine, 29 Mar. 2019, https://www.yesmagazine.org/social-justice/2019/03/22/decolonize-western-bias-indigenous-library-books.

The Missouri Botanical Gardens (MOBOT) allowed the CODES cohort to take a deep dive into their herbarium archive to fully understand the biases that may be present in the specimens that are in MOBOT’s herbarium.

            These plant specimens that are some seven million in MOBOT’s herbarium all possess the following: barcode, list of location, genus name, species name, local name, and accessioning number (is a special code to look up a specific plant withing the Tropicos database)

            In my group within the research team we were given plant specimens mostly from Central and South America, as those regions of the world typically are helped by the local people(s) of that region to help the botanist(s) when they travel to South America to help with the language barrier and the insight knowledge these local botanists would have on the plants located in their own region. There was nothing in particular that stood out about the way the plants were presented within the folder.

            The loudest voices within the collection of these Indigenous plants would be the botanist that collected the plant originally. The bias the original botanists possesses can become prevalent within the description of the plant and/or additional notes that might not appear on the databased information that is available on Tropicos.

            There were no voices that had been silenced within the plant description itself solely based on the fact that local botanists assist with any plant that is collected in that local botanist’s area of expertise. The document tags only take a snapshot into the time that the plant was sampled, and it doesn’t show all sides of the story. It’s not like there was a livestream to witness the full interaction of the plant collection. Since the whole moment can’t be processed into words on a plant data collection sheet, this gives examples of a problem of what others might think about the original collector’s opinions.

            Following the guest lecture from Dr. Tisha Brooks in CODE 123, the thought process of what to do with the information we received from our garden partners only opens my mind to what all could be done with the few gaps that are present in the specimens. What we found in our archive dive can be the starting building blocks for our further research.