This episode of Confluence celebrates Ada Smith, Ph.D. candidate in Forestry and Conservation Sciences at 老虎机攻略. Recently, Smith was announced as a winner of a the P.E.O. award, a national organization that honors a female graduate student making a distinctive contribution to education. Listen in to hear about Smith's previous research on Indigenous food sovereignty with Gitxaala Nation in northern British Columbia and the decolonizing research approach she used, which she has brough into her work here at 老虎机攻略. Now, Smith is working with ranchers in Montana on the challenges of adapting to climate change.
This episode is the beginning of a 3-part series exploring the power of collaborative work in natural resource conservation and highlighting the role of three dynamic, independent female scholars at 老虎机攻略.
Story Transcript
Ashby Kinch: This is Confluence, where great ideas flow together. The podcast of the Graduate School of the 老虎机攻略. I'm Ashby Kinch Dean of the Graduate School on Confluence. We travel down the tributaries of wisdom and beauty that enriched the soil of knowledge on our beautiful mountain campus.
Libby Metcalf: One of the things that's exceptional about Ada is that she's willing to roll up her sleeves and get her hands dirty around the topics that she finds the most interesting. Ranch work is hard work. It requires patience, it requires time, and it requires you to get up every day at sunrise and get out there on the farm and do the work.
Kinch: You just heard the voice of Dr. Elizabeth Metcalf, talking about Ada Smith, a student in 老虎机攻略’s PhD program in Forest and Conservation Sciences.
On Confluence, we like to highlight graduate student accomplishments and in this episode we celebrate Ada as a winner of the PEO Award, a national organization that honors a female graduate student making a distinctive contribution to education. Ada is finishing her PhD in Forest and Conservation Sciences, for which she received a prestigious NSF National Research Training fellowship. In addition to a Bertha Morton Scholarship Award in 2019, she's been lead author on three research publications and co author on others in her research areas of rangeland, social, ecological systems, climate adaptation and adaptive rangeland management and decision making. In this episode, we discuss her path into this important area of research which combines her undergraduate training and anthropology with conservation science we discuss her path into this important area of research which combines her undergraduate training and anthropology with conservation science and is built from graduate work she has done in community engaged research practices in indigenous communities in Canada. We're proud to share her story with you on Confluence. Enjoy the flow.
Kinch: Welcome to Confluence, Ada.
Ada Smith: Thank you. It's great to be here. Thanks for having me.
Kinch: So as with Chell, we're celebrating that you won the PEO Award. That's a pretty incredible award.
Smith: Yeah. Thank you so much. It's an honor to receive the award.
Kinch: You took a couple of cracks at it, right?
Smith: I did, yeah. This is my last year putting my name in the hat for it. I'm glad that I did. Yeah. For me, I think it was just really validating that others see value in my research direction. I think that there's a growing kind of awareness that rangelands in the US. Are really important systems to understand in terms of in light of climate change. 40% of the US. Is rangeland, and ranchers are incredible stewards on both public and private lands of our rangelands. And so, yeah, it was just kind of validating in that respect. And then it also is just another opportunity to be part of a network of women supporting women in education. I feel like I've been fortunate to have sisters around the world in different contexts supporting me. I grew up with sisters. I went to Wellesley College, which is an all women's school, and then I taught at an all girls school after Wellesley, and I just feel like I've had so much support from the women in my life. And so to be part of another network of women who value science and education and are kind of here to support one another is a great opportunity.
Kinch: Yeah. Tell us a little bit about that story to go to Wellesley. How did that happen? How did you end up choosing not just the female education component of it, but why Wellesley?
Smith: Yeah, great question. Well, I grew up in Wisconsin, and so I really wanted to explore different parts of the US. And I had my eyes set on the East Coast because there are so many fantastic colleges. But my mom said I could only visit a few schools, and she happened to be at an art conference in New York. So I was like, okay, well, I'll meet you out in New York and we'll visit a few schools. Wellesley was not on my list. I was looking at Middlebury and Bowden and Brown and some other schools.
Kinch: Kind of your standard high achieving colleges.
Smith: I think I worked harder in my life in high school than I've ever worked. I was very adamant about creating an opportunity for myself to kind of expand my horizons. But my mom had gone to Wellesley.
Kinch: I know you've gone to three or four, but we'll add Wellesley as a family.
Smith: I’d really love to go and see my Alma Mater. And so we stopped at Wellesley and after, I think I had five schools that I visited. And Wellesley was just incredible. The campus is beautiful, and I felt super welcomed by the cross country coach there. Cross country and running isn't my life, but it was an important aspect of my life. And when I'm kind of physically well, I feel like I'm also mentally, emotionally well. I wanted to integrate that if I could. So really welcoming coach. And coming from rural Wisconsin, I felt like it was a good opportunity to be outside of a big city, but not in a city like Brown or Yale in New Haven or something. So, yeah, I kind of narrowed down my options to Wellesley and Middlebury and then applied early to Wellesley and got in. And that's how it works.
Kinch: And that's that. And you studied anthropology and environmental studies there, which I found really interesting. It makes sense that you ended up in a PhD program eventually. That kind of welds resource management with social sciences. The interim step was University of British Columbia, where you did a masters that was, I'm assuming, more kind of resource focused.
Smith: Yeah, it was. My degree is technically in resources, environment, and sustainability. But my focus there in my master's thesis was in the food system space at Wellesley. I was in environmental studies and anthropology double major, but I did a thesis that focused on kind of food justice and environmental justice in Puerto Rico. And so my lens of kind of looking at the intersection between humans, human culture, human values, and environmental health was through food. And I stuck with that lens in my Masters, where I was really focused on Indigenous food systems and had a wonderful opportunity to work with an Indigenous advisor, Charles Menzies, who's been working with his community for most of his career. And my thesis there focused on food sovereignty and really what it means for Gitxaała Nation to achieve this thing called food sovereignty and what that entails.
Kinch: And were you able to kind of see some progress in that area while you were there on increasing food sovereignty, or is the longer lens your advisors were going back in time?
Smith: I don't know if I would say in the short time that you have to do a Masters, I was necessarily able to see these great strides or great outcomes from my work or our work, you know, my work with my advisor on this idea of food sovereignty. But really, that research enabled me to understand what food sovereignty actually is and what it looks like for one community in particular. Food sovereignty is something that looks different in every single community. And for Gitxaała Nation part of being able to achieve food sovereignty is really integrating Indigenous knowledge into education and food systems education. And so that was the focus of my thesis. And really, that research took a different approach than a lot of other fields. We followed, like a decolonizing research methodology where I essentially was based in Gitxaała Nation and worked in the community in a kind of a teaching role. And after a significant amount of time spent with Gitxaała , that's where sort of my thesis and research questions were better kind of defined. And so it's kind of a little bit backwards than your typical research approach, where you start out with a question that you have the answer and you go and kind of find the answer in community.
Kinch: Instead, you're finding the question from the community. And this is the community engaged research model.
Smith: Exactly.
Kinch: Which here we also coupled with the Indigenous research model right. Which is making sure from the very beginning the research project is defined from an Indigenous culture perspective, not from the outside in, but from the inside out.
Smith: Right, exactly. Yeah. And I'm really grateful for that opportunity. I think that it set me up for my research here in Montana, working with the ranching community in a really valuable way of putting kind of relationships first and trying to understand my research context by really embedding myself within it. And so, yeah, I'm sure we'll get to talking about my work now.
Kinch: Well, yeah, this is the segue, right. Because I'm fascinated by the social science comes in. A lot of it covers a wide range. Right. But if you've come from the anthropological tradition that's decades of internal debate built into that field about its ethical problems right. The ethical problem of the outsider coming in and studying, so they've kind of built up a certain tradition for thinking about that. Environmental studies, very various field as well. I'm just thinking about all your backgrounds are very interesting because they've evolved dramatically just in the last decade or two decades over their ethics, over how they define a research. Question so how did you come to kind of make that choice to do this kind of PhD.
Smith: Yeah, I think that from my master's work, I felt really strongly about having a community centered, relationship centered research approach. But at the same time, I felt like in that two years, I wasn't able to develop all of the kind of social science methodological skill sets that I wanted to. And so I really wanted to kind of broaden my skill set into quantitative methods and also kind of brought in my skill set to include more formal interviews. And I was incredibly inspired by the relationship that my advisor at UBC had with the community, his own community that he worked with. And so my master's work really allowed me to reflect on my positionality in my work and maybe question, okay, what community do I want to work with? What community or communities do I want to develop longstanding relationships with? And it takes a long time to establish trust with communities. Thinking about that, I felt like Montana is a home for me, and I really wanted to go back home and kind of work with a community that I felt like I would be more of an insider research with and a community that I feel just really connected to and deeply rooted in.
It was exciting to think about having a really meaningful relationship with a community like my advisor from my master's program had with his own community. And so that's really where my desire to come back to Montana was born out of. Yeah, exactly.
Kinch: We’ll say more about that about your Montana identity, a home, Montana home. This is from your background?
Smith: Yeah, I grew up spending summers in Montana. My dad actually taught a ceramics course here at the university of Montana and wood fired kiln out at Lubrecht every summer. He actually built the wood fired kiln in the my parents met here, and so I have grandparents still here. My grandma lives out in nine mile, and, yeah, I had actually come back to Montana for a celebration of life for my grandpa. He was a longtime rancher in the nine mile valley, and that was kind of at the end of my master's degree. And that drive from Vancouver back to Montana just felt like I was coming home. So I just had this kind of deep sense of like, yeah, I really would love to be in Montana again. And the ranching community, I have kind of family roots in, and I had actually applied to work on a ranch the summer after I defended my thesis. So I was already seeing myself back in this context, and so when the opportunity came up to work with Libby on a project, working with the ranching community, it was perfect.
Kinch: Literally just starting out for you.
Smith: Stars Aligned. Yeah, I felt super lucky. I remember running into my housemates room and just being like with the posting on the web, Libby's I think it was the human dimensions page. I went to my roommate's room and I was like, I think this is me. This is me in a description right here. I think I'm going to go back to Montana.
Kinch: Yeah. So your Montana story is a kind of a full circle story. You obviously grew up in Wisconsin, you went east, went way back west, and then here you are back in Montana doing your work. So research publications already under your belt, and you're moving forward on your research. What ties it all together? What's you're sort of deep concepts that you're working on? Rangeland in particular.
Smith: One of the most meaningful experiences coming back to Montana and kind of reintegrating myself into this context and this ranching context was working on a ranch, working for the Mannixes out in the Blackfoot Valley the first summer after my first year here.
Kinch: So for listeners who don't know Mannix Beef, I mean, it's a fairly well known, very important brand, of organic beef.
Smith: Grass finished beef.
Kinch; Yeah, grass finished beef.
Smith: And they have kind of a deep sense of stewardship and work with conservation organizations and stuff. And so I'm incredibly grateful for that opportunity to just get my kind of boots on the ground here in Montana and have an experience working on a ranch to understand the decision making context that my research seeks to understand better. And that experience I was so adamant about having because of my master's work and that idea of doing research where you really are involved in the community that your research intends to serve. My focus in my dissertation is really trying to understand how ranchers are planning for and responding to drought and climate change. And I'm using an adaptive decision making framework to really understand those factors that are either enabling or constraining ranchers decision making or ability to make decisions and plan for and respond to climate change. So that's kind of the essence of my dissertation work. But it's also part of a larger research effort. The Montana Drought and Climate Project is a collaborative, interdisciplinary project working with the Montana Climate Office to develop a suite of climate information resources for both farmers and ranchers that are really tailored to meet their needs in decision making.
Kinch: But I'm guessing there are some pain points there. Right there. There are some ideological pain points. So, so far, how has your sort of background experience as a insider to the culture allowed you to kind of communicate past what would be obvious political problems? And just talking about climate change, I'm guessing there are some farmers and ranchers in Montana who, for example, don't accept climate change as a reality.
Smith: Yeah, that's true. But they are kind of they are the people working on the land who feel acutely the effects of climate change. We're in a drought right now. And so I think in interviews and in working with ranchers, I guess on the ground and or in other kind of contexts for me it's important to communicate around like shared values and understandings.
Kinch: Everyone can recognize we're in a drought. Everyone can recognize we have water shortages and a farmer more than anybody is feeling that most acutely. And so that's the shared understanding whether or not what's driving it up above is this larger intellectual construct exactly. They can see on the land the impacts.
Smith: Yeah. Whether someone believes that climate change is caused by natural cycles or is human caused, the reality is that Ranchers are having to adapt and having to think about ways in which they're going to keep their livelihood in light of these events. And so that's really where the focus is. It's on the climate adaptation piece. It's not the climate mitigation piece. There's nothing in my work about blaming ranchers for their contributions which a lot of the literature does around beef production in the beef industry. And it's misleading because a lot of that literature focuses on a really narrow suite of indicators. And also beef production is incredibly diverse in terms of the types of management, types of operations and the aspects of the supply chain that are the most impactful in terms of climate change. So primary production versus your secondary processing, your kind of feedlot systems and the processing and distribution still don't have an.
Kinch: Industrial scale slaughterhouse in the state of Montana which is kind of amazing for me to learn. I grew up in Texas and then went to school in California where the food systems are huge. Right. And it's interesting that we have a feedlot system but we're still mostly shipping cows away to be slaughtered. Exactly. It's a huge constraint. And not necessarily with the right environmental constraints. I mean, in other words, it's ind of a negative from an environmental perspective, shipping cattle somewhere else.
Smith: And it's a constraint in terms of ranchers being able to diversify their enterprises and do more direct market local selling. My research really is trying to kind of identify some of those constraints to being more adaptive to climate change. But also ranchers are dealing with land use change, they're dealing with demographic change. There are all kinds of pressures and changes that people are adapting too. Constraining factors involve involved policy. They involve also maybe informational constraints which were trying to address with the Montana Climate Office providing better information. Yeah, but also some of these structural factors access are incredibly important and the types of programs, cost share programs and other conservation programs ranchers are able to participate in or not how those are actually working for people, things like that.
Kinch: Your work because it's intrinsically social and is about relationship building. I'm sure that applies double with the people that you collaborate with. So this would be Libby and your fellow graduate students. Tell us a little bit about that program and it's sort of team environment and it's collaborative environment.
Smith: Yeah. I have loved the collaborative nature of the Montana Drown Climate project that I'm on in particular working with Kelsey Jensco and Kyle Bocinski in the Montana Climate Office. And then Laura Young and Libby Metcalf, my advisor and other grad students. It's been super fun to feel like I'm part of a team and to learn more about the climate science aspect of Montana's reality right now and what is possible in terms of the type of information data and information resources that we're able to provide to the agricultural community. And so that's been really fun. I also just feel like my advisor, Libby, is incredibly collaborative in all of her work and she's included me on other side projects that I've been able to be a part of her kind of side project working from her dissertation on women in hunting. And then Alex has had some data that I've been able to work with with other grad students.
Kinch: This is Alex Metcalf, also professor.
Smith: In the foreseeable on sustainability and the beef production system. So I just feel like I've been in an environment here at the 老虎机攻略 and particularly in the Human Dimensions Lab that is super collaborative and inclusive. It set a standard or precedent for me going forward that I'd love to recreate if I have my own lab someday.
Kinch: Yeah, that and to bring it back to the top. The chance to be a mentor to other female academics, to pass that baton on as well. I'm sure as a PEO scholar that's going to be on your mind.
Smith: I would love to stay in academia. That's the plan right now. And to continue research and teaching. I find that I get a lot it's really rewarding to teach and to feel like you are I don't want to say making a difference because it sounds a little bit cheesy, but sometimes.
Kinch: It’s a cliche for a reason, right? Yeah.
Smith: To feel like you're doing sort of work that is potentially making a difference on more of a day to day basis because in research takes a long time and so you aren't able to necessarily feel the impact of your work for a while. And so I think teaching really adds the kind of day to day you.
Kinch: Can see those brains lighting up.
Smith: Yeah, exactly.
Kinch: I think you're going to be a wonderful professor some day. And thank you very much for coming and sharing your story with Confluence.
Smith: Thanks so much for having me. It's been a pleasure.
Kinch: If you like what you've heard, you've got Kate Lloyd to thank. She's a student in our MFA program in Media. Arts? Her deaf ear and keen editing touch have created the sonic landscape through which you're floating. We'd like to thank 老虎机攻略's College of Arts and Media for providing studio space and talent to support this production. Confluence is brought to you by the Graduate School of the 老虎机攻略. Innovation. Imagination. Intellect to serve the state, the region and the world. You can subscribe to our podcast on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify and Google, by searching Confluence 老虎机攻略 or click a link at the Confluence website www.umt.edu.grad. On the Telling Our Story tab, you'll find podcasts, videos and other media that help us share with the world the groundbreaking research and creativity happening at the 老虎机攻略. Enjoy the float.