Context

My ecological restoration and design research is situated in the North American context. I am a settler scholar living and working in the Western United States, specifically in Wašišiw lands known today as California and Nevada. This ecological context is defined by a remarkably high level of biodiversity in the bioregions of the Western United States (California Department of Fish and Wildlife 2024). Settler occupation of the land by groups of non-Indigenous people, mainly of European descent, in what is today California has defined the eco-social context of this region since at least the early eighteenth century (Akins and Bauer 2021; Anderson 2013). Before sharing examples from this context, I will introduce key concepts from design and restoration, describing the historical and contemporary relationship between these two fields.

Introducing Ecological Restoration and Design

Ecological restoration is a vast amalgam of material and cultural practices emerging from multiple places and knowledge systems (Higgs 2003; Kimmerer 2011; Tomblin 2009). Though varied in scale and context, these practices share a belief that humans can be agents of positive change in the face of ecosystem degradation and harm. Far from comprising a singular community or discipline, restoration has been described by David Tomblin as a “heterogeneous apparatus of multiple discourses concerning how humans should relate to nonhuman nature and human living environments” (2009: 187).

Tomblin (ibid.) suggests that these multiple restoration discourses comprise four adjacent and connected epistemic sub-cultures: environmental justice restoration, holistic restoration, Indigenous Peoples’ restoration, and institutional restoration. Each group practices restoration in ways that serve their communities or institutions differently. The key attributes that differentiate restoration approaches and projects are typically project goals, how goals relate to historical conditions, how restoration groups relate to state power, project funding and partnerships for restoration, the physical methods used to restore land, and how the physical labor required in the project is done (Sides 2023b). Approaches to restoration range widely, from a completely hands-off rewilding approach that precludes any human intervention in a site, to precisely engineered restoration approaches that use the latest geospatial technologies and digital models.

Much like restoration, design is also a field of research and practice spanning multiple subfields and movements. Often eluding singular definitions, design has been described as the process of “devis[ing] courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones” (Simon 1969: 111). With this definition in mind, and as this article will demonstrate, design is explicitly and implicitly present in the work of ecological restoration. As a design researcher, I broadly conceptualize what comprises design, including recognizing that design is not just about creation; it is also a way of diagnosing or understanding problems (Irwin 2019). Design research draws on ideas from social sciences and the arts, but it is a form of inquiry unto itself, asking questions about how and why things are created, by whom, for whom, and the implications of these answers. This line of questioning differentiates design from the natural sciences, where questions focus on establishing certain causal relationships or characterizing material phenomena. Foundational research by the Royal College of Art in the 1970s into design education argues that when compared to the work of the sciences or the humanities, design reflects a third way of inquiring and doing (Baynes et al. 1977). Whereas scientific work values “objectivity, rationality, neutrality, and a concern for ‘truth’” (ibid.: 222) and accordingly makes use of controlled experimentation, analysis, and classification, what Nigel Cross (1982) has called designerly work values practicality, ingenuity, empathy, and concern for appropriateness and is based on activities of pattern synthesis, construction, and novel form creation. While scientific values are essential to restoration, scientific methods alone are unlikely to surface and reproduce the meaningful but non-material social, cultural, and political dimensions of ecosystem care and repair.

Over the past century, design has, according to scholar Richard Buchanan, evolved from “a trade activity, to a segmented profession, to a field for technical research, and to what now should be recognized as a new liberal art of technological culture” (1992: 5). This expansion of what design means has also been accompanied by the acknowledgment of design as a fundamental human capability. Scholars like Ezio Manzini (2015) argue that everyone designs to solve problems in their local contexts; thus, formally trained experts make up only a small portion of everyone who designs. As I will detail in subsequent sections, these changes and other emerging movements in design mean that deepening the relationship between restoration and design and recognizing the ever-present role of design in restoration offers ways to address some of ecological restoration's shortcomings. First, I review some of the status-quo ways of understanding the role of design in restoration.

The Need for Change in Ecological Restoration

In recent decades, ecological restoration has been widely promoted as an environmental management strategy, exemplified by the United Nations Environment Programme's designation of the decade from 2020 to 2030 as the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration. Campaigns like the UN Decade often use an “optimistic ‘win-win’ framing” for restoration (Anderson and Woelfle-Hazard n.d.). Yet, as Tomblin notes, “the recent emergence of an increasingly pervasive restoration narrative in no way consists of a unified vision promoted from a singular institutional standpoint” (2009: 187). A group of scholars and practitioners identifying as “critical restorationists” are advancing, through research, practice, and teaching, critical “social-scientific questions” (Anderson and Woelfle-Hazard n.d.) about the work of restoration. Planning institutional restoration projects often centers on the epistemic culture of Western scientific frameworks. Critical restorationists argue that knowledge and inquiries that are based in ecological sciences alone are insufficient to guide restoration projects toward just and inclusive outcomes, claiming that “application of objective, apolitical ecological knowledge for better management elides questions of who reaps ecocultural and economic benefits within extant political- economic structures” (Anderson and Woelfle-Hazard n.d.: 2). What's more, as many practitioners and scholars point out, the push to scale restoration practices without questioning the politics of “restoration for whom, by whom?” (Elias et al. 2021) will not address the root causes of environmental degradation (Anderson et al. 2022).

Restoration based solely on Western ecological sciences often overlooks the social and human dimensions of ecosystems because of an inherent dualism or binary between people and nature embedded in that intellectual tradition.¹ Ecofeminist author Val Plumwood defines dualism as “the process by which contrasting concepts (for example, masculine and feminine gender identities) are formed by domination and subordination and constructed as oppositional and exclusive.” (1993: 31). She writes that Western culture is defined by “a network of dualisms” (idem: 2) like nature/culture and mind/nature, or what Deborah Bird Rose calls “a hyperseparated dualism, or incommensurable and oppositional difference, between humans and other animals” (2011: 34). Dualistic thinking in ecological science leads restorationists to think that it is possible to restore a natural place without restoring the human relationships within that place.

Restoring relationships and a broader sense of relationality between groups of people and between people and nature is required to enact durable, holistic restoration of living systems. In settler colonial contexts, dualistic thinking is implicated in the exclusion and erasure of past, present, and future stewardship of Indigenous People (Anderson 2013). Restoration projects, especially in North America, often strive for a “wilderness ideal” (Comer 1997; Cronon 1996), a version of nature free from human presence or interference. This ideal reflects a colonial nature–culture divide while erasing the ways that people lived in and beneficially disturbed places in ways that promoted ecosystem health (Anderson 2013; Kimmerer 2011).²

For restoration work to holistically address the causes and symptoms of environmental degradation, it must transcend these binaries, enacting a kind of relational repair that restores relationships not only between people and nature but also between groups of people whose marginalization is linked to environmental harm (Almassi 2017). Here, relationality serves as a counterpart to dualism, suggesting “that life is not lived under conditions of separation but of the radical interdependence of everything that exists” (Escobar 2021: 26). In this case, the recognition and restoration of relationality I am calling for in restoration is somewhat broad—the recognition and practice of non-separation between people and nature, which will manifest locally in different ways.³ Before describing how this vision may be realized by embracing design in restoration, I review a contemporary debate that centers on the appropriate role of human intention in restoration.

A Contemporary Debate: Considering the Design in Designer and Novel Ecosystems

A significant contemporary debate in ecological restoration concerns the creation and management of what are called novel and designer ecosystems. Examining this debate with an emphasis on the implied meanings of “design” used therein shows both the promise and perils of framing restoration as a design activity. The concept of “novel ecosystems” was first written about in 1997 and introduced to the restoration and conservation community in 2006 by Richard Hobbs. Carolina Murcia and colleagues define a novel ecosystem as “a new species combination that arises spontaneously and irreversibly in response to anthropogenic land-use changes, species introductions, and climate change, without correspondence to any historic ecosystem” (2014: 548). Novel ecosystems vary in the amount of human intentionality that produces them, ranging from “accidental” to “by design.” Novel ecosystems may emerge following human activities like mining and intensive agriculture. Interventions like afforestation and land rewetting can also create them.

The novel ecosystem debate in the restoration community boils down to three key questions: (1) Are novel ecosystems real ecological phenomena distinct from other ecosystem states? (2) Should the practice of creating novel ecosystems be considered restoration? (3) Is orienting restoration work toward novel ecosystem creation a good idea? Rather than extensively review this debate on ecological terms, I ask, what are the implicit and explicit meanings of design held by those who promote and oppose the novel ecosystem concept? I focus on two general groups in the debate to review the implications for design found therein: (1) those who generally promote the novel ecosystem concept and (2) those who resist or reject it.

The first group includes scholars, practitioners, and environmental organizations worldwide who propose that novel ecosystems are distinct ecological phenomena that should be embraced in restoration practice. While they recognize that this stance comprises a “significant widening of the term ‘restoration.’” (Hertog and Turnhout 2018: 2), these proponents tend to be pragmatists who advocate for the wise and scientific investigation into best practices for directing novel ecosystems. Proponents of the novel ecosystem concept suggest that restoration should look to the future just as much toward the past, meaning that restorationists ought to steer ecosystems toward certain functions rather than particular assemblages of species.

While I feel wary of introducing yet another binary to restoration practice in defining “novel” versus “historic” ecosystems, this proposal is compelling. For one, it opens the door to the wise engagement of design in ecosystems, as conveyed in the reflection by John Tillman Lyle, “The point is that if we are going to design ecosystems (and we continually do so whether we care to face all of the implications or not) then it will be best to design them intentionally, making use of all the ecological understanding we can bring to bear” (1985: 16). This framing perhaps breaks down the human–nature binary by acknowledging that human intent applied to ecosystems is neither new nor inherently problematic. Yet, I fear that the “design” referred to in these proposals is overly oriented toward optimization. Furthermore, these discourses of ecosystem novelty often obscure or erase the Indigenous land management regimes and their impacts on landscapes over millennia. For example, Indigenous People in California have long designed ecosystems through a process referred to as “tending the wild” (Anderson 2013: 1) or steering ecosystems toward increases in biodiversity and resilience, yielding extensive culturally- modified landscapes (Klinger 2006). Debates about ecosystem novelty too often ignore these longstanding human roles in ecosystem design.

Those who oppose the novel ecosystem concept do so on several grounds. Scholars Murcia and colleagues (2014) question the novel ecosystem premise on an ecological basis. Some conservationists and restorationists fear that “accepting human-altered ecosystems constitutes a ‘license to trash,’ a free pass for business-as-usual pollution and natural resources depletion” (Martin 2022: 227). I share this concern. Yet, we must move the conversation past whether humans should intervene in wild nature toward how humans might best act as part of wild nature. It has also been suggested that negative connotations of the word “design” is part of the resistance to this concept. Matthew Ross and colleagues note that for some restoration and conservation practitioners, “the word design convey[s] an idea of fake nature” (2015: 421). This association of design with artificiality must be countered in theory and practice if we are to confront the human–nature binary and open the possibility for human activity ever to be considered wild.

The concept of designer ecosystems takes the novel ecosystem idea one step further. These are “explicitly designed ecosystems aimed at delivering new functions previously not provided by those ecosystems or optimized functions, or both.” (Hobbs et al. 2013: 261). One example is mitigation banks, compensatory restoration efforts to offset development in wetlands and other protected habitats. Living roofs and water treatment biofiltration systems are also cited as examples of “highly contrived” (ibid.) designer ecosystems. Per Ross and colleagues, embracing designer ecosystems reflects a “future-centric, goal-oriented approach to applied ecology with a primary focus on human well-being and working with nature in the face of rapidly changing environmental conditions” (2015: 421). While these initiatives are not all bad, they face a high degree of scrutiny from restorationists and the public, and rightfully so. My concern is that by labeling these projects “designer,” we are doing a disservice to design, keeping it in the realm of the artificial. The “design” in these projects is an optimization-based approach in which human intention is dominant. These projects ought to be named otherwise to widen and shift the connotations of “design.”

Reviewing the novel ecosystem discourse reveals that the question of whether human design in ecosystems inherently produces undesirable artificiality is still being debated in the ecosystem restoration field. Unfortunately, the conceptualization of design as producing artificiality is self-reinforcing. If we consider all we design inherently unnatural, we are bound to continue seeing ourselves as separate from nature. Our design choices will inherently reflect that dualism when we see ourselves as separate from nature. For design to be a valuable framework to drive deeper human engagements in landscapes, we must move beyond the idea that human design produces artificiality to the possibility that we can craft meaningful, natural interventions. By casting human creations into the realm of the natural world, we refute the nature–culture and nature–human binaries at the heart of many contemporary environmental debates.

Relationality and Critical Movements in Design

In the same recent decades, during which ecological restoration found both widespread promotion and critique, design has also grown and changed through engagement with people outside of its core community of scholars and practitioners. In the late 1990s through mid-2010s, human-centered design (HCD) was widely recognized everywhere from business schools to government agencies. This movement in design primarily focused on the humanization of technological systems to reflect the diversity of user experiences and the needs of real people. The HCD movement brought design methods and thinking to the vanguard and improved the usability of many technologies. Yet, the HCD approach has been critiqued for its largely apolitical promotion of design within a capitalist paradigm (Escobar 2018) and for its tendency to, in practice, support “gratuitous innovation, novelty, and the generation of millions of ‘solutions’ to non-problems” (Willis 2021: 82). These critiques have been advanced by what is known as the critical design studies movement.

Over the past two decades, critical design scholars have politicized the work of design, producing what design scholar Damian White calls “compelling arguments for the proposition that politicized processes of making, of prefiguring, are going to be constitutive features of the attempt to build survivable futures on a rapidly warming planet” (2021: 200). While the field of critical design studies is not a singular set of ideals, its expansion across domains and geographies has led to meaningful changes in design research and practice. Co-design and participatory design methodologies that have long worked to disrupt designer-as-expert dynamics have been joined by other powerful movements toward design justice (Costanza-Chock 2020) and decolonizing of design (Danah Abdulla et al. 2019; Schultz et al. 2018), to name a few. Together, this amalgam of heterogeneous movements has produced both sensibilities and tools for designing that re-cast designers as facilitators of emergent, community-driven practices, intentionally phasing out old ways of domination, optimization, and control by design.

Scholars of critical design call for foregrounding relationality as a reorientation for designing. These scholars posit that by designing to restore relationships, we can transcend the binaries in Western ways of knowing that design has previously reproduced. One such scholar is Arturo Escobar, a Colombian anthropologist who proposes a reorientation of design toward recognizing our fundamental relationality. To design our world differently, Escobar argues, requires a reorientation such that “design/ing emerges as a praxis of healing the web of life . . . a weaving and repairing of the damage done by the ontology of separation” (2021: 40). To Escobar, desirable social and ecological transitions can only be realized through what he calls “re-conceiving reality in terms of radical relationality” (idem: 39) How do we enact a praxis of relational designing? Scholars Erica Dorn and Tara Dickman urge designers to adopt “longer-term commitments to places and projects . . . and relationship-first ethics” (2022: 7). These calls for relational designing are certainly salient in the context of ecosystem restoration. In the following sections, I will elaborate on how these conceptual threads from design are materializing in restoration practice.

Mimicry as a Relational Design Posture in Restoration

In this section, I show how new postures for designing are emerging in the practice of restoration. Scholarship from Transition Design, an emerging field of design research and practice, argues that new postures and mindsets for designing are required in the transition to ecologically sound and socially just futures (Irwin 2019). Emergent design postures for restoration offer thoughtful alternatives to non-interventionist rewilding and design-driven landscape optimization. If used to guide restoration along with ecological science, these postures can provide ways to thoughtfully move past the human–nature and nature–culture divides found in restoration practice.

Mimicry is an example of a contemporary restoration practice that I conceptualize as a relational design approach. Mimicry is the process through which desirable landscape processes typically propagated by non-human forces are replicated through human interventions. This approach is a well-accepted restoration method in a variety of landscape types, backed up by scientific evidence (Albertson et al. 2022; Klinger 2008; Temmink et al. 2020). Mimicry often appears as a method within the framework of process-based restoration. This movement in restoration, often referred to in riverscape restoration, is an intentional departure from engineering-based restoration. Proponents of process-based restoration contend that the effectiveness of engineering-based restoration is limited by its “precisionism and the need for certainty [and] an emphasis on stability” (Shahverdian et al. 2019: 11). Process-based restoration approaches make an intentional move away from mechanistic applications of design toward more emergent and, perhaps, relational ways of working. Here, I review the practice of mimicry in restoration to suggest how it is an implicitly designerly mode of restoration practice.

Beaver mimicry and fire mimicry are two key mimicry examples worth consideration for how they exemplify mimicry as an emerging relational design posture in restoration. Beaver mimicry is a process-based restoration method that involves “installation of in-stream structures that mimic natural beaver dams” (Albertson et al. 2022: 105). Beaver mimicry work is based on the creation of beaver dam analogs, generally called beaver mimicry structures. These structures alter river and stream flows, often locally slowing down the flow of a river. Slower water in a river or stream offers numerous ecological benefits, like increased wetting of surrounding habitat, habitat creation for different aquatic fauna, and decreased waterway erosion. These structures are often simple and low-cost to install and may exist in place for only one season, requiring return maintenance and engagement from practitioners. Figure 1 shows restoration volunteers building beaver mimicry structures in the Lake Tahoe Basin. The need for beaver mimicry in rivers and streams is often driven by historic beaver removal from ecosystems where they once lived. The use of beaver mimicry in a given stream or river restoration may or may not be part of a larger initiative to return beavers to an ecosystem. Tori Pfaeffle et al. (2022) note that while the ecological benefits of beaver mimicry are still being studied and proven scientifically, the practice has seen an upswell of enthusiasm and adoption by what Ben Goldfarb calls “beaver believers” (2018: 18).

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Ecological restoration volunteers in South Lake Tahoe, CA, add woody material across a creek to mimic the current-slowing effects of beaver dams (photo by the author)

Citation: Environment and Society 15, 1; 10.3167/ares.2024.150104

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How can restorationists make sense of the human mimicry of non-human ecological processes? Mimicry has been described as a restoration method, but I conceptualize it as a relational design posture for restoration. Whereas a method connotes a specific means to a particular end, a design posture refers to a stance from which a designer works. Contemporary design movements such as Transition Design encourage designers to be flexible and reflective in their design postures, encouraging self-awareness.⁴ Mimicking beavers is a way of restoring relationships because it requires us to deeply consider a beaver's needs, preferences, and mentality so that our work can invite their return. Cleo Woelfle-Erskine writes about how engaging with and considering beavers in the context of restoration encourages us to “think about interdependence and practices of care” (2019: 110). Engaging in beaver mimicry is one step toward what Woelfle-Erskine calls “re-imagin[ing] restoration projects as invitations” (ibid.), which is also a compelling framing for repositioning the goal of design in the work of restoration.

Less well-known than beaver mimicry, fire mimicry is an ecological restoration approach that restores human relationships to trees and fire. Ecologist Lee Klinger and his collaborators, many of whom are Indigenous People in California, have worked to develop this practice in the coastal Californian oak woodlands. These woodlands are ecologically and culturally significant. Before Euro-American colonization, Indigenous People in California managed oak woodlands with fire and hand tending (Klinger 2006). Today, these beneficial disturbance regimes (Anderson 2013) have largely disappeared due to the ongoing dispossession of Indigenous Peoples’ homelands in California. As a result, forest health has declined, and these woodlands are more susceptible to disease, drought, and catastrophic wildfire. Oak forests need regular episodes of low-intensity “good fire” to restore health, but many forest sites are too unhealthy or too close to human settlements for this kind of burning to be possible.

Fire Mimicry is a transitional restoration process that bridges this divide between current conditions of unhealthy, fire-prone oak forests and a future where healthy oak trees can be tended with fire (Klinger 2008). Fire serves many purposes in an ecosystem, such as making soils more alkaline, killing pathogens, hardening oak tree bark, and lowering overall fuel loads. Fire mimicry offers these benefits without the direct application of fire. Phases of fire mimicry are sequenced, beginning with a stage of clearing and thinning of unhealthy or overgrown woody materials. Mosses and lichens are removed from the tree trunks with a mineral wash applied. Finally, the tree soil is treated with alkaline minerals, and any infection sites are surgically removed and covered with more mineral wash. The trees can be treated multiple times over several years, and observation over time is a key part of the process. The method is primarily disseminated to non-expert and aspiring land stewards through community workshops and work weekends, as shown in Figure 2.

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Restoration volunteers in the central coast of California apply minerals to the base of an oak tree as part of the fire mimicry process (photo by the author)

Citation: Environment and Society 15, 1; 10.3167/ares.2024.150104

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In addition to offering biophysical benefits, fire mimicry asks us to relate to, rather than suppress, fire. Restoring the ecological conditions for good fire to be safe helps prepare people to have relationships with fire again, as well as with trees. Caring for trees and deeply contemplating the benefits of fire through mimicry also bring together human communities to learn about the harmful legacy of colonization and the need for Indigenous-led stewardship in what Manzini (2015) would call “relational encounters.” These acts of caregiving remind us that nature includes people, trees, and other non-humans.

These examples from ecological restoration practice show that mimicry is an emerging posture for relational restoration design. Mimicry may have negative connotations, connoting faking something as part of manipulation. Yet, mimicry can refute the nature–human binary and return wildness to design. From flowers to fish, many species mimic the work and appearance of other species (Baker 1976; Emsley 1966). In embracing mimicry in restoration, we, perhaps unexpectedly, re-integrate and re-cast our human selves into the web of life. Mimicry is a way of designing that, rather than producing artificiality, can restore a dynamic of wildness that includes people.

Restorationists Are Bringing New Meaning to Design in Restoration

To deepen my consideration of what design means in restoration practice, I purposely sought out engagement with restorationists working in my home state of California. In 2023, I conducted eight semi-structured interviews with California-based restoration practitioners. These practitioners engage with the concept of designing in ways that counter dominant narratives of design as an exercise in optimizing nature. Here, I share three observations from conversations with three interview participants about what design means in their practice to add nuance to the discussion regarding design's current and future role in ecological restoration.

To start, I noticed through my research that restorationists with formal landscape design or landscape architecture training more readily identify as designers than their science-trained peers. When asked about how their approach to design in the context of ecological restoration, one interviewee with a landscape architecture background explained:

I can't design the fundamental ecology. Ecology is the relationships. That's something that takes time to build and changes over time. I like to say that I design the framework for functioning ecology. . . . So, I am designing with the understanding that things are going to change and sort themselves out. I can't predict what the site is going to look like, the stream channel might totally change, the plant matrix might totally change. It's almost like putting a metaphorical birdhouse out, in that my work hopefully helps bring the birds in. From there, the system starts building on itself and ultimately becomes resilient.

In this reflection, the speaker refers to designing as inviting in emergence and natural processes from non-human actors. They release expectations that their design will be static and highly controllable, instead focusing on how the initial conditions that they create might support dynamic changes toward long-term resilience.

Whereas landscape designers and architects have formal training in design, many ecological restoration practitioners are trained in biology or ecology. These practitioners, I found through my conversations, were less likely to identify as designers or someone who designs. One interviewee with a science background reflected on how their identification with design has evolved in their work, stating, “I actually didn't start thinking of myself as a designer until just a few years ago. In my work, I started to wonder, ‘What am I really doing here?’ I realized I was designing. So, I've started using the word design more frequently. Now, I do consider myself a designer. . . . When we do design as restorationists, we have to be humble in our design process. We have to acknowledge that we were doing our best with what we know, and we don't know everything.” This interviewee found that design offers a useful framing to explain decision-making in restoration work that science alone cannot dictate. This practitioner also identified humility as a key element of the restoration design process.

Restoration scholars have written about the need to balance human intention with the notion that “we are not designing for ourselves, articulate clients, or identifiable users, but for the largely silent interests of ecosystems” (Higgs 2003: 284). Yet, contemporary restorationists and living non-humans are not the only actors bringing intention to a landscape. Through my interviews, participants acknowledged that they work in California ecosystems that have been modified intentionally by humans for decades, centuries, or even millennia. This dynamic adds complexity to what it means to design and restore. This interviewee shared, “I don't have a clear design plan for any particular stand of trees. I look at what the native people did, and that's my starting point. I don't try to get ahead of that. I think, after 1,000 years of experience, they had it right. And I'm not going to design anything better. . . . What I'm doing is trying to preserve their design.” This interviewee declines to identify as a designer, instead citing the original Indigenous stewards of the land as the expert designers. Instead of imposing a new design vision, this practitioner works to read, learn from, and protect the landscape designs that Indigenous stewards developed for thousands of years.

Together, these reflections from practitioners illustrate an evolving engagement with design in restoration. These interviewees neither strive for design-driven landscape optimization nor call for a hands-off rewilding. Instead, these reflections suggest that human intention, referred to as design, can manifest beneficially in a landscape. These practitioners emphasize that notions of designing in restoration can and must be tempered with humility, consideration of the autonomy of non-human actors, and a deference to the intentions of Indigenous stewards.