Introduction

Technology alone cannot secure humanity’s future. While technological advances aid in addressing many environmental issues, ecosystems and communities face more complex problems. Regions like Indiana urgently need to rethink land and water management as climate change affects human health and life (Bowling et al., 2020; Filippelli et al., 2020). Machin and Ruser (2016) stress technology’s limits in solving complex challenges. To address Indiana’s land and water challenges and their complexities, there are the prerequisites of understanding the connections between historical understanding and Indigenous insights, or worldviews. The Gullah-Geechee people offer a compelling framework in which to explore what this connection looks like and how to act on it.

The Gullah are a people that are categorized as being racially Black and culturally indigenous, with indigeneity becoming more than, but simultaneously being thought of, what is explored within Western epistemologies (Fuller, 2015, 2019). Here, I provide context toward alternative environmental and ecological ecologies to restore not just the wetlands crisis that Indiana faces, but to address what restoration looks like beyond returns from loss of land or water—be that quality or access (Barra, 2023), to let us find alternative land and water management in environmental and ecological narratives, or narratives otherwise (Ortiz, 2023). Their practices, rooted in the southeastern United States, demonstrate a sustainable relationship with land and water; their approaches ensure environmental health while supporting community prosperity.

In this paper, I argue for innovation to collaborate with traditional knowledge for long-term and effective sustainable solutions. It is not about isolating traditional practices but understanding land history and human-nature relationships. This comprehensive approach marries technological innovations with ancestral wisdom. My research framework proposed learning the land and its history as a potential solution to the challenges of land and water management, economic security, and sustainability. To bolster my proposal, I seek to provide concrete examples of experiences that can be drawn on to reflect on this overall understanding, as the framework is developed from the indigenous ontological practice of the Gullah—Geechee referencing southern associated heritage folk (Georgia and Florida) and Gullah (North and South Carolina) representing the northern folk. Although the terms are often used interchangeably, they refer to distinct regional groups (Goetcheus & Cari, 2014).

Briefly, in this text, I addressed the significance of narrative, the Gullah, and the Gullah’s narrative. I then addressed how this work was formed and the articles chosen for review, as well as the context in which they were reviewed. Then, I discussed the literature, which I divided into Synthesizing Indigeneity and Gullah Geechee Governance, Ecological Knowledges and Narratives, Healing and the Spiritual, then Our Ghosts: Living Advices and Devices for Living from Ancestors. Drawing on Gullah-Geechee knowledge can shape a sustainable, equitable future for those beyond the coast. I share the experiences that can likewise be looked for to address, assess, and allay ecosystemic instabilities caused by the excessive confluence of environmental feedbacks in Indiana. This multifaceted strategy strengthens our response to environmental and economic challenges, paving the way for holistic and effective solutions.

The Gullah

If we can justify the use of African folktales to deliver moral lessons and cultural values for education and socialization, what about the narratives? White absenteeism, the task system to manage and regulate labor, and the influx of enslaved peoples, allowed people to spend time developing self-perception and agency through storytelling and the cultivation of traditions. The stories we tell ourselves not only foster and retain culture, identity, kinship, and family but remain testaments for overcoming adversity (T. Smith, 2012). In the process of developing the environmental reciprocity framework, I aimed to bring untold stories to the fore and learn about firsthand experiences that are and are not. At the same time, I knew that there was a historical hyper-investigation of the Gullah-Geechee people in environmental knowledge production: written about and seldom the writer (Yen-Kohl & The Newtown Florist Club Writing Collective, 2016). In this article, I draw on my Gullah worldviews and history to situate the contexts in which we seek Indigenous knowledge production to co-develop our worlds.

Livelihood, community, and determination use what is known within the Gullah community as abundance. Being that I seek to acknowledge and reproduce that abundance in scientific exploration, my own community offered essential insights into how we engage with science moving forward. This includes the reimagination of systems and structures that not only shape engineering, environmental stewardship, and the lexicon of STEM education but also the principalities within governing. Thus, this work represents an earnest effort to connect the published literature on heritage to the interpretation of environmental and ecological assets that emerged via the societal and cultural values of this group, whom retain works in cooperative labor, self-determination, and community. The Gullah has fostered resiliency for generations and it has produced moral lessons that we can impart on the search for scientific revelation, problem resolutions, and resourcefulness as we seek measures to resist and counter the myriad of impacts happening environmentally and ecologically.

Combining ontologies, or ways of being, and science is not new, but it often struggles to establish itself as a practical possibility. Similar to how George Washington Carver developed a sense of scientific spiritualism and had an outlook that allowed magic, science, spirit, and religion to all exist, acting on ontology requires a new posture and proposition of holistic scientific inquiry. This holistic view also allows us to speak to the ecological concept of no waste, just change in form. For him, it was looking at science as a tool to discover the purpose of something and find its benefit for others; he used knowledges not to separate and make inferior, but complement one another and release the othering that can happen environmentally and ecologically into ecological agency (Ruffin, 2010). The Sankofa bird is a mythical bird believed to represent the idea that the past can serve as a guide for the future. Join me in using the past to build the future— for nothing is new under the sun, but how we address it could be (The Power of Sankofa: Know History, n.d.).

Methodology

My initial search, or inclusion criterion, was focused on articulating values found between the Gullah (or Gullah Geechee) and reciprocity, including communal concepts, livelihood narratives, and dissertations with a study within, on, or as part of the cultural heritage and peoples. Most of this work ranges from hundreds of articles that stretch from the 1900s to the contemporary 2000s and is concisely addressed in about 14 articles for this cursory review. Further, I sourced books that speak to ecoliterary and ecological criticisms that the articles did not, or could not, speak about. I likewise sought the additional use of dissertations; there is not only a historic undervaluing of Black history but also a current disregard for these narratives in the education and socialization of people across the United States (Morales, 2021; Muhammad & Mosley, 2021; C. A. Smith & Garrett-Scott, 2021). Due to this, even theories and analytical frameworks, such as Critical Race Theory, are removed, hindering a greater understanding of how race impacts ways of living and interacting with life, as Blackness is a racialized social construct. When this happens, you also limit how environmental injustices can be addressed for it is neglected the ways, processes, and institutions that it has been progressing within (Kurtz, 2009).

I started my search within this study by using Google Scholar and university library resources to collect references with content that contained the coupling of indigenous sayings with scientific exploration, inspired by Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass. In this novel, she sought to encourage the connection of scientific explorations with the frames of Indigenous worldviews (Kimmerer, 2013). I localized information relevant to the Gullah by examining the sources that discussed the praxis of Indigenous knowledge systems concerning learning land, land use, power, water access, and socialization, or storytelling and the context of reciprocal relations consciousness in livelihood. References needed to include accounts or authors of Gullah descendants or witnesses. I did this to elicit authenticity, accuracy, and respect as I recognized their intellectual and cultural contributions to what I would like to speak to.

Informed by these methodological aims, my research questions in this literature review were as follows:

  1. What supports the application of ontology to science and engineering?

  2. How can enacting ontologies shape land and water governance?

  3. How can we connect the published literature of heritage to interpret environmental and ecological assets that emerged via the societal and cultural values of peoples that contain a repertoire of inputs in cooperative labor, self-determination, and community?

My primary goal in this review was to explore the real-world application of ontology to science and engineering by studying the land and its history as a potential solution to the challenges at the intersection of land and water management, economic security, and sustainability. I suggest that the Gullah indigenous ontologies offer alternate ways to inform policy and practice in engineering sustainable land use. I present a review of literature that permits us to explore communal well-being of how environmental and ecological consciousness, indigenous knowledges, and cultural practices allow us to access, retain, and maintain resources more autonomously. Western epistemology and ontologies regarding engineering limit the holistic work that it is, entertaining economic deprivation. There is so much more available to help society navigate challenges by engaging in intentional connections and relationships. I challenge the Gullah ontology of abundance. I challenge the theory that science, technology, and engineering are not influenced by ontology, and ask how will we engineer the relationship.

Literature Review

Synthesizing Indigeneity and Gullah Geechee Governance

The Gullah exist in a myriad of ways and at some point, whereby language or cultural tradition, it was once not welcome. Even the waterfront property that once housed the multitude of Gullah Geechee, was considered unacceptable. As increased developer interest expanded upon those lands, so did the tax burdens and undermining of those descendants who did not properly deed their lands. The latter became one path among many that resulted in vicious land dispossession also referred to as the heirs’ property issue (Communication, Development, and Cultural Preservation: The Case of Gullah History and Culture on James Island, SC, 2010). Preservation of spaces and places became reliant upon their ability to become commodified or consumed in a way be that as a museum or classroom. Rarely do we have discussions concerning place and space as a means to preserve culture, history, suffering, contribution, or community (Communication, Development, and Cultural Preservation: The Case of Gullah History and Culture on James Island, SC, 2010). In a 2022 case study done by the Brookings Institution, “Empowering the Gullah/Geechee Economy,” oral traditions afforded the Gullah-at-large economic agency in their land management, despite generational impacts from climate change, out-migration, anthropogenic intrusion on their biosphere, socioeconomic divestment and devaluation, and rapacious land development (Henry-Nickie & Seo, 2022).

In the same study, one disclosed aspect of their culture that contributed to prosperity was the empirical knowledge developed in agriculture, along with local and traditional environmental and ecological insights, which shaped both traditional and occupational livelihoods. Despite political and economic changes, such as the impact of tourism and coastal gentrification—often fueled by eminent domain and environmental devastation—the Gullah Nation has maintained its identity through oral traditions, particularly the knowledge of crop cultivation and medicinal practices passed down through generations (Henry-Nickie & Seo, 2022). However, access to land dictates not only which plant continues to grow, but also how the culture, its traditions, and its people continue to thrive (François, 2022). The prime example is the material inaccessibility and insecurity that has arrived with the development and change of the coast, impacting the sweetgrass basket-making art form. Local grass harvesting has turned into going greater distances to not only complete basket weaving but also sustain livelihood and the associated cultural values found in Gullah Geechee culture: faith, family, community, and work ethic. In this, we find cultural retention and economic agency have also been the resistance, with women at the head (Lovelace, 2021).

The main preservation bearers have largely been associated with women of Gullah families (Communication, Development, and Cultural Preservation: The Case of Gullah History and Culture on James Island, SC, 2010). Even within the agrarian work, the woman is found to be gifted with the visions and guides for livelihood staked into self-sufficiency, communal health, sustainability, and responsibility (Melotte, 2022). Lovelace Jr found that the Gullah Geechee woman retains the influence of the family and is a prime cultural leader in art, social advocacy, and religious practices. Women are not just keepers of life, but spirit, art, culture, and house (Lovelace, 2021). Beyond house, the classroom is also identified, as a place in which culture, literature, and narratives can be preserved (Butler, 2009). That said, what are we collectively teaching and discussing about preservation and its significance? What place does it hold, if any? These questions have carried the conversation into academia and socio-ecological relations, which I broadly refer to as environmental and ecological narratives.

In response to being asked how they could know the correct course of action for an altered hydrology proposal meeting within the community, a Geechee resident said, “It’s gonna overflow somewhere. We know because we live here. We don’t need no one to tell us, because we know. We don’t have science, but we know because we’ve been here. We see it with our eyes.” Social science literature has been reprimanded before for prematurely declaring Black and Indigenous societies, community, culture, making space, placemaking, and knowledges as dead, often with a macabre perspective concerning the triage of devastations and exploitation of the peoples in general (Motta, 2023; Woods, 2002). This doubly applies to practices in environmental and ecological spheres, where we have had to concoct terminology, definitions, and methodologies to provide voice, validity, and dimension to the Black experience. For example, racial coastal formation is a concept for socio-ecological relations to be incorporated into adaptation planning due to colorblind—or negligent—planning methods that disregarded race and led to subsequent failures in recognizing disparities in conditions such as access. This formation is considered an approach based in abolition ecology, which involves studying the living world in a more informed way that permits alternative management development (Butler, 2009; Woods, 2002). In other words, it aims to develop, maintain, and affirm visibility otherwise; to help institute and acclaim narratives otherwise. As Ruffin (2010) addresses in Black on Earth, “For as long as Africans have been Americans, they have had no entitlement to speak for or about nature,” and the absences of these narratives reinforce this.

Ecological Knowledges and Narratives

Abolition, Black Forest Ecology, and the Frontier Myth

The Frontier Myth is a Western dialogue that affords the colonial narrative that civilization was something to be established and settled (H. N. Smith, 1950). This has persisted, permitted, and pervaded an erasure of the indigenous peoples that simultaneously progressed the ecological othering of peoples escaping institutions of enslavement and exploitation. When we intentionally map the societies in which the Gullah Geechee formed, and likewise turn terminology from runaways to freedom seekers, we likewise see a difference in ontology in establishing societies: a more aligned living that relates to the livingness of landscape.

Knowledges of ecosystems for Black people were more than an intimate relationship for food and survival’s sake. With regard to the histories of the institutions of slavery and racial, peoples found respite socially, spiritually, and physically in these places and spaces. Living in such terrain and hostile circumstances, not only did collectivism form for the Gullah Geechee, but also a livelihood that produced strategies in regeneration for that which was being provided around them. In the post-antebellum, sites of violence became the same landscapes in which land-nature relationships developed to foster and practice liberation. This can also be seen as homeplace making, or the Black Commons—wherein lie reciprocal social relations among Black people— in lieu of the land dispossession and fragmentation that has also occurred with Heir property challenges. Black forest ecology strategies have birthed from these practices’ principles in reciprocity, legacy, and subsistence—with regard to sustainment or non-encroachment. These relations allowed generations of abundance and life preservation of the integrity of environments and ecologies (Purifoy, 2022). If we tie together those notions of Black ecology and abolition ecology, place, space, and time become indicative of freedom. If we see land as us, we can better understand collectively that land was and is crucial for the emancipation for Black politics, ecologies, and futures. The care, access, and labor of land, if we can steward and care faithfully, it can likewise be the emancipation of all (Heynen, 2021). So, what does environmental and ecological restoration look like?

Reimaging restoration includes the ways in which we perceive oral histories and creative works, and permit multicultural identification of environmental issues and ecological experiences. It must be plural. Narratives can offer information on how people and cultures have shaped the land and otherwise. If we allow environmental and ecological dialogues to persist by coupling practice within the constraints of cultural and communal continuity and de facto sovereignty in land management, we can also hereby shift the scientific practice of restoration to also include human life—preserving first instead of scrambling to conserve later (Ruffin, 2010), (Barra, 2023). The Gullah ontologies and local knowledges have permitted this people group to access resources otherwise unknown including “human and other-than-human kinship networks” (Fuller, 2021). They have simultaneously had access to things that have be rendered near obsolete as well as those things that found their own subsistence in crises (François, 2022). Restoration is, otherwise—mobilized within concept of abolition ecology—from those dispossessed, displaced, and dejected to produce emancipatory alternative land management and a commons that will actually repair, heal, and restore (Heynen, 2021).

Healing and the Spiritual

As a subset of the African American population at large, their health and recovery include not only different ways of speaking, but different ways of practicing life including rootwork, ethnobotany, cooperative economics, magic, and medicine. For the Gullah, it was talking to those not occupying a physical body on earth, for the Gullah it was creating a living memory of spaces, places, and people, and making heritage of their veneration (Manigault-Bryant, 2014). However, this is not a cluster of happenstance practices that entered their ontologies. Its empirical practices are based on faith (Burke, 2019; Li, 2023; O’Brien, 2006). Socio-religious agency within the Gullah community involved and invoked the creation of their own religious expressions within Christianity and folk religious traditions and practices, also referred to as Africanisms.

Examining African American ecotheological creativity contextualizes the way that religion is and has been used as a tool to help promote ecological action. Environmental protections, conservation, and preservation progresses within this community are not only about the right to have environmental or ecological justice, but also the relationship with Creation: natural and built environments, nonhumans and humans—and this is not typically included in environmental literature (Ruffin, 2010). bell hooks once noted that a collective self-recovery and renewal of relationship to Earth will occur within the procurement of knowledge of our ancestors. If we expand the knowledge surrounding worship, sanctuaries, and beliefs of ancestors and collectively acknowledge and come to know the experiences of more humans and their observations, experiences, and conjectures, we will enable more people to think critically and increase efforts to act on environmental and ecological injustices (Ruffin, 2010). Expanding on the author’s thought, from the Gullah worldview, it was never about the church building or religion specifically—rather worship. We Gullah. We build on faith. The self-preservation and resilience of this population of peoples—the environmental and ecological human-nature relationships achieved— were not exercised through economic growth alone, science alone, or in isolation. In the case of environmental and ecological thought, the practices of worship and spiritual ways of being are integral to

Our Ghosts: Living Advices and Devices for Living from Ancestors

Ancestors do not just remain in us biologically, culturally, and linguistically, but relationally too, fostering themselves through survival and liberation pursuits. Referencing even posthuman literature’s application to environmental and social contexts, it is not just nonhumans with which relations are established, but more-than-humans as well, in body, experiences, identity development, and human agency itself (Simpson, 2022). For the Gullah, their ancestors maintain presences in familial and community life as guards and guides (Jarrett & Lucas, n.d.). By entertaining the dialogue of pluralism, society is permitted to reflect on ecological knowledges being used for movement, migration, placemaking, and prosperity happenings—from the way Harriet Tubman applied knowledge to liberation to negotiate social and natural demands for communal survival, to the way George Washington Carver coupled science and religion to produce and actuate methodology for the economic and otherwise security of Black farmers (Ruffin, 2010).

It means practicing and integrating our grannies and elders’ knowledges as livelihoods, not just within manufacturing plans and schemes in which we form and base policy in our management and frameworks. One Gullah heritage member recalls and reflects on this saying: “We didn’t have regulations. But she (Grandmother) would say 'no dat not hardback dat mean those little old shrimp just growing. And dey not ready until ‘bout a month from now.’ But local knowledge not recognized. You have to go to school and come back with degrees and make policies. You pay no attention to me, like you doing now. You come back and tell them, rather than listen” (Fuller, 2015). Her voice and knowledge call attention to not only the way we integrate narratives but how we honor them. Science and the empirical nature of local ontologies are not separate as contrasting; rather, they are mutually acceptable and compatible, and not mutually exclusive (Ruffin, 2010).

Key Findings and Implications

The cursory nature of the literature review was used to explore the concept of environmental reciprocity further, specifically its application. The content beckons a reimagination restoration: to reconsider the choices made in engaging with the environment; to imagine a governance informed by ecological narrative and knowledge which are likewise informed by ontologies including the ancestral wisdom and spiritual practices that guide us. The texts point out a few objectives to be studied within and beyond Indiana as pertains to improving the nonstructural management of land and water.

The work asks governance, and thus people, to achieve one goal: a cultural and historical understanding of the land. It seeks to raise awareness of the region’s land and water use. It also aims to explore, with communities and historians, the ecological knowledge and the land-water relationships. To fulfill the objective, four objectives are inferred based on the data collected from the narratives of studies discussed in the literature review:

  1. Integrate Indigenous environmental stewardship into modern land and water governance. This includes evolving sustainable farming, water conservation, and land regeneration methods with knowledge keepers. It includes not only studying traditional agriculture, water management, ecology, and urbanism, but also making room for contemporary practices, modes, and methods to be refined.

  2. Use more participatory approaches to involve the community in land and water management decisions. Not only will the government reduce domination in local affairs, but skills—and therefore resilience—will be built in the network of the community to manage their resources.

  3. Emphasize long-term, community-driven conservation. This should focus on civic engagement, stewardship, resource sharing, regeneration, and mutuality—or building systems within networks of people. It ties into the second objective and similarly fosters resilient and adaptive responses to climate change and environmental degradation that do not entertain catastrophizing situations, challenges, and the complexities thereof.

  4. To include knowledge and heritage in curricula and public work, we must promote supportive policies and economies. There should be support for research that integrates cultural heritage into scientific and environmental policy discussions.

Upon reviewing the research questions, what supports the application of ontology to science and engineering includes building up people to see its worth and retain and sustain that valuation. This paper does that in a way that builds the plane as it flies: educating the public in tandem with connecting the published literature of heritage to not only interpret but assess and care for that which we consider to be environmental and ecological assets in our economical spheres.

Conclusion: Limits and Beyond Them

The Gullah Geechee worldviews, which were influenced by Africanisms, allegedly enabled them to regard the land and the sea as gifts and to take on duties for nonhuman and more-than-human beings. Even in view and lieu of ancestry, therein is a testament that even if a people face land loss, dispossession, and fragmentation from their original lands to the ones they occupy, the empirical nature of reciprocal relations and the extended knowledge produced from that, there is a call to be informed and transformed by the ontologies of those who came before us and who are beside us—the Gullah our leading example. The question is whether, when faced with ecological and environmental crises that we term climate change, we will allow the necessary changes to be made and see them as possible.

This paper was a synthesis of various knowledges afforded the Gullah Nation including the intergenerational knowledges associated with land, economy, and cultural heritage. It contributed to the scientific realm that has not yet afforded narratives and environmental and ecological narratives as purposeful in identifying gaps in nonstructural land management practices, non-economic loss and damage assessment and restoration, as well as a counterspace to address environmental and ecological distress, violence, and fragmentation from being to being. At the nexus of Indigenous and local knowledge (ILK) and cultural heritage, there are opportunities to better understand non-economic and intangible losses in environmental and ecology realities, as well as the abundance therein via oral traditions. Engineering spaces often discuss making infrastructure modular, which can be built on over time to form resilience. However, what about people and the relationships and networks being formed within, outside of, and around the world? In this paper, as demonstrated by cultural theorists, cultural heritage is relied on to develop solutions to the complex problems exacerbated by the Anthropocene—to use that which is seen looking back to also look forward.

Author’s Positionality

I was motivated to do this work by tracing the story of Indiana in ecological and environmental ways of being. For me, these stories and narratives were communicated within the kitchen, over the phone, or in laborious gardening. They were not written down to be shared. They were not recorded to be watched. The preservation of knowledge within the African diaspora is rich with a consciousness about metaphorically, spiritually, and physically sowing and reaping, and what it means to bring the harvest in, and how it is not about just you in your life journey. As someone who descends from Gullah and Native American folk, I was taught that knowledge is to be shared and there is something to learn from everyone. I beenya too, so I know it helps, communally and collectively, to share this point of view. I sought to reflect on the heritage of my family in terms of what fosters what I referred to as environment reciprocity, work for establishing a greater group identity in reciprocity within the environmental and ecological sphere, and make greater constructive use of the ecological narrative of the Gullah to help shape the ways we see management of land and water.