Today my coauthors and I pulled an in-press article. I want to explain why.

The article analyzed a historical dataset of Indigenous hunting and fishing in Alaska to explore the diversity of the subsistence portfolio and resilience through 20th Century. (1/n)
I happened upon the records when I was doing my masters. They were kept by Alaska Native Service schoolteachers.

We saw the records as a rare quantitative dataset on subsistence hunting and fishing for a tumultuous time in recent history (2/n)
The trouble was, we didn't partner with Alaska Native organizations or scholars or traditional knowledge holders, not when designing our questions or doing our analysis. We should have. (3/n)
We had nothing but the best intentions w/ our paper, but as settler scholars it is simply not possible for us to know if our manuscript might do harm. One thing that made me realize this was the recent, *terrible* paper in Nature erasing Indigenous fire practices (4/n)
I *knew* that the time had well passed for settlers to stop "studying" Indigenous peoples, to stop writing papers that established "scientific truths" about them without their invitation or consent. But I hadn't fully turned that critique inward. (6/n)
How did we know if we were asking the right questions? If we were being sufficiently critical of the oppressive colonial system that generated these records? How could we know if the people in these communities want these records to represent them and their history *at all* (7/n)
The point is we couldn't.

Now, our paper looks like thousands of others out there. When I realized we had to hit the brakes, to go back to the drawing board and reach out to the appropriate partners to ask if a paper like this should even exist, it was an odd feeling (8/n)
Because even though I am an established scholar with tenure, I still feel the pull of the thankless incentives that exist in academia. The paper, by many academic standards, is pretty darn cool.

But it is unethical and damned if I shouldnt have seen that sooner. (9/n)
What if we weren't fully thinking through the policy implications? Should we even purport to be the sole arbiters of those implications, and whether they are "good" or "bad"? (10/n)
The answer is, again, no.

That's why we pulled an accepted paper that the editor and the peer reviewers were all excited about.

Thats also why I'm sharing this story. We need to do better, teach better standards, get in the habit of doing this kind of work the right way (11/n)
This old academic notion that it shouldnt matter who *does* the science as long as they do it "right", needs to be put to bed. In this kind of research, whether it is done right *depends* on who is involved. (12/12)
Ps- after sending our email to the journal, all the uncertainty and worry about if I was overreacting, went away. I immediately knew we were doing the right thing.

I really look forward to talking with Indigenous partners about this.

But I'm also willing to walk away from it.
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