Data sovereignty and community engagement at the intersection of language and ecological knowledge: Lessons from two Wixárika (Uto-Aztecan) communities

Indigenous languages and ecological knowledge are tightly interwoven and have been eroded in tandem in many parts of the world. To bolster or revitalize this cultural heritage, many Indigenous Peoples have worked with linguists and/or ethnobiologists, either from within or outside of their communities. Despite an increase in interdisciplinary projects at the intersection of these fields, there has been a limited exchange of best practices, ideas, and resources related to ethical and effective work with communities. Two areas where linguists and ethnobiologists have been innovative in parallel are data sovereignty and community engagement. While linguists often deposit data in large centralized archives with different levels of access to respect community preferences, equivalent archives, and graded access capabilities for ethnobiology are less common. At the same time, ethnobiologists have been experimenting with Traditional Knowledge Labels and Biocultural Labels to ensure that community preferences for information use accompany the data. For community engagement, tools such as ‘linguistic landscapes’ would be easily translated to ethnobiological projects, and community natural history collections could be synergistic with linguistic projects. Linguistics and ethnobiology share significant overlaps not only related to the classification and encoding of biological knowledge as well as in the need for methodologies that foster ethical engagement with local communities. Cross-communication between the two disciplines may lead to mutual benefit. In this paper, we outline approaches taken to address these issues by both fields, examine opportunities for mutual enrichment, and share experiences from our project with two Wixárika communities in West-Central Mexico.