When second-year transfer student Terra Sage Wallin walked into her first day of ENV S 193TK: Traditional Ecological Knowledge: Honoring All Our Relations taught by Margaret McMurtrey in the summer of 2021, she had no idea how profoundly it would shape her academic journey at UC Santa Barbara. Now, after having completed her first year as a master’s student in the Department of Religious Studies, she recalls how McMurtrey’s course opened her eyes to a worldview that combined her undergraduate interests.

“It really actually changed my life,” Wallin said about ENV S 193TK. “I came to college to do environmental studies and philosophy because I wanted to look at how people interact with the land and what worldviews inspire those connections and that action … When I had the opportunity to take [McMurtrey’s] class it was like this aha moment, this is what I’ve been looking for.” 

Traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) is defined by the Indigenous Climate Hub as the “cumulative body of knowledge, practices, and beliefs about the relationship between living beings and their environment. Passed down through generations via oral traditions, TEK is deeply rooted in the cultural and spiritual practices of Indigenous communities.”

As the primary facilitator of the course, McMurtrey defined TEK as “the idea that people of the land have been for a millennium observing changes in the land and the interrelationality of the land, and [are] putting those observations into practice with every-day seasonality.” 

McMurtrey started at UCSB as a freshman in 1970, the same year that the environmental studies department was founded. She has a master’s degree in religious studies and educational administration, and is currently in her fifth year of the doctoral program in English literature. 

Additionally, McMurtrey is a member of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma. 

“I was asked to lead this class because we felt that it was needed, and there was nobody on campus that felt remotely qualified to offer it,” she said. “I like to say that I facilitate the class because I am not a TEK practitioner in the sense that it is not something that I’ve been traditionally taught, but it is something that I know about and I invite members of our Chumash community or other communities to come talk to our students.”

McMurtrey first led the course in the summer of 2020 via Zoom due to the COVID-19 pandemic. “The idea was to give students an introduction to Indigenous ways of knowing, what that meant, what it might have meant to different authors we read, as well as speakers that came in,” she said.

Upon completing the second rendition of the course in the summer of 2021, Wallin felt strongly that TEK should play a more prominent role in the environmental studies curriculum at UCSB. She and other students articulated this belief in an email to the environmental studies department. 

“I wrote to the environmental studies department with a few other students and we expressed that being in Santa Barbara, on the land that we are on, the land of the Coastal Band of the Chumash Nation, that it should be a requirement for all environmental studies students to take this class. And there needs to be institutional support behind that,” Wallin said. 

“They told me at that point, ‘Yeah, love your enthusiasm, maybe five or 10 years and we’ll see what we can do.’ And we just weren’t very happy with that,” she recalled. “So we got together with our communities and were able to collaborate on creating this new curriculum that is an addition to [McMurtrey’s] curriculum for 193[TK].” 

Alongside McMurtrey and classmate Cameran Bahnsen, a 2023 environmental studies alum, Wallin worked to establish a second course, ENV S 194TK: Traditional Ecological Knowledge Studies. Where 193TK aims to provide the contextual framework and theoretical foundations to understand what traditional ecological knowledge is, McMurtrey describes 194TK as an “applied” course, or a “lab” that takes place in the Three Sisters and Four Directions Indigenous Garden on West Campus, as well as the wetlands space outside of the American Indian and Indigenous Collective center in Building 434.

Courtesy of Terra Wallin

The course, first offered in the spring of 2022, consists of a two-hour block once a week. One hour is spent outside “tending,” or taking care of, the flora in the garden or the wetlands space while the other half is spent in the classroom discussing that week’s topics and materials. 

The 194TK course has two major assignments. The first is the “plant relative” project, where students choose a plant in one of the Indigenous garden spaces on campus and build a relationship with it throughout the quarter. 

“Whether that looks like sitting with their plant, drawing their plant, watering, pruning, planting more, removing it — it can look like a number of things depending on the plant’s need,” Wallin said. In addition, students leave behind a care guide for their plant relative for students to come. 

“What that looks like is extending personhood to our nonhuman relatives and understanding that nonhuman relatives are relatives as well,” Wallin said.

Both traditional ecological knowledge courses are listed in the course catalog under the environmental studies department, although environmental studies students accustomed to their chemistry, biology and ecology course requirements may find that these classes do not fit into the typical mold of a college-level science class. Still, rooted in inquiry, observation and experimentation alongside elements of relationality and cultural tradition, these courses offer students a different perspective in environmental studies. 

“I think that maybe we can redefine what science means, because if it’s based on observation and trying out things, Indigenous people have been doing science for a millenia,” McMurtrey said. “There’s this binary between science and traditional ecological knowledges and it’s an artificial one.”  

The second assignment in the 194TK course is the creation of a land acknowledgement that incorporates the students’ places of origin, where they are now and a pledge for how they will occupy different lands moving forward. 

As a co-founder and previous co-facilitator alongside Bahnsen, Wallin now works as a student mentor for the teaching team each fall and spring quarter. 

“This class is undergraduate led. As a grad student, I show up when I can but I’m not the teacher of this class and neither are the student leaders,” Wallin said. “We try to use the language of ‘facilitators’ because we’re not experts. What we want to do is reach out to our community members who are experts.”

This past fall and spring, the course had an all-female, all-Native teaching team. “It was really incredible because they got to reach out to their aunts and their uncles and their grandparents, and get their family members to come talk about the work that they do. And each one had a different background, different tribal affiliations,” Wallin said.  

Furthermore, the facilitators rely on the perspectives of members of the Coastal Band of the Chumash Nation in shaping their curriculum. Wallin noted that Mia Lopez has been particularly “paramount” to not only the establishment of the TEK courses, but has supported the American Indian and Indigenous community at UCSB in a myriad of ways.

“She shows up. She does what is needed and supports students with everything. After the first couple of times I met her, she became Aunty Mia,” Wallin said. “With our curriculum, we brought it to [Lopez] and were like, ‘Can you please help correct us if we’re taking any missteps?’ She’s not afraid to tell us if we did something out of step and in a loving way.”

McMurtrey emphasized the significance of including Chumash voices in her course. “I believe that it’s very important and why I’ve chosen to be the facilitator of this class is to bring these people to this place to share their wisdom with others. I think it’s my way of honoring that I am a visitor to this land,” she said.

Despite being the UC campus with the highest number of self-identified Native students, almost 1% of the total student body, UCSB lacks an American Indian and Indigenous studies major or official department. There is an American Indian and Indigenous studies minor, however both Wallin and McMurtrey note that there is a limited amount of faculty trained in teaching the discipline. 

“We do have an American Indian and Indigenous collective academic council, and that’s been in effect since about 2016,” McMurtrey said. “A group of students met with the chancellor and the executive vice chancellor and some deans and asked that we have some more faculty on campus that were American Indian and Indigenous with I think the hope of establishing a department.” 

McMurtrey and Wallin are both supportive of the effort to establish an official department and major at UCSB, however McMurtrey acknowledged the challenges of this process. “We have had advocates and supporters and allies in the administration, it’s not us against this monolith. But the University works very slowly and there are layers and layers of bureaucracy and we sometimes get stuck in that morass,” she said. 

In the meantime, the traditional ecological knowledge classes offer students not only a deeper understanding of Indigenous culture and practices, but what McMurtrey calls “an alternative hope.” 

“In the current climate where we’re all wondering what we can do, we can look to how other generations or iterations of our human family dealt with these catastrophic changes,” she said. “I think that knowing that there’s a way of being in the world that is different from what we’ve grown up with based on a capitalism … I think that it resonates with a lot of students and they want to share it and empower others with this worldview. It’s what’s going to save us, I think.” 

McMurtrey shared an example from her own experience as a course facilitator, illustrating the real-world impacts of teaching traditional ecological knowledge. “[One student’s] family was in real estate and, as a result of taking this class, she convinced her family to give land back to the Native communities in one of the areas they had real estate … That’s the impact that I know of; [the students are] going back and sharing this information with their family and their passion and their understanding of ‘Oh, wait a minute, we have a responsibility to this land and the people of this land.’ That is how we make change.” 

For Wallin, who started in McMurtrey’s classroom as an undergraduate and has now become a key conduit for sharing traditional ecological knowledge to new groups of UCSB students, TEK as an academic discipline and a worldview is about being rooted in place. 

“When I think about global scale, I see local autonomy. I see local community building, rather than a prescriptive ‘everybody needs to do this,’” she said. “It’s not a one size fits all, it’s truly about a relationship to place and everybody has that, everybody has a place that they come from. To sit in that and develop your relationship to place is powerful.”