UC Santa Cruz

European honeybees, Apis mellifera, are largely promoted and studied as necessary pollinators for their economic importance and agricultural viability. Apis mellifera receives widespread attention due to two key factors: national and global agricultural dependence on them and the high volume of bee deaths across the country and worldwide. My work cares about the relationships and (im)material realities that are (re)created when and where settler colonial scientific research practices center Apis mellifera honeybees and Euro-Amercian agriculture systems and the ways that Indigenous Land and Native bee pollinators are taken up in these systems of research. I attend to such attachments as they flow through research institutions where they have palpable material, immaterial, social, and political consequences, and I do so in ways that are adapted to my relationships with science and Indigenous Land and Peoples. This methodological work contributes to Indigenous Science, Technology, and Society (I-STS), an emerging subfield of Native American and Indigenous Studies, and is an effort in creating Indigenous theories of the technosciences. In it I show how agents of pollination, be they human or not, are altering Indigenous Land, lives, and bodies and ways that institutional research can be done differently through decolonial research practices and by following Indigenous Land protocols and ethics. In this vein, this work discusses how researchers can learn from Indigenous research practitioners who in their life/work, reclaim and remake research practices that honors Indigenous Land, and who co-create and co-think with their Land-bodied relatives through mutually (corporeal) caring and Indigenous centered more-than-research practices. Attending to bee pollinators and research institutions within US agricultural systems provides better understandings of (im)possibilities for good research relations by which they may disrupt colonial legacies and ongoing settler colonial realities toward Indigenous sovereignty.