#TheYearofBelief | #TYBPrep

You Don’t Hunt Alone: How Shared Preparation Builds Trust in Equitable Arctic Research

🌿 From the Land: Preparation Is Shared Work

In Arctic communities, goose hunting season doesn’t begin the moment someone heads out with a shotgun. It begins long before that—with shared preparation.

You prepare your gear and plan for your hunts—together.
You go have coffee with Elders and find out where the birds are.
You check the weather and text each other with updates.
You load the sled or boat together, knowing you’re prepared.

You don’t “get ready” in a vacuum.
You get ready in relationship.

Sometimes preparation looks like conversations over coffee.
Sometimes it looks like cleaning your gun next to someone who taught you how.
Sometimes it looks like asking someone younger to help you so they will learn.

This kind of preparation is practical—but also deeply relational.
It’s about making yourself available, relational, and trustworthy—to your team, your land, your responsibilities.

Our nephew Willard, a dedicated hunter and provider, is often out hunting with Corina’s son Tyler. The two of them prepare together, travel together, and learn alongside each other. They check in with Elders, get advice, talk gear and timing—and go out as a team.

In this video, they’re specklebelly (Cana thought it was a duck but it’s a goose!) hunting.

You can see the shotgun track a group of birds flying across the sky.
Then a shot rings out, and one goose drops.
What follows is quiet: the duck falling, the retrieval, and the shared moment of recognition that this is not only about food: It’s growing up in subsistence. It’s responsibility and rhythm.
It’s learning through shared experience, becoming dependable through practice, and supporting each other in the field.

In equitable Arctic research, this same ethic applies.
Getting ready to engage in respectful research means preparing with others—not just your co-authors or your field assistants, but the people whose lives, land, and futures intersect with your work.

Belief builds faster when it is co-prepared.

🏛️ From the Institutions: Shared Readiness, Imperfect Duties, and Transformative Planning

In Perfecting Imperfect Duties (1996), Buchanan reminds us that ethical responsibilities often feel most vague when we are just starting.

We want to do the right thing—but we’re unsure how.
We know we should prepare—but don’t always know what that means.

That’s where preparation, done with others, becomes its own form of ethical clarity. It makes the fuzzy duty visible. It gives it shape and texture—through planning, feedback, and conversation.

Scoones et al. (2020), in Transformations to Sustainability: Combining Structural, Systemic and Enabling Approaches, argue that transformation requires more than intention—it requires infrastructure and support. They emphasize enabling conditions: social networks, institutional flexibility, and room for shared deliberation.

In short, you don’t have to “figure it out” by yourself.
You need space and people to get ready with. [Hint: our TYB Group Mentoring Session is May 29 @ 1pm ET/9am AK! The registration link is in our email newsletter.]

And as Rämö (2004) notes in Spatio-temporal Notions and Organized Environmental Issues, the act of timing—kairos—emerges most clearly when we are embedded in dialogue and place.

The right time to act is often not something you decide alone.
It’s something that reveals itself in relationship.

In effective community engagement in equitable Arctic research, preparation is a process of listening, planning, and aligning with others—it’s not a solo work.

🧭 TYB Framework: This Week’s Practice

This week, we focus on:

Invest in a Community of Support
Who are your trusted partners to get ready with?

Know Who You Are
How do your values show up in the way you plan, organize, or ask for help?

Reinforce Hope with Grit
Planning is hopeful. Following through—together—is gritty.

✅ This Week’s Challenge: Prepare With Someone

Pick something you’re working on.
It could be a research idea, a conversation, a logistical plan, or a personal growth goal.

Now:

• Ask one person to help you think it through

• Be vulnerable and ask for a gut check

• Offer your early outline or idea

• Join or start a shared space to co-prepare for the next season

Then, if it feels right, share using:
#TheYearofBelief | #TYBPrep

“Here’s what I’m getting ready for—and who’s helping me.”

You can also post in comments, on our EAR Facebook Group, ARCUS’s Connect the Arctic portal, or simply send a message to someone who’s been part of your preparation process.

🌬 Remembering Forward

You don’t have to prepare alone—you were never meant to.

Belief isn’t just built in motion.
It’s built in the gathering, the cleaning and prepping of tools, and the checking in.

Respectful research begins with shared preparation.
Equitable Arctic research moves faster when readiness is relational.

You’re getting ready—and you’re not alone. 🙂