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Articles Earth is undergoing profound changes in climate, ecology, culture, and technology (MEA 2005). Moreover, changes that occur in one place often have far-flung consequences because of biophysical connections (by oceans, atmosphere, and migratory animals) and human linkages (through high-speed communication, global markets, and human travel). These global changes challenge our capacity to sustain the desirable features of the local systems in which we live for at least three reasons : (1) It is impossible to preserve a system in its current state when the factors that control its basic structure and function are changing directionally (i.e., show a persistent trend over time). (2) Many processes that concern policymakers at local or regional scales respond to changes occurring at other scales, over which they have little influence. (3) Diverse actors want to sustain different, sometimes conflicting, local and regional features in the face of directional change. For these reasons, global change has created "wicked problems" for society that are difficult or impossible to solve within current management and policy paradigms. If wicked problems cannot be solved without a shift in paradigm, incremental approaches to improving conditions may be insufficient to address major societal issues. What is a wicked problem, and why is it difficult to solve?The concept of wicked problems was developed by community planners to describe social problems (e.g., poverty) that are so complex that people disagree about how to define and solve them; in addition, efforts to solve the focal problem

Indigenous Knowledges (IK) are continually contrasted with Western positivist sciences. Yet the usual conception of IK-as a translatable knowledge about things-renders incomprehensible its discussion as a spiritual or ethical practice. A practice taking place within what we call an epistemic space. A moose hunting event can demonstrate how IK is produced through the epistemic spaces within which hunting is performed. Part of the performance is becoming-animal; as practiced by Koyukon Athabascans, a moose hunt reproduces the social relations between hunter and prey, spiritual relations that demonstrate an ontology and ethics seemingly distinct from those of the Western wildlife sciences founded upon Enlightenment humanism. Yet such 'Western -Indigenous' dichotomies falsely indicate entirely separable spaces within which to produce accounts of reality. Instead, this account of a moose hunt demonstrates an assemblage of actors within one space, who together become more than the authors' individual positions and selves, and becomes an event. We additionally argue that more faithfully representing this assemblage requires changing the form of the usual academic paper. Thus tacking between a narrative and theoretical approach that switches from each of our first-person points of view, we aim to depict how knowledge of one hunting event becomes assembled.

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Community workshops are widely used tools for collaborative research on social-ecological resilience in indigenous communities. Although results have been reported in many publications, few have reflected explicitly on the workshop itself, and specifically on understanding what is said during a workshop. Drawing on experience from workshops held in Huslia, Alaska in 2004 on wildfire and climate change, we discuss the importance of considering cultural, political, and epistemological context when analyzing statements made by indigenous people in community workshops. We provide examples of statements whose meaning and intent were, and may remain, unclear, with descriptions of our attempts to understand what was being said by placing the statements in a variety of contexts. We conclude that, although workshops can be an efficient means of exchanging information, researchers should strive for multiple channels of communication and should be cautious in their interpretations of what is said.