The Advisory Council on Historic Preservation’s Office of Tribal and Indigenous Peoples (OTIP) is developing a policy statement to “further inform how Indigenous Knowledge (IK) should be integrated into the Section 106 process.”
ACHP says that their IK policy statement seeks to “address ongoing requests made by Indian Tribes and Native Hawaiians, meet the needs of federal agencies to incorporate IK more fully, and align with administration directives to advance IK in federal decision making. For Indian Tribes and Native Hawaiians, IK is cross-cutting and has a role in all ways of knowing, including the identification and evaluation of historic properties, the assessment of an undertaking’s effects on such properties, and the resolution of adverse effects.”
According to the Council, the policy statement will “build on the recently released government-wide Guidance for Federal Departments and Agencies on Indigenous Knowledge in an effort to tailor many of those messages to the needs of the historic preservation community. The policy will also be informed by concepts discussed the ACHP’s existing information paper Traditional Knowledge and the Section 106 Process: Information for Federal Agencies and Other Participants.”
ACHP is accepting comments on the policy statement until March 8, 2024. Comments can be submitted to the Council at native@achp.gov.
The ACRA Government Relations Committee is currently reviewing the draft policy statement to determine whether and how ACRA would comment. If you have feedback for the Committee, please email it to amanda@acra-crm.org no later than March 1.