SNRAS researcher begins project in Mali

Shauna BurnSilver has left the cold for a few weeks, to begin a new study in Mali. Her traveling companion is her son Silas.

After intensely examining subsistence life in remote areas of Alaska, Shauna BurnSilver is turning her attention to challenges surrounding water resources in Mali, Africa.

A postdoctoral research scientist with SNRAS, BurnSilver succinctly sums up her life’s work: “It’s looking at the interactions between people and the environment.”

For three years she has been working with Associate Professor Gary Kofinas and the Alaska Department of Fish and Game on the “Sharing Project,” funded by the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management. The project documents the social side of subsistence. “It’s about sharing and cooperating after hunting,” she said. “It’s gifting and trading and the relationships that take place with subsistence.”

While numerous studies document the harvest aspects of subsistence this was the first time UAF scientists have looked at the deeper meanings. “Subsistence is so much more than hunting,” BurnSilver said. “It’s what happens once the harvest gets to a village and how it supports so many people.”

With that work to conclude soon, BurnSilver is leaping into new territory, but it is not entirely unfamiliar. She served in the Peace Corps in Mali 1987-1989, and after traveling through Asia returned to Mali as a Peace Corps agricultural trainer. She went back in 1996 to study strategies for how trees were used in farmland, part of her graduate research.

When this recent opportunity to return arose she was more than pleased. BurnSilver is part of an interdisciplinary team of scientists who will study water resources in the Gao area of northern Mali. The National Science Foundation-funded work will focus on hydrology, ecology, and sociology. “We will look at the ephemeral and perennial water resources in a dynamic coupled system,” BurnSilver said. UAF is one of four institutions involved, along with South Dakota State University, Colorado State University, and Universite de Bamako.

The area to be studied experienced a severe drought in the mid-1980s, causing major changes in the landscape that created a lake where water sources had traditionally appeared and disappeared. This changed the structure not only of the landscape but of the nomadic people who populate the area. Suddenly they became agro-pastoralists. “The pools became permanent and the people became more sedentary but still continued to move their animals around,” BurnSilver said. There are two ethnic groups, the Fulani and the Songhai, who use the area.

“I will tackle the human-ecological questions,” BurnSilver said. “What do these changes mean to the people?”

BurnSilver departed Fairbanks Feb. 9 to help launch the four-year project. “We’ll begin the collaboration face to face,” she said. She’ll travel to Mali at least three times this year. For the first trip she has a traveling companion, her five-year-old son Silas. Another researcher is bringing her children too. “It’s a really good set of circumstances,” BurnSilver said. And it’s not Silas’s first time to Africa; he went to Kenya when he was eleven months old.

To prepare him for the trip the BurnSilvers have read Silas many stories about African village life and a globe is a fixture on the kitchen table. They have explained to Silas that people will be speaking different languages that he doesn’t understand. He already comprehends poverty, his mother said. His geographic knowledge isn’t slacking either. “When his teacher asked him if he was going to Africa, Silas said he was going to Mali, a country in Africa,” BurnSilver said.

Mother and son endured a nearly twenty-three hour flight to get to Mali but took many books and movies along for the flight.

BurnSilver is ready to deepen the collaborations with her co-principal investigators and get the foundational planning for the project done.

Her work in Alaska can be compared to the upcoming research. “There is a commonality in groups of people strongly engaged in subsistence for their livelihood,” she said. “They live close to the resources they depend on. The issues here are equally true for these transhumant pastoralists in Mali. I want to understand how these groups are grappling with big issues of land use changes and economic development.”

Challenges are plenty, but BurnSilver is optimistic. There are logistical issues, transportation problems, weather concerns, and even security risks. “They are all part and parcel of what I love about doing this,” BurnSilver said.

“I can’t wait to get back to Mali.”