From colonial legacies to equitable futures: Early career researchers on the fifth international polar year

This paper is a call to action from researchers in the Polar Science Early Career community. This call comes from experiences held and events witnessed by early-career researchers where imbalanced power dynamics and extractive research in and with Indigenous communities persist largely unchecked. As objectives for the Fifth International Polar Year are established, current leaders in science policy and research have an opportunity to cultivate a space for Indigenous leadership in science by acknowledging the colonial past of research and by actively dismantling neo-colonial practices in the present. To do this, we present a series of priorities that support the mission to foster equitable, sustainable, and relationship-centered engagement with Indigenous Peoples and local communities. We must reimagine science through relational, land-based, and cyclical processes, increase implementation of trauma-informed practices, and make structural and systemic changes to allow for research processes that reflect Indigenous ways of knowing, being, and doing. Ultimately, we challenge those who traditionally hold power in polar science and policy to ask, “How can we make space for community priorities, values, and knowledge systems?” instead of “How can we build research capacity for polar communities?”.