The Nunatsiavut Government (NG) has long led interdisciplinary contaminants monitoring in Labrador, Canada, centring Inuit-led research priorities. As marine plastic pollution increasingly interacts with Arctic ecosystems and Indigenous foodways, community-based monitoring and mitigation become essential. Yet dominant Western approaches to marine surface-water plastic monitoring often produce results poorly suited to community inquiry, emphasizing broad oceanic-scale concentrations rather than local patterns. This study investigates plastics in Nunatsiavut’s marine surface waters (>333 µ m) and advances two methodological approaches to improve community relevance. First, we develop a method to assess whether plastics likely originate locally or from long-range transport. Second, while we address regional patterns where appropriate, we conduct a place-by-place analysis that more accurately and meaningfully quantifies plastics than regional averages. Across most sites, plastic concentrations and plastic characteristics resembled those reported elsewhere in the Arctic, although site-level differences would have been obscured by aggregation. Most plastics were microplastics (<5 mm; 86%) and fragments (50.6%, n = 86), with wastewater microfibres (22%) and fishing-line threads (15%) as the most common identifiable sources. Our locality assessment method indicated that a greater proportion of plastic likely originated locally (39%) than from long-range transport (19%), while 42% remained indeterminate due to methodological constraints. We conclude by showing how community-oriented methods and site-level variation position place as a central analytic in surface-water plastics research.

There is a growing movement committed to the values of equitable and just citation, but the material practices of altering citational politics are more challenging. For instance, researchers in the Global South are under-cited, but how many citations are enough to correct this bias? How do we best determine when an author is from the Global South to begin with? We present a case study where social and natural science researchers (the authors) spent years engaged in the material practices of citational politics at the Civic Laboratory for Environmental Action Research (CLEAR). Our findings show that there were notable changes at the individual and collective levels as participants tried to change the status quo, and we use Gloria Anzaldúa’s pathway to conocimiento as an organizing framework for explaining the process of unlearning and learning that occurs through engaging with citational politics. The pathway moves through seven non-linear stages on the way to conocimiento: (1) arrebato/the rupture, when the reality of citational politics is fully understood; (2) liminal space, characterized by more questions than answers; (3) a retreat to pre-rupture/arrebato politics in the face of difficult ideas (backsliding); (4) the crossing, a step in ethical learning that moves the learner from thinking to action; (5) creating new stories where new individual and collective norms emerge; (6) the clash, a stage where these new norms clash against the status quo again; (7) and finally chores, the mundane, regular practices that maintain an amended status quo. Our analysis of the process is designed to both support citational politics practices in particular and provide a framework with examples of how to facilitate and anticipate changes in engaged, collective social change work in general.

The recent Land Back movement has catalysed global solidarity towards addressing the oppression and dispossession of Indigenous Peoples’ Lands and territories. Largely absent from the discourse, however, is a discussion of the alienation of Indigenous Peoples from Water by settler-colonial states. Some Indigenous Water Protectors argue that there cannot be Land Back without Water Back. In response to this emergent movement of Water Back, this review of research by Indigenous and non-Indigenous writers traces the discursive patterns of Indigenous Water relationships and rematriation across themes of colonialism, climate change, justice, health, rights, responsibilities, governance and cosmology. It advances a holistic conceptualization of Water Back as a framework for future research sovereignty, focusing mainly on instances in Canada, Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand, and the United States. We present the findings on the current global Waterscape of Indigenous-led research on Indigenous Water issues. Water Back offers an important framework centring Indigenous ways of knowing, doing, and being as a foundation for advancing Indigenous Water research.

The recent Land Back movement has catalysed global solidarity towards addressing the oppression and dispossession of Indigenous Peoples' Lands and territories. Largely absent from the discourse, however, is a discussion of the alienation of Indigenous Peoples from Water by settler-colonial states. Some Indigenous Water Protectors argue that there cannot be Land Back without Water Back. In response to this emergent movement of Water Back, this review of research by Indigenous and non-Indigenous writers traces the discursive patterns of Indigenous Water relationships and rematriation across themes of colonialism, climate change, justice, health, rights, responsibilities, governance and cosmology. It advances a holistic conceptualization of Water Back as a framework for future research sovereignty, focusing mainly on instances in Canada, Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand, and the United States. We present the findings on the current global Waterscape of Indigenous-led research on Indigenous Water issues. Water Back offers an important framework centring Indigenous ways of knowing, doing, and being as a foundation for advancing Indigenous Water research.

An exponentially growing body of international research engages with plastic pollution using different ideas on the right ways to frame, research, and intervene in the problem. The premise of this study is that all scientists work with understandings of what is right and wrong and why that is (models of justice) in their research, even when it is not explicitly stated, reflected upon, or a conscious part of the discussion. We surveyed 755 published articles on marine debris and plastic chemical additives and found that all evoked at least one model of justice, and often more. The most routinely used models included: developmental justice, distributive justice, and procedural justice. More rarely, we found appeals to environment-first justice and Indigenous sovereignty. While occasionally these multiple models worked synergistically, more often they conflicted. Our findings ground a call for fellow researchers to use a more intentional and systematic approach to evoking models of justice in our work. Our goal is to offer descriptions and insights about models of justice that are already being deployed to increase the sophistication of the ethical and normative orientations of our research and our fields, both in plastic pollution sciences and beyond.

While calls for Indigenous participation in plastics pollution governance are increasingly common, exactly what participation means remains unclear. This review investigates how English-language peer-reviewed and gray literature describe Indigenous participation and its barriers and analyzes the dominant terms, models, enactments, and theories of Indigenous participation in plastics pollution work. We find that different actors – Indigenous people and organizations, non-Indigenous authors, mixed collaborations, and settler governments and NGOs – are talking about participation in acutely different ways. Non-Indigenous actors tend to focus on the inclusion of Indigenous people, either as data, knowledge, or a presence in existing frameworks. Mixed Indigenous and non-Indigenous author groups focus on partnership and collaboration, though with significant diversity in terms of what modes of decision-making, rights, and leadership these collaborations entail. Indigenous authors and organization advocate for participation premised on Indigenous rights, sovereignty, creation, and leadership. We end by characterizing Indigenous Environmental Justice (IEJ) in the literature. IEJ provides a notably unique way of understanding and intervening in plastics pollution. The text is designed so researchers and organizers can be more specific, deliberate, and just in the way Indigenous peoples participate in plastic pollution research, initiatives, and governance.

Plastic pollution is ubiquitous, and the Arctic is no exception. One important step to understand the extent of the problem, and to monitor its impact is to have repeatable, comparable, and relevant measures across time and space that allow for the detection of marine litter trends. Arctic shorelines are a critical part of monitoring efforts. Pan-Arctic monitoring of litter on shorelines is also an essential component to examine global trends. Based on previous work examining litter in some regions of the Arctic, we suggest steps towards more harmonized protocols that include community-based monitoring, crowdsourced science programs, and science team-based surveys that are specific for the Arctic. Specifically, we recommend that shoreline survey sites for long-term monitoring be established where possible and be at least 50 m and surveys carried out at regular intervals of at least twice a year by any type of research team. Criteria for the selection of sites should be grounded in Indigenous and other local community and regional priorities, and should result in representation of both remote shorelines impacted by distant-source marine litter and shorelines impacted by more local sources. Results of any Arctic shoreline litter surveys should be made regularly available either through publications which include data sets, and/or accessible databases to promote regional comparisons and trend analysis across the pan-Arctic.

Abstract The CLEAR lab is an interdisciplinary plastic pollution laboratory whose methods foreground humility and good land relations. In this interview, María Fernanda Yanchapaxi and Eve Tuck speak with CLEAR lab founder, Max Liboiron, and co-investigators, Katherine Crocker and Deondre Smiles. Together, they explore Indigenous perspectives on climate change and outline the problems with how Western education thinks about it. Our guests question individualism in the understandings of and responses to climate change and reveal the importance of dismantling individual saviour complex perspectives embedded in educational approaches. Our guests invite educators to reflect on and redefine the values at the core of their practice and seek new ways to act on them.

The MV Veteran, a seagoing car ferry constructed by the Dutch industrial conglomerate Damen Shipyards Group, connects the two small, rural outport communities of Fogo Island and Change Islands to the larger island of Newfoundland, Canada. Our paper examines the breakdowns of this new ferry and the repairs facilitated through its manufacturer's warranty. In our analysis, we treat the warranty as a 'script' as something that both constrains and enables action and engenders resistances. The warranty anticipates and conditions both future times and spacings of breakdown and how those future breakdowns are to be addressed through activities such as maintenance and repair. In recounting the ferry's breakdowns and repairs, we explore how the case of this ferry and its warranty in this particular place suggests a need to add to the analytical and conceptual repertoire for thinking about the breakdown and repair of technical objects. We suggest there is a need for supple enough concepts of breakdown and repair that they can deal with technical objects that are neither as 'fluid' as the classic example of a bush-pump nor quite as 'fixed' as infrastructures embedded in landscapes such as electrical grids or canals. Thus, we think with the notion of the 'viscosity' of technical objects. We claim that the importance of the term viscosity in the sociotechnical lexicon is not to demark a halfway point between fluid and fixed, mobile and immobile, but to point out how a single object like a ferry can be all of these things, unevenly, at once through characterizing its multiple resistances following breakdowns.

Plastics are a ubiquitous pollutant in the marine environment. Despite growing concerns, quantitative and qualitative data on microplastics in aquatic and marine environments of Atlantic Canada is just emerging. Surface water plastics were measured and categorized by morphology (thread, microfibre, fragment, foam, film, pellet, and microbead) in two locations in Nova Scotia and one in Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada. All sites within the three locations contained plastic with an average abundance of 9669 items/km2. Most plastics (68 %) were sized as microplastics (0.425-5 mm), and plastic fragments were the most common morphological type. Polyethylene accounted for a third (30 %) of all particles found across all three locations, followed by polypropylene (23 %). Results can inform future research for community-based environmental groups, government, and academia.