Adams, Dawn Hill
Dawn Hill Adams
Dawn Hill Adams is the co-founder and director of the Tapestry Institute. Through Tapestry, she works to create small communities and facilitate partnerships that explore science in different ways. Before founding her organization, Dr. Adams received her doctorate in Paleontology and taught courses in Biology. Tapestry has received four grants from the National Science Foundation since 2002. Dr. Adams has also participated in national science policy discussions and decisions.
“You have to find the balance point between getting the credentials that you need and maintaining your integrity. It’s really important to remember what’s at stake when you hit the barriers—it’s not just your career or the money that you make, your job, or your prestige. What’s at stake is everything that exists, the life that is life.” - Dawn Hill Adams, 2006
Adams, Dawn Hill, Stuart Barlo, and Jo L. Belasco. 2021. “Of Time, Patience, and Ceremony.” Evaluation Matters—He Takes Tō Te Aromatawai, 7. A response to “Confronting storms, fires, and pestilence: Meaningful evaluation for a hazardous world” by Juha I. Uitto. https://doi.org/10.18296/em.0069.
Belasco, Jo and Dawn Hill Adams. 2021. “Indigenizing Environmental Law,” published (pages 7-10) in the 2021 Compendium of Indigenous Knowledge and Local Knowledge: Towards Inclusion of Indigenous Knowledge and Local Knowledge in Global Reports on Climate Change, Mustonen, T., Harper, S.L., Rivera Ferre, M., Postigo, J., Ayanlade, A. Benjaminsen, T., Morgan, R., & Okem, A. (Eds.). Snowchange Cooperative of Kontiolahti, Finland, in association with the current IPCC AR6.
Adams, Dawn Hill, Shawn Wilson, Ryan Heavy Head, Fiona Cram, and Edmund W. Gordon. 2019. “Bridges to ‘Ceremony at a Boundary Fire: A Story of Indigenist Knowledge,” in Human Variance and Assessment for Learning. Armour-Thomas, Eleanor, Cynthia McCallister, A. Wade Boykin, and Edmund W. Gordon, Eds. Third World Press Foundation, Chicago. Forward, pp. xiii – xxvi.
Adams, Dawn. 2018. “An experience-based perspective on the relationship between indigenous and Western epistemic systems in research.” Evaluation Matters—He Take Tō Te Aromatawai, 4.
Adams, Dawn Hill, Shawn Wilson, Ryan Heavy Head, and Edmund W. Gordon. 2015. “Ceremony at a Boundary Fire: A Story of Indigenist Knowledge.” University of Sydney eRepository.
Dr. Dawn Hill Adams’ inspiration to pursue an environmental career has much to do with her upbringing. Although Dr. Adams is Oklahoma Choctaw, she grew up in the urban environment of Phoenix, Arizona. “Growing up separated from the Choctaw culture base in Oklahoma affected me a great deal,” Dr. Adams says. “I grew up not able to fully understand differences that were culturally biased, rather than family- or individually based. My Choctaw community was my father, and he taught us about the natural world and our responsibility toward it.” Dr. Adams’ father made a concerted effort to introduce his daughter to that natural world that existed just outside the city limits. “Though I could not connect with my cultural community, I could connect in important ways with the natural world,” she recalls. “The city was surrounded by millions of acres of wilderness in those days, so I had many opportunities as a child to spend long periods by myself, just learning how to be on the land, listen, and pay attention…how to feel.”
As Dr. Adams grew to know and understand the “circle of life,” she also desired to understand the mechanics of the natural world. She wanted to understand the dynamic and living relationships between how living creatures, plants, water, and weather. Years of informal education from her father encouraged her to pursue more formal scientific education. She received a B.S. in Geology in 1974 and an M.S. in Systematics and Ecology from the University of Kansas in 1977. She completed a Ph.D. in Vertebrate Paleontology at the University of California-Berkeley in 1989. There, she ran into the first significant resistance to her approach to scientific study, an opposition that would ultimately lead her away from academia. Adams intended to use her understanding of science—focusing on connections rather than reductionism—to approach her dissertation topic. Still, her initial advisor deemed her approach “frivolous and unscientific” and insisted on using a disconnected, non-participatory method.
Dr. Adams feels that their difference of opinion was an issue of worldview. “There are good philosophical and pedagogical reasons why I approach science in the way that I do,” she explains. “I told my advisor that my approach was culturally based just like his was, but he couldn’t see it that way since he is living in the dominant culture.” The crux of the issue, Dr. Adams says, is that the dominant culture forces people to accept ontological ideas that have very specific cultural roots—usually at the expense of non-dominant cultures, like that of traditional Native Americans. Ultimately, Dr. Adams got a new advisor, but such clashes of perspectives would continue to haunt her career for years.
Dr. Adams’ first job was as a teacher at a small liberal arts school in South Carolina. While finishing her dissertation, she taught Introductory Biology, Comparative Anatomy, Evolution, and Developmental Biology. As a teacher, she always worked to connect scientific principles with a holistic view of the natural world and natural processes. “Those courses or areas of study are always about connections between all the parts of the natural world, and that was how I approached teaching them,” Dr. Adams says.
Dr. Adams left South Carolina for a tenure-track position at “a bigger university with a good reputation.” There, she found that “at [many] large institutions—particularly those with a significant research component—there is a simultaneous desire to have diversity present to satisfy criteria, but also a resistance to the genuinely diverse voice.” Dr. Adams felt pressured to conform to a particular way of seeing the world the way “it really is;” a worldview that did not mesh with her own. It seemed to her that the university wasn’t seeking diversity as much as pushing for a single-party line. “I thought really hard about issues of integrity, both personal and cultural, and about being true to the way I know the world to be real, as well as issues of professional success,” Dr. Adams recalls. “Ultimately, I decided to stay true to myself and try to do what I wanted to do in a politically astute way. To see if it was possible to fight all the way through and to succeed.”
After deciding to forego academia, Dr. Adams used the connections and expertise she had developed to found Tapestry Institute in 1998. Through Tapestry, she works to create small communities and facilitate partnerships that explore science in different ways. Dr. Adams says she does a lot of the same work that she would have been doing at the university, but she no longer has to deal with an administration that constantly demands she justifies her efforts. “I’ve been able to establish an identity that says this is what we do, how we do it, and why,” she says (2006). Tapestry has received four grants from the National Science Foundation since 2002, and Dr. Adams has participated in national science policy discussions and decisions. She believes she’s found a compelling and productive solution in Tapestry. “I can now use all of my energy to work and can just get things done,” she says (2006).
Though Dr. Adams never got tenure, she feels that her struggle and effort while working as an academic benefited her in the long run. “In working hard to articulate and apply the issues and go for it, I ended up establishing connections around the country that were significant,” she says. “By the time I found out that I didn’t get tenure, I had been recognized as a leader on these issues, was invited to present my ideas, and so on. In that regard, I was a professional success by the standards of academia, and I decided to do without the university.”
Though she has had some negative experiences with those who would traditionally fulfill a mentorship role, Dr. Adams has benefited from the advice and guidance of others in her career. One of her most influential recent mentors is Tom Windham of the National Science Foundation. Dr. Adams met Windham while he was the head of the Significant Opportunities in Atmospheric Research and Science (SOARS) program at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder. “We met at a meeting of the American Indian Science and Engineering Society,” Dr. Adams says (2006). “He’s African American, and Yamasee-Seminole is a very wise person and has been a wonderful mentor to me.” But perhaps Dr. Adams’ most meaningful mentor is her father, Louis A. Hill Jr., an engineer who has also struggled with a conflict between his appreciation of the natural world and his career designing highways and bridges. Hill’s support played a key role in Dr. Adams’ completion of graduate school. “I grew up seeing him struggle and talking to him about it,” she says (2006). “He taught me to constantly be aware of my conflicting responsibilities and how to find balance on my own. My father continues to mentor me about those issues of conflicting responsibility to myself and others, whether they are beings in the environment or other humans with needs. The issue of balance is an issue at every level” (2006).
Since leaving the university setting, Dr. Adams has not had many traditional opportunities to mentor young people. However, she believes that the young people she works with influence her as much as she influences them. “Mentoring is not the most appropriate term [for our relationship] because, in Western culture, it implies a hierarchical relationship—whether it means to or not,” she notes. “As a woman aware of that difference, and also because of my heritage, I tend not to think hierarchically. It’s been a mutual thing, a back and forth.”
In terms of diversity efforts, Dr. Adams points out that the environmental community has talked for years about losing minority students from “the pipeline” between graduate school and the professional world—a concept she calls problematic and outdated. “The reason there is a problem with the pipeline is that things only move one way,” she explains. “That’s acculturation in terms of a model, and it doesn’t work” (2006). Instead, Dr. Adams supports efforts to reshape the entire enterprise. Hence, there is no “pipeline” but rather a fertile web of discourse between different ways of understanding and learning about issues. “Such a ‘web of discourse’ in place of a ‘pipeline’ makes it possible for individuals of any cultural background to travel back and forth and within this environment, in ways which permit them to expand their repertoire of understanding, skills, questioning, and thinking,” she says (2006). “While I’m not often mentoring one-to-one, I’m trying to establish a new environment, a way of thinking about community that reflects how the world really is. That will create a sustainable difference, change the way science is done, and the way folks in the dominant culture live in and experience the world” (2006).
Dr. Adams says diversity is problematic for the dominant culture because it challenges how things are or seem to be. She says it is imperative to include more minority voices in the environmental field—partly to include multiple views and approaches to environmental problem-solving. “The dominant culture has an ‘either/or’ view of things and doesn’t understand the value of different concepts. It’s an important thing to think about, and [minorities] have a responsibility to challenge that and to show the strength of diversity,” she says (2006).
Dr. Adams has remained in the environmental field because “the world needs us. It’s that simple.” For other minorities who are interested in following an environmental career path, she has a lot of advice to give. “Be brave, have courage,” she says. “Be smart. The trick is that you must have integrity and must get through the system far enough to be able to get power and do work. You have to find the balance point between getting the credentials that you need and maintaining your integrity. It’s important to remember what’s at stake when you hit the barriers—it’s not just your career or the money that you make, your job, or your prestige. What’s at stake is everything that exists, the life that is Life. Everything can end; it won’t matter what culture we have or where we live; the earth sustains us. It is us, and we are it” (2006).
Interview conducted by Multicultural Environmental Leadership Development Initiative staff. 2006. University of Michigan – School of Natural Resources and Environment. Ann Arbor, MI.
Tapestry Institute. 2022. Dawn Adams. https://tapestryinstitute.org/leadership/dawn/
Taylor, Dorceta (Ed.). 2006. The Paths We Thread: Profiles of the Careers of Minority Environmental Professionals: II. Minority Environmental Leadership Development Initiative, University of Michigan School of Natural Resources and Environment.