CAF awarded Emilio Uribe for his project, “A Shared History.”

For generations, the Comcáac (Seri) people of the Sonoran Desert coast maintained a reciprocal, sacred relationship with green turtles (Chelonia mydas) that overwintered in spring-fed upwellings they called moosni-iime: sea turtle shelters. These biocultural sanctuaries, protected through Indigenous ecological knowledge and spiritual practice, were devastated fifty years ago when external fishers discovered the dormancy behavior of turtles sheltering there, decimating the local subpopulation and severing both ecological processes and cultural transmission.

“A Shared History” seeks to make the moosni-iime visible again (as multispecies refuges, as living memory, and as a foundation for ethical, care-centered human–animal relationships). Through four phases— community consultation, ethnographic reconstruction via oral histories and participatory cartography with elders, collaborative non-invasive ecological monitoring, and community return of findings—the research will document traditional Comcáac knowledge while exploring whether green turtles have begun returning to ancestral sites.

Grounded in multispecies justice, political ecology, and environmental ethics, the project explicitly challenges extractivist models of science. Turtles, places, and people are recognized as co-creators of culture and history. Elders, youth, conservation practitioners, and academic researchers participate as equal partners in knowledge production.

Emilio Uribe is a biologist with a degree from the Autonomous University of Aguascalientes, Mexico, who has worked at three separate sea turtle conservations in Jalisco and Costa Rica.