Two-Eyed Soil Seeing: enhancing soil security through indigenous knowledge, ethnopedology and shared stewardship

Soils support food production, biodiversity conservation, climate regulation and human well-being, yet soil degradation continues despite major advances in scientific understanding. This paradox suggests that achieving soil security requires more than improved biophysical measurement; it also requires engagement with diverse knowledge systems through which soils are understood, valued and governed. While ethnopedology has demonstrated the richness of Indigenous and local soil knowledge, its integration into soil-security assessment and governance remains limited.This conceptual Perspective proposes Two-Eyed Soil Seeing as a provisional, soil-specific framework inspired by the Mi'kmaw principle of Etuaptmumk (Two-Eyed Seeing). The framework encourages practitioners to bring community-authorised Indigenous or local soil knowledges into respectful dialogue with institutional soil science without requiring either to be absorbed into the other. Drawing on soil security, ethnopedology, Indigenous research methodologies, knowledge co-production and environmental governance, we examine how this approach could enrich the five dimensions of soil security: capacity, condition, capital, connectivity and codification.We introduce cultural-relational soil capital and relational connectivity, and propose a continuum of knowledge governance from consultation and participation to co-production and Indigenous-governed stewardship. We develop a seven-stage operational framework for applying Two-Eyed Soil Seeing in research, policy, restoration and land management.We argue that appropriately governed Indigenous and local knowledges can make indispensable contributions to soil security, while cautioning that no single Indigenous knowledge system can represent another and that Etuaptmumk should not be converted into a universal technical protocol. Two-Eyed Soil Seeing is offered for co-development and empirical evaluation, not as a validated or community-authorised methodology.