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How the Choctaw Nation of OK is adapting to climate change.

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Wilson Roberts, an elder member of the Choctaw nation, believes the earth is out of balance [Nicholas Linn/Al Jazeera]

Durant, Oklahoma - It's nearly June. Every day, the Earth brings Darryl "Grey Eagle" Brown closer to the Sun, to heaven, to the Creator. That means it's nearly time for the Eagle Sun Dance ceremony, a 12-day communal gathering of fasting, thanksgiving and prayer that takes place around the summer solstice, when the Creator is especially near.

Fifty-six-year-old Brown is a member of the Choctaw tribe of Oklahoma and a spiritual leader for a band of tribal members seeking to practise their indigenous religion. He learned the Sun Dance from another Choctaw elder who learned it from a tribe in the northern Great Plains. It is a pan-Indian dance - a blend of traditions and historic knowledge passed between the tribes of the Great Plains.

Brown has held this ceremony on his family's land outside Durant, Oklahoma, each summer for 20 years. Every year, it seems to get hotter, he says, and the weather less predictable. Some years, they dance on parched ground under a cloudless sky. At other times, they're nearly blown away by hot, angry winds. Last year, they were drenched in torrential floods. But regardless of what the weather holds, Brown must dance anyway because he feels the Choctaw - and the earth - needs him to.

"Our ceremonies help keep life in balance," he says.

'The earth is speaking, but man won't listen'

Brown believes that both his people and the earth they inhabit are deeply out of balance, damaging one another as a result. "Man's pollution has altered the earth," he says. "The earth is speaking now, but man won't listen."

In Oklahoma, the earth seems to be shouting. From 2010 to 2015, the land plunged the state into a punishing drought, bringing the Choctaw nation to the brink of a water crisis. In 2011, it was the second-hottest summer on record, with more than 35 consecutive days of temperatures above 37 degrees Celsius. Then last summer, the missing rains arrived, but in devastating 30cm deluges. The seemingly incessant floods tore through the state all summer long, destroying houses and wiping out crops.

Brown knows the outside world has a term for these catastrophic weather shifts: climate change. He knows there have been summits and debates and policies on the matter. But here in Choctaw nation, Brown doesn't place much stock in what the federal government or the United Nations have to say. The earth is speaking - speaking through thunderous rains, violent tornadoes and scrambled seasons.

"The seasons aren't in order any more," Brown says. "I remember winter in Oklahoma. I remember the ponds freezing up and staying that way for months. Now, we get a few days of cold, but no real winter."

Historically, the Choctaw have proved to be adaptive to whatever nature has given them, says Scott Ketchum, a Choctaw member and PhD candidate studying Choctaw cultural history at the University of Oklahoma. "But now, you have a thunderstorm in January that normally marks the change of a growing cycle, and then the next week, you have a snow storm. What do you do with that?"

The earth is out of balance, Brown says, and his people are partly to blame. "It's written in our teachings, the knowledge of how to take care of the earth," he says. "We're out of balance with that teaching."

The Choctaw cultural identity has always hinged on an intimate connection with the environment, says Wilson Roberts, a tribal elder and spiritual teacher. "In my mother's teaching, I was always taught that all animals and life-bearing things are just like us," he says. "We're a part of them, they're a part of us. We're supposed to take care of each other and look out for each other."

The Choctaw have forgotten this, Roberts says. And what's worse, they've failed to impart their knowledge to the settlers who now control much of their ancestral homeland. The Choctaw were forcibly removed to Oklahoma from their lands in Alabama and Mississippi in 1831. Twenty-five percent of the population died during the journey, and those who remained were converted to Christianity. "The government came in and took away everything," Roberts says. "I'm talking about everything .... They burned our pipes and whatever we had that they thought might have some sort of 'energy', anything that was sacred to us."

For Roberts, 76, this isn't some far-flung part of his history - these are his grandparents' stories.

The removal marked the beginning of the imbalance, Roberts says. "I always tell people that our downfall as a Choctaw nation is that we gave up what the Creator gave us," he says. "We didn't fight hard enough to keep it, and because of that, we've lost our continuity with the Creator."

Healing the earth

Roberts and Brown believe that the only way to bring healing to both the earth and their tribe is for the Choctaw to reclaim their traditional relationship to their environment - and then spread those teachings to the rest of the US.

In a modest trailer that serves as a government office building, Ryan Spring labours to do just that. As the director of historic preservation for the Choctaw nation, it is Spring's job to study his tribe's past, relearn its traditions and help people like Roberts and Brown pass it on.

"The more culture and heritage we give back, the more we become whole again," Spring says.

For Spring, a good place to start is by re-teaching traditional gardening. Historically, the Choctaw were adept farmers whose ceremonies and gatherings revolved around the growing cycles. Since their removal, however, they've become highly dependent on processed foods handed out through state welfare programmes. A return to traditional gardening will help members regain independence from state handouts, reduce their risk for heart disease and stroke brought on from the unhealthy foods they are given - and reduce their imprint on the environment.

There is a growing interest in learning traditional gardening, Spring says, but climate change poses a formidable challenge.

"The growing seasons are getting more and more unpredictable," Spring says. "We'll have longer cold snaps or six-year droughts. There's no average."

Spring teaches members to keep small gardens that are easier to manage, regardless of the weather. Brown has one, and he has learned to shift his planting and harvesting year-to-year and season-to-season, depending on what the weather appears to be doing. He can't depend on regular, consistent cycles like his grandfather taught him to do, but by paying close attention to the weather - by listening to the earth - he can grow his food anyway.

Likewise, he has learned to perform his ceremonies not according to the seasons but according to the cycles of the Sun and Moon. This too is a departure from the Choctaw's ancestral ways, Ketchum says, which revolved entirely around growing cycles. "You used to know to start a particular ceremony in June when a certain plant bloomed," he says. "But now, it might be June and the plant won't bloom at all or maybe it will have bloomed early."

This sort of creativity and adaptability is a good thing, though, Brown says - perhaps even a divine thing.
READ MORE: Hupa - a language that refuses to die
"The weather will do what it does and we have to be adaptable," he says. "We have to get creative, we have to find new ways to keep [ceremonial items] dry, which normally would already be dry or to hold a sweat lodge even when it's chilly outside. But creativity is part of the [Creator], we have that creativity in us."

Creativity is an essential feature of religious ceremonies like the one Brown is preparing to host. In preparation for such a ceremony, traditional families would historically have spent weeks weaving beautiful, brightly-coloured baskets to hold food for the dancers and sacrifices for the Creator. There will be no baskets this year, however: climate change and industrial agriculture have all but wiped out river cane, the plant used to make the baskets.

The bamboo-like plant used to cover Oklahoma, growing in kilometre-wide swaths called "cane breaks". Now, as much as 98 percent of it is gone, says Roger Cain, a river cane specialist from the nearby Cherokee Nation. "We had a massive die-off in 2011," he explains. "We had two weeks in February where it was below [-17C]. I haven't seen that kind of weather in my whole life."

Flooding in 2015 further emaciated the river cane population. "We had floods wipe out entire cane breaks," Spring said. "It's grown back some since then; it's surviving, but not on the level where we can use it to make baskets."

Cain has worked with the Cherokee nation to declare river cane a culturally-protected plant species and has begun a project to map what populations remain in an attempt to preserve them. He holds regular "wild gardening" sessions where he visits these cane breaks and weeds out any invasive species that pose a threat to the plants. He is hopeful that with time and care, he will be able to restore these cane breaks to a level where tribes can resume regular large-scale basket weaving.

As Brown prepares to host the Sun Dance ceremony, he is keenly aware that everything he is doing is different from the ways of his ancestors. So much has changed. So much has been lost. But he will dance anyway. He will dance with what he has. "[Because] our ceremonies are helping," he says. "They're helping the cycles, they're helping the earth."
Funding for this article was provided in part by the Earth Journalism Network.

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The Choctaw v climate change: 'The earth is speaking'

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Durant, Oklahoma - It's nearly June. Every day, the Earth brings Darryl "Grey Eagle" Brown closer to the Sun, to heaven, to the Creator. That means it's nearly time for the Eagle Sun Dance ceremony, a 12-day communal gathering of fasting, thanksgiving and prayer that takes place around the summer solstice, when the Creator is especially near.

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On traditional ecological knowledge, specifically related to burning.

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Decades of logging and fire suppression have left California's forests prone to drought, infestation and catastrophic wildfire. Climate change is only exacerbating these impacts. But for thousands of years before, during and after European colonization, Indigenous tribes have lived within and among these forests, intentionally lighting fires to manage landscapes and ecosystem mosaics, enhance habitat, produce food and basketry materials, clear trails, reduce pests and support ceremonial practices.

A new study published this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences combines scientific data with Indigenous oral histories and ecological knowledge to show how the cultural burning practices of the Native people of the Klamath Mountains -- the Karuk and the Yurok tribes -- helped shape the region's forests for at least a millennia prior to European colonization.

The study found that forest biomass in the region used to be approximately half of what it is now, and that cultural burning by the tribes played a significant role in maintaining the forest structure and biodiversity, even during periods of climate variability. For example, while there were probably fewer lightning-sparked fires during the cool, wet time period known as the Little Ice Age, data from the study suggests that burning in the region actually increased during that time, and that forest biomass remained relatively low.

"Using multiple lines of evidence, we were able to detect an influence on forest conditions by Native people and show that their stewardship kept these forests at a stable, lower level of biomass for at least a millennia," said study lead author Clarke Knight, who completed the research as a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley. "The idea that we need to just let nature take its course really underestimates the management need, because these woods were actively managed for at least a thousand years and probably longer."

A recent study in the Sierra Nevada found that the density of trees in that region has also increased dramatically over the past century by a factor of six- to sevenfold, contributing to more severe wildfire. Understanding both the stable, historical state of California's forests, as well as the role of human stewardship in maintaining them, will be key to California's success in reducing the risk of catastrophic wildfire, while effectively managing its forests for climate change mitigation.

"California is expecting its forests to do a fair bit of carbon storage to help meet its greenhouse gas emissions goals," said study senior author John Battles, a professor of forest ecology at UC Berkeley. "But more and more, we are finding that the resilient forests that were here in the past looked nothing like what we have now, and to get a fire-safe forest, we might have to sacrifice a lot of carbon storage. It's a well-known trade-off, but these findings bring it into stark relief."
Managing California's fire-adapted landscapes
For thousands of years, Indigenous peoples have used intentional burning and other forms of resource stewardship to help care for California's fire-adapted landscapes, and these practices are integral to many tribal cultures. Cultural burning is often guided by a detailed knowledge of the environmental conditions that are most favorable to burning and the effects of the fire.

"Fire has historically been the primary tool for people to live in this place," said Bill Tripp, director of natural resources and environmental policy for the Karuk tribe, in a video produced by the tribe. "Not only is it rooted into practices that were traditionally employed at different times of the year, it was deeply rooted, and remains deeply rooted, in the ceremonial practices of the Karuk people."

Research has shown that fire suppression policies in the Klamath Mountains have led to the forest becoming dense and overgrown and have shifted the composition of the forest from fire-resistant hardwoods like oak and more fire-sensitive softwoods like Douglas fir. The inability to burn has also impeded the rights and cultural expression of the Karuk and Yurok people and depleted the supply of traditional foods and other resources on their ancestral lands.

However, while many now agree that frequent fire was once a fixture of many of California's forests, there remains some debate over the relative effects of Indigenous burning practices versus climate-driven factors, such as lightning, in shaping pre-colonial forests.

To better understand the historical role of cultural burning in the Klamath Mountains, Knight assembled a team of collaborators with expertise in both paleoecology and the cultural history of the Karuk and Yurok tribes, including some current tribal members. The team also worked with the tribes to obtain permission to collect samples from their land and conduct research using their oral histories and Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK). For the Karuk tribe, this meant following the principles of the Practicing Pikyav Policy, which is a guide and protocol for collaborative research between university scientists and the tribe.

"It really seemed necessary to talk to the people who live on the land to figure out what the story of this place was, because there's so much more beyond an empirical data set about the history of a landscape," said Knight, who is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the U.S. Geological Survey. "Thankfully, they are open to that and were able to share their history and Traditional Ecological Knowledge with us."

The study focused on the watersheds encompassing Fish Lake and Lake Ogaromtoc in the Western Klamath Mountains. To estimate how the forest biomass near the lakes has changed over the past 3,000 years, members of the research team collected sediment cores from the two lakes and then painstakingly counted the number of tree pollen grains at each sedimentary level of the core samples. With the help of carbon dating and careful modeling, this data could be used to estimate forest biomass at different times in the past.

Likewise, charcoal counts in the sediment cores revealed how often fires had once burned near the lakes. Clues about the timing of historical fires were also obtained by examining nearby trees for fire scars and comparing the years of burning from tree rings.

Study co-author Frank Lake, a research ecologist for the U.S. Forest Service and a Karuk descendant growing up among the Karuk and Yurok tribes, helped integrate this data with tribal histories and traditional knowledge. In many cases, this ethnographic information helped explain both geographic and temporal patterns in the paleoecological and fire history records.

For example, fire scars found near the lakes suggested that fires occurred more often near Fish Lake than Lake Ogaromtoc, which is consistent with accounts that the areas around the lakes were used for different tribal purposes. In addition, patterns in fire frequency and forest biomass during the cool, wet Little Ice Age also indicate a significant human influence on the forest.

" If you're trying to detect a signal of increased fire due to human stewardship, having a cooler, wetter climate is a perfect time to do so because it will really stand out in the record," Knight said. "And that's exactly what we found: More charcoal accumulation, more charcoal production, so, therefore, more fires and decreases in biomass that correspond with that fire."

While it may not be possible to restore California's forests to how they were 150 years ago, the findings highlight the critical importance of active forest management in the West, especially as climate change brings warmer and drier weather. To help restore fire resilience and reinstate cultural burning practices in the Klamath Mountains, the Karuk tribe has partnered with the U.S. Forest Service and other organizations to form the Western Klamath Restoration Project, which is dedicated to using forest management techniques rooted in Traditional Ecological Knowledge.

"In the fire-prone West, not managing our forests is not an option," said study co-author Matthew Potts, the S.J. Hall Chair in Forest Economics at UC Berkeley. "You have to decide how to actively manage a landscape that's at risk for fire, especially when you have lots of people living in those landscapes. The challenge remains in keeping up the momentum and effort towards managing these important resources."

Additional co-authors of the paper include Lysanna Anderson, Marie Champagne and David Wahl of the U.S. Geological Survey; M. Jane Bunting of the University of Hull; Rosie M. Clayburn, the Yurok tribe's cultural resources manager; Frank K. Lake, Jeffrey N. Crawford and Eric E. Knapp of the U.S. Forest Service; Anna Klimaszewski-Patterson and James Wanket of California State University, Sacramento; Scott A. Mensing of University of Nevada, Reno; and Alex Watts-Tobin of the Karuk tribe's Department of Natural Resources.

This research was supported by funding from the U.S. Forest Service and the National Science Foundation (grants #0926732, #0964261), Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (#09ERI003), the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (18-CCI-FH-0007-SHU), the U.S. Geological Survey Land Use Research and Development program; U.S. Forestry Service McIntire-Stennis Cooperative Forestry Program (project 1020791) and the California Agricultural Research Station (CA-B-ECO-0144-MS).

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ecology research; nature; trees; wildfires; forest; rainforests; early climate; cultures; early humans

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How Indigenous burning shaped the Klamath's forests for a millennia

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A new study combines scientific data with Indigenous oral histories and ecological knowledge to show how the cultural burning practices of the Native people of the Klamath Mountains -- the Karuk and the Yurok tribes -- helped shape the region's forests for at least a millennia prior to European colonization.

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History of the Dawes Act, why it was created, and how it affected Native Americans.

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On the Native perceptions of climate change

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It does what it says on the box.

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Covering the United Nations Climate Change Conference, known as COP26, was a binge-work undertaking filled with rabbit holes of scientific, economic and existential research that never seemed to end.

Now on the other side of this momentous world event, Indian Country Today is sharing some observations, takeaways and looming questions.

The biggest question to emerge from the meeting is what's keeping the world's leaders from taking quick and strong action, given the gravity of the global threat to humankind of fossil-fuel-induced climate change?

Although UN reports and leaders at the COP26 point to Indigenous knowledge and ways as a means to combat climate change, why do they fail to heed their direction and advice?

The overriding message from scientists and world leaders appears to be a keen interest in integrating Indigenous peoples' reciprocal worldviews and relationship to the planet in the battle against climate change.

But is that the reality?

'Watching for concrete measures'

Positive moves during the COP26 conference included pledges by the governments of the United Kingdom, United States, Germany, Norway and the Netherlands to give $1.7 billion directly to Indigenous peoples and local communities in recognition of their key roles in protecting lands and forests. The funding supports Indigenous self-governance, land reform, conflict resolution and mapping and registration efforts.

Incongruously, however, Indigenous peoples had almost no official representation or authority in the COP26 proceedings or in creation of the final document.

Related stories:
-Indigenous leaders face barriers to UN climate conference
-Are carbon markets the new gaming for tribes?
-Enbridge Line 3 divides Indigenous lands, people

Tuntiak Katan, of Ecuador's Indigenous Shuar people and coordinator of the Global Alliance of Territorial Communities, was skeptical of the funding pledge to Indigenous peoples.

"We are happy with the financing announcement, but we will be watching for concrete measures that will reveal whether the intent is to transform a system that has directed less than 1 percent of climate funding to Indigenous and local communities," Katan said. "What happens next is what matters most."

And in the end, the COP26 agreement fell far short of realizing Indigenous messages of responsibility and urgent action to reduce reliance on and production of fossil fuels and keep global warming to 1.5 degrees. Promises to phase out fossil fuels were watered down to a pledged "phase down" coal power and fossil fuel subsidies.

Forbes reported that COP26 President Alok Sharma, who is the minister of state in Great Britain, was deeply disappointed over the lack of commitment to remain below 1.5 degrees.

"We have kept 1.5 degrees alive," he is quoted as saying. "But its pulse is weak and it will only survive if we keep our promises and translate commitments into rapid action."

Both U.S. President Joe Biden and Special Presidential Envoy John Kerry passionately described the threat of climate change as an existential crisis, a matter of life or death. Despite the catastrophic language, however, Biden continues to support sales of oil and gas leases on public lands and has failed to take action on controversial pipeline projects such as Enbridge Lines 3 and 5.

"The approved texts are a compromise. They reflect the interests, the conditions, the contradictions and the state of political will in the world today," UN Secretary-General António Guterres wrote in a public statement at the conclusion of the conference.

"Our fragile planet is hanging by a thread."

Climate anxiety and 'solastigia'

The climate change discussions among world leaders in general resemble a collective case of cognitive dissonance, when cognition and behavior contradict each other.

Indigenous and environmental leaders say the modern disconnect between humans and nature lies at the core of the dilemma, a disconnect that has roots in a worldview that emerged fully in Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries during the Age of Enlightenment. French philosopher René Descartes and his peers gave birth to an "empire of reason" that helped fuel scientific progress and divorce nature from human beings.

"Through Cartesian dualism, which enabled the flourishing of modern science by removing psych from the world, Descartes inadvertently structured modern science to conceive of the human being as outside of nature," according to writer Alexander Blum.

Today, however, "the ideal of human mastery over nature is swallowing its own tail," Blum wrote.

European settlers in America, already steeped in a Cartesian worldview objectifying nature as a resource to be exploited, have more recently embraced neoliberalism, the ideology that elevates consumerism and capitalism as the final drivers of human life. The term neoliberalism was coined in the late 19th century but today refers to the economic policies commonly associated with Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher that elevated the use of free-market policies for social and governmental works versus supporting social-democratic reforms of the past.

Before this era there had been a distinction between the market and society, but in neoliberal ideology, all features of life including objects, services, knowledge, spirituality and experiences are commodified. Anything and everything can be measured, assigned monetary worth and ultimately reduced to a transaction.

Economist Edward Lazear describes the ideology as economic imperialism. Economic thought invades and colonizes domains previously occupied by logics such as family, tastes, politics, culture, religion, crime, law and war.

In addition to normalizing the careless treatment of our home, the earth, the consequences of neoliberalism and economic imperialism have fed human alienation and distress giving rise to new terms such as climate anxiety and solastigia to describe a collective soul sickness.

Have neoliberal politics, economics and worldview forever cast a vision of creating sustainable life on earth at irreconcilable odds?

Leaders such as Biden are now forced to govern in a world that is almost entirely fueled by neoliberal political and economic interests. Responding to complaints that he and his administration are moving too slowly to renewable energy and away from fossil fuels, Biden called on major oil producers to pump more oil as he headed to the COP26 meeting, noting, "The truth of the matter is ... everyone knows that the idea that we're going to be able to move to renewable energy overnight ... is just not rational."

He lamented that Russia and Saudi Arabia and others are decreasing their oil production in order to drive up prices, and expressed concern over the impact on U.S. working families.

Pursuing bipartisan cooperation in reducing reliance on fossil fuels while reducing global warming is a delicate balancing act. Michigan's 12 tribes and others opposing Enbridge Line 5 are pressuring Biden to intervene in closing down the pipeline, saying it poses a major environmental threat to the region.

But Republicans are forwarding the argument that shutting down Line 5 would exacerbate the country's surge in natural gas prices. They also say shutting down the pipeline would cause serious tensions between the U.S and Canada, one of the U.S.'s biggest trade partners, according to Inside Climate News.

"The optics of shutting down Line 5 in this market with elevated prices would be really poor," said Ben Cahill, climate and energy analyst for the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Biden supporters point to his success in passing the $1 trillion infrastructure bill despite Republican and some Democratic opposition. The bill includes $54 billion for clean energy and grid-related investments, $7.5 billion to build a network of electric charging stations for vehicles, $21 billion to clean up Superfund sites and cap unused oil and gas wells, and $55 billion to expand access to clean drinking water.

What about the boom in Native oil?

Not all Indigenous peoples support the same path in curtailing climate change.

The latest oil boom has propelled an almost tenfold spike in oil production from Native lands since 2009, with tribal lands now producing more than 3 percent of U.S. oil. Biden exempted Native lands from a suspension of new oil and gas leases on government-managed land in deference to tribes' sovereign status.

"We're one of the few tribes that have elected to develop our energy resources. That's our right," Mark Fox, chairman of the Mandan Hidatsa Nation, told The Associated Press. "We can develop those resources and do it responsibly so our children and grandchildren for the next 100 years have somewhere to live."

Some tribal citizens, however, lament ills brought by the oil boom, such as increased crime and drugs, tanker truck traffic, road fatalities, and spills of oil and wastewater.

The Mandan Hidatsa Nation on the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation in North Dakota is located on one of the biggest U.S. oil discoveries in decades.

The Standing Rock Sioux tribe, about 100 miles south, however, tried to shut down the Dakota Access Pipeline that carries Fort Berthold crude. There is no oil worth extraction on Standing Rock lands.

Wasin Zi, whose ancestors followed Lakota leader Sitting Bull, wants to ensure the tribe doesn't fall victim yet again to a changing world, where fossil fuels warm the planet and bring drought and wildfire.

"We have to find a way to use the technology that's available right now, whether it's geothermal or solar or wind," she said.

Psychological impact

As people grow more dissatisfied with a value system that is costly to physical life, however, change may be coming.

According to the Climate Psychology Alliance the narratives of neoliberalism are difficult to relinquish because they have become part of who we think we are. Collective amnesia and anesthesia are symptoms of a pandemic of the Western mind, covering up the emptiness and soullessness that Western lifestyles engender. This emptiness and loneliness creates a hunger that makes us devour the world without ever being satisfied.

Many people are turning to Indigenous peoples for guidance and answers, according to Kyle Hill of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa and Cheyenne River Sioux tribe. Hill, who attended COP26 in person, is an assistant professor at the University of North Dakota's Department of Indigenous Health.

"Indigenous peoples have sacred places that are a part of our creation stories involving the land and water," Hill said. "We protect these places because without them we are no longer who we are. We are spiritually dead."

"My impression is that non-Native people have a desire to establish a similar relationship with the earth but they have no idea how to go about it, " Hill said.

Unable to resist commodifying their spiritual relationship with the earth, non-Native people are consumed by the individual pursuit of excellence often at the expense of others and the earth.

Hill was saddened by the way Indigenous peoples who wore their traditional regalia to the COP26 conference were treated.

"Members of the media wanted to take photos of them but very few people asked to sit down and speak with them," he said.

Hill observed that many non-Native people are attracted to Indigenous efforts opposing fossil fuel development and pipelines but are often more fascinated by how Indigenous ceremony and spiritual practices can heal their personal disconnect with the earth.

"I don't think their healing is going to come from lifting us up," Hill said. "White people need to do their own healing work. They need to figure out what it means to get back to their own roots and stop commodifying and stealing our roots"

Can Western people re-establish their connection with the earth by working to reverse climate change?

Winona LaDuke, White Earth Ojibwe and director of Honor the Earth, an Indigenous environmental advocacy organization, takes journalists on a tour of Enbridge's Line 3 construction sites near Park Rapids, Minnesota, on June 7, 2021. (Photo by Mary Annette Pember/Indian Country Today)

"I believe the land can heal people but only if they can humble themselves," said Winona LaDuke, White Earth Ojibwe and director of Honor the Earth, an Indigenous environmental organization.

"Unfortunately, most people won't let go of their stuff," LaDuke said. "They've got to carry all their trappings with them and that's way too heavy."

LaDuke has no patience for those who are unwilling to do the heavy lifting, the physical work of opposing fossil-fuel development and creating a just transition.

"We'll teach you but you have to be willing," she said. "Industrial man is not the person that the creator put here."

Tom Goldtooth, Dine and Dakota, executive director of the Indigenous Environmental Network, describes the battle to address climate change as the final frontier of colonization.

"There's a time and a place where White people are going to come full circle to understanding their responsibilities to the earth," he said. "But it has to be a natural process; no one can force them."

Some of the best work that Indigenous people can do is model good behavior and relationships with the earth, LaDuke and Goldtooth said.

Whenever Goldtooth and others from the Indigenous Environmental Network work on environmental issues related to air, water quality and land, for example, they frame the discussion within Indigenous teachings that see these elements as sacred.

"We can't separate the environment from spirituality; that is the foundation of our work," Goldtooth said. "That's why I talk about our sacred relationship to each other and the earth because I believe that's one of the biggest problems humans have throughout the world."

Goldtooth and the Indigenous Environmental Network have brought Indigenous spiritual connections and perspectives to the annual COP meetings for years. Lifting up that perspective often faces tough challenges from both Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples.

Tom Goldtooth, Dine and Lakota, is director of the Indigenous Environmental Network. He is shown here at the organization's headquarters in October 2021 in Bemidji, Minnesota. (Photo by Mary Annette Pember/Indian Country Today)

Many Indigenous peoples are in favor of nature-based solutions such as carbon markets.

"People tell me to be practical," Goldtooth said. "Carbon markets are going to happen anyway. Let's work to put safeguards in place and prevent human rights violations. ... Nature based solutions are putting nature into this 'financialization of nature' file. It's a movement around quantifying the sacred-nature, trees, grasslands. It's a false solution."

What about tribes that support carbon markets?

Although some Indigenous peoples may view carbon markets as false solutions, the markets appear to be winning. The COP26 agreement relies heavily on the lucrative carbon market system.

"Carbon markets are not the final solution but at least they give tribes opportunities to develop additional practices and protect and preserve their natural resources, " said Bryan Van Stippen, a citizen of the Oneida Tribe of Wisconsin and director for the National Indian Carbon Coalition.

Fawn Sharp, president of the National Congress of the American Indian and citizen of the Quinault Nation, compares carbon markets to gaming in terms of financial potential for tribes.

Several tribes, including the Yurok Tribe in California, participate in the California compliance market. The tribe was awarded the Equator Prize by the U.N Development Programme in 2018 for its climate mitigation work associated with the market.

The tribe dedicated a large portion of its forest for carbon sequestration. With the profits, they have supported housing and road improvement and bought back tens of thousands of acres of their traditional territory.

As of September 2020, 78.9 million carbon offset credits were issued to tribes or Alaska Native Corporations for forest projects through California's program.

Sharp envisions the carbon market as a means for tribes to confront the existential threat of climate change and a means to hold polluters responsible for generations of exploitation that has contributed to the forced relocation of tribal citizens, such as those in the village of Taholah in Washington State.

Reversing a world view is slow going, complicated and extremely nuanced.

Indigenous leaders, however, continue the work of modeling ways for the world to address climate change. LaDuke and others spent eight years opposing Enbridge's Line 3 oil pipeline through northern Minnesota, but the line was completed in October.

LaDuke has no regrets.

"I basically got my butt kicked by Enbridge," LaDuke said. "When someone asked me if I felt like I'd wasted my time, I said, "Are you kidding?' Someone has to stand up for what's right."

In the same spirit, Sharp calls for working within the existing political and economic system to pursue equity of world view and survival for Indigenous peoples.

"Tribes are gaining a seat at the world's diplomatic table," Sharp said. "We're going to continue to advance a clear agenda for Indian Country.

Our stories are worth telling. Our stories are worth sharing. Our stories are worth your support. Contribute $5 or $10 today to help Indian Country Today carry out its critical mission. Sign up for ICT's free newsletter. This article was produced as part of the Spiritual Exemplars Project fellowship with the University of Southern California's Center for Religion and Civic Culture. It contains material from The Associated Press.

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A spiritual perspective on climate change

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Covering the United Nations Climate Change Conference, known as COP26, was a binge-work undertaking filled with rabbit holes of scientific, economic and existential research that never seemed to end. Now on the other side of this momentous world event, Indian Country Today is sharing some observations, takeaways and looming questions.

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Another Indigenous spiritual perspective on climate change, this time as a response to COP26

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Tom Goldtooth, Dine and Lakota, is director of the Indigenous Environmental Network. He is shown here at the organization's headquarters in October 2021 in Bemidji, Minnesota. (Photo by Mary Annette Pember/Indian Country Today)

This story was originally published by Indian Country Today, with the support of CRCC's global project on engaged spirituality.

Covering the United Nations Climate Change Conference, known as COP26, was a binge-work undertaking filled with rabbit holes of scientific, economic and existential research that never seemed to end.

Now on the other side of this momentous world event, Indian Country Today is sharing some observations, takeaways and looming questions.

The biggest question to emerge from the meeting is what's keeping the world's leaders from taking quick and strong action, given the gravity of the global threat to humankind of fossil-fuel-induced climate change?

Although UN reports and leaders at the COP26 point to Indigenous knowledge and ways as a means to combat climate change, why do they fail to heed their direction and advice?

The overriding message from scientists and world leaders appears to be a keen interest in integrating Indigenous peoples' reciprocal worldviews and relationship to the planet in the battle against climate change.

But is that the reality?

'Watching for concrete measures'

Positive moves during the COP26 conference included pledges by the governments of the United Kingdom, United States, Germany, Norway and the Netherlands to give $1.7 billion directly to Indigenous peoples and local communities in recognition of their key roles in protecting lands and forests. The funding supports Indigenous self-governance, land reform, conflict resolution and mapping and registration efforts.

Incongruously, however, Indigenous peoples had almost no official representation or authority in the COP26 proceedings or in creation of the final document.

Tuntiak Katan, of Ecuador's Indigenous Shuar people and coordinator of the Global Alliance of Territorial Communities, was skeptical of the funding pledge to Indigenous peoples.

"We are happy with the financing announcement, but we will be watching for concrete measures that will reveal whether the intent is to transform a system that has directed less than 1 percent of climate funding to Indigenous and local communities," Katan said. "What happens next is what matters most."

And in the end, the COP26 agreement fell far short of realizing Indigenous messages of responsibility and urgent action to reduce reliance on and production of fossil fuels and keep global warming to 1.5 degrees. Promises to phase out fossil fuels were watered down to a pledged "phase down" coal power and fossil fuel subsidies.

Forbes reported that COP26 President Alok Sharma, who is the minister of state in Great Britain, was deeply disappointed over the lack of commitment to remain below 1.5 degrees.

"We have kept 1.5 degrees alive," he is quoted as saying. "But its pulse is weak and it will only survive if we keep our promises and translate commitments into rapid action."

Both U.S. President Joe Biden and Special Presidential Envoy John Kerry passionately described the threat of climate change as an existential crisis, a matter of life or death. Despite the catastrophic language, however, Biden continues to support sales of oil and gas leases on public lands and has failed to take action on controversial pipeline projects such as Enbridge Lines 3 and 5.

"The approved texts are a compromise. They reflect the interests, the conditions, the contradictions and the state of political will in the world today," UN Secretary-General António Guterres wrote in a public statement at the conclusion of the conference.

"Our fragile planet is hanging by a thread."

Climate anxiety and 'solastigia'

The climate change discussions among world leaders in general resemble a collective case of cognitive dissonance, when cognition and behavior contradict each other.

Indigenous and environmental leaders say the modern disconnect between humans and nature lies at the core of the dilemma, a disconnect that has roots in a worldview that emerged fully in Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries during the Age of Enlightenment. French philosopher René Descartes and his peers gave birth to an "empire of reason" that helped fuel scientific progress and divorce nature from human beings.

"Through Cartesian dualism, which enabled the flourishing of modern science by removing psych from the world, Descartes inadvertently structured modern science to conceive of the human being as outside of nature," according to writer Alexander Blum.

Today, however, "the ideal of human mastery over nature is swallowing its own tail," Blum wrote.

European settlers in America, already steeped in a Cartesian worldview objectifying nature as a resource to be exploited, have more recently embraced neoliberalism, the ideology that elevates consumerism and capitalism as the final drivers of human life. The term neoliberalism was coined in the late 19th century but today refers to the economic policies commonly associated with Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher that elevated the use of free-market policies for social and governmental works versus supporting social-democratic reforms of the past.

Before this era there had been a distinction between the market and society, but in neoliberal ideology, all features of life including objects, services, knowledge, spirituality and experiences are commodified. Anything and everything can be measured, assigned monetary worth and ultimately reduced to a transaction.

Economist Edward Lazear describes the ideology as economic imperialism. Economic thought invades and colonizes domains previously occupied by logics such as family, tastes, politics, culture, religion, crime, law and war.

In addition to normalizing the careless treatment of our home, the earth, the consequences of neoliberalism and economic imperialism have fed human alienation and distress giving rise to new terms such as climate anxiety and solastigia to describe a collective soul sickness.

Have neoliberal politics, economics and worldview forever cast a vision of creating sustainable life on earth at irreconcilable odds?

Leaders such as Biden are now forced to govern in a world that is almost entirely fueled by neoliberal political and economic interests. Responding to complaints that he and his administration are moving too slowly to renewable energy and away from fossil fuels, Biden called on major oil producers to pump more oil as he headed to the COP26 meeting, noting, "The truth of the matter is ... everyone knows that the idea that we're going to be able to move to renewable energy overnight ... is just not rational."

He lamented that Russia and Saudi Arabia and others are decreasing their oil production in order to drive up prices, and expressed concern over the impact on U.S. working families.

Pursuing bipartisan cooperation in reducing reliance on fossil fuels while reducing global warming is a delicate balancing act. Michigan's 12 tribes and others opposing Enbridge Line 5 are pressuring Biden to intervene in closing down the pipeline, saying it poses a major environmental threat to the region.

But Republicans are forwarding the argument that shutting down Line 5 would exacerbate the country's surge in natural gas prices. They also say shutting down the pipeline would cause serious tensions between the U.S and Canada, one of the U.S.'s biggest trade partners, according to Inside Climate News.

"The optics of shutting down Line 5 in this market with elevated prices would be really poor," said Ben Cahill, climate and energy analyst for the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Biden supporters point to his success in passing the $1 trillion infrastructure bill despite Republican and some Democratic opposition. The bill includes $54 billion for clean energy and grid-related investments, $7.5 billion to build a network of electric charging stations for vehicles, $21 billion to clean up Superfund sites and cap unused oil and gas wells, and $55 billion to expand access to clean drinking water.

What about the boom in Native oil?

Not all Indigenous peoples support the same path in curtailing climate change.

The latest oil boom has propelled an almost tenfold spike in oil production from Native lands since 2009, with tribal lands now producing more than 3 percent of U.S. oil. Biden exempted Native lands from a suspension of new oil and gas leases on government-managed land in deference to tribes' sovereign status.

"We're one of the few tribes that have elected to develop our energy resources. That's our right," Mark Fox, chairman of the Mandan Hidatsa Nation, told The Associated Press. "We can develop those resources and do it responsibly so our children and grandchildren for the next 100 years have somewhere to live."

Some tribal citizens, however, lament ills brought by the oil boom, such as increased crime and drugs, tanker truck traffic, road fatalities, and spills of oil and wastewater.

The Mandan Hidatsa Nation on the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation in North Dakota is located on one of the biggest U.S. oil discoveries in decades.

The Standing Rock Sioux tribe, about 100 miles south, however, tried to shut down the Dakota Access Pipeline that carries Fort Berthold crude. There is no oil worth extraction on Standing Rock lands.

Wasin Zi, whose ancestors followed Lakota leader Sitting Bull, wants to ensure the tribe doesn't fall victim yet again to a changing world, where fossil fuels warm the planet and bring drought and wildfire.

"We have to find a way to use the technology that's available right now, whether it's geothermal or solar or wind," she said.

Psychological impact

As people grow more dissatisfied with a value system that is costly to physical life, however, change may be coming.

According to the Climate Psychology Alliance the narratives of neoliberalism are difficult to relinquish because they have become part of who we think we are. Collective amnesia and anesthesia are symptoms of a pandemic of the Western mind, covering up the emptiness and soullessness that Western lifestyles engender. This emptiness and loneliness creates a hunger that makes us devour the world without ever being satisfied.

Many people are turning to Indigenous peoples for guidance and answers, according to Kyle Hill of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa and Cheyenne River Sioux tribe. Hill, who attended COP26 in person, is an assistant professor at the University of North Dakota's Department of Indigenous Health.

"Indigenous peoples have sacred places that are a part of our creation stories involving the land and water," Hill said. "We protect these places because without them we are no longer who we are. We are spiritually dead."

"My impression is that non-Native people have a desire to establish a similar relationship with the earth but they have no idea how to go about it, " Hill said.

Unable to resist commodifying their spiritual relationship with the earth, non-Native people are consumed by the individual pursuit of excellence often at the expense of others and the earth.

Hill was saddened by the way Indigenous peoples who wore their traditional regalia to the COP26 conference were treated.

"Members of the media wanted to take photos of them but very few people asked to sit down and speak with them," he said.

Hill observed that many non-Native people are attracted to Indigenous efforts opposing fossil fuel development and pipelines but are often more fascinated by how Indigenous ceremony and spiritual practices can heal their personal disconnect with the earth.

"I don't think their healing is going to come from lifting us up," Hill said. "White people need to do their own healing work. They need to figure out what it means to get back to their own roots and stop commodifying and stealing our roots"
Winona LaDuke, White Earth Ojibwe and director of Honor the Earth, an Indigenous environmental advocacy organization, takes journalists on a tour of Enbridge's Line 3 construction sites near Park Rapids, Minnesota, on June 7, 2021. (Photo by Mary Annette Pember/Indian Country Today)
Can Western people re-establish their connection with the earth by working to reverse climate change?

"I believe the land can heal people but only if they can humble themselves," said Winona LaDuke, White Earth Ojibwe and director of Honor the Earth, an Indigenous environmental organization.

"Unfortunately, most people won't let go of their stuff," LaDuke said. "They've got to carry all their trappings with them and that's way too heavy."

LaDuke has no patience for those who are unwilling to do the heavy lifting, the physical work of opposing fossil-fuel development and creating a just transition.

"We'll teach you but you have to be willing," she said. "Industrial man is not the person that the creator put here."

Tom Goldtooth, Dine and Dakota, executive director of the Indigenous Environmental Network, describes the battle to address climate change as the final frontier of colonization.

"There's a time and a place where White people are going to come full circle to understanding their responsibilities to the earth," he said. "But it has to be a natural process; no one can force them."

Some of the best work that Indigenous people can do is model good behavior and relationships with the earth, LaDuke and Goldtooth said.

Whenever Goldtooth and others from the Indigenous Environmental Network work on environmental issues related to air, water quality and land, for example, they frame the discussion within Indigenous teachings that see these elements as sacred.

"We can't separate the environment from spirituality; that is the foundation of our work," Goldtooth said. "That's why I talk about our sacred relationship to each other and the earth because I believe that's one of the biggest problems humans have throughout the world."

Goldtooth and the Indigenous Environmental Network have brought Indigenous spiritual connections and perspectives to the annual COP meetings for years. Lifting up that perspective often faces tough challenges from both Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples.

Many Indigenous peoples are in favor of nature-based solutions such as carbon markets.

"People tell me to be practical," Goldtooth said. "Carbon markets are going to happen anyway. Let's work to put safeguards in place and prevent human rights violations. ... Nature based solutions are putting nature into this 'financialization of nature' file. It's a movement around quantifying the sacred-nature, trees, grasslands. It's a false solution."

What about tribes that support carbon markets?

Although some Indigenous peoples may view carbon markets as false solutions, the markets appear to be winning. The COP26 agreement relies heavily on the lucrative carbon market system.

"Carbon markets are not the final solution but at least they give tribes opportunities to develop additional practices and protect and preserve their natural resources, " said Bryan Van Stippen, a citizen of the Oneida Tribe of Wisconsin and director for the National Indian Carbon Coalition.

Fawn Sharp, president of the National Congress of the American Indian and citizen of the Quinault Nation, compares carbon markets to gaming in terms of financial potential for tribes.

Several tribes, including the Yurok Tribe in California, participate in the California compliance market. The tribe was awarded the Equator Prize by the U.N Development Programme in 2018 for its climate mitigation work associated with the market.

The tribe dedicated a large portion of its forest for carbon sequestration. With the profits, they have supported housing and road improvement and bought back tens of thousands of acres of their traditional territory.

As of September 2020, 78.9 million carbon offset credits were issued to tribes or Alaska Native Corporations for forest projects through California's program.

Sharp envisions the carbon market as a means for tribes to confront the existential threat of climate change and a means to hold polluters responsible for generations of exploitation that has contributed to the forced relocation of tribal citizens, such as those in the village of Taholah in Washington State.

Reversing a world view is slow going, complicated and extremely nuanced.

Indigenous leaders, however, continue the work of modeling ways for the world to address climate change. LaDuke and others spent eight years opposing Enbridge's Line 3 oil pipeline through northern Minnesota, but the line was completed in October.

LaDuke has no regrets.

"I basically got my butt kicked by Enbridge," LaDuke said. "When someone asked me if I felt like I'd wasted my time, I said, "Are you kidding?' Someone has to stand up for what's right."

In the same spirit, Sharp calls for working within the existing political and economic system to pursue equity of world view and survival for Indigenous peoples.

"Tribes are gaining a seat at the world's diplomatic table," Sharp said. "We're going to continue to advance a clear agenda for Indian Country.

Mary Annette Pember is a journalist fellow with the Spiritual Exemplars Project.

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Winona LaDuke and Tom Goldtooth: A Spiritual Perspective on Climate Change

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This story was originally published by Indian Country Today, with the support of CRCC's global project on engaged spirituality. Covering the United Nations Climate Change Conference, known as COP26, was a binge-work undertaking filled with rabbit holes of scientific, economic and existential research that never seemed to end.

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A super long article, but a good resource for understanding some abbreviated issues.

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The Biloxi- Chitimacha-Choctaw show resilience in their original relocation and are forced to show resilience again as climate change affects their new home.

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The Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw Community and Their Land

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The Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw are a people who have a history of resistance and resilience. And their resilience is being tested again as their ancestral homeland is being washed away and a resettlement community is turning out to be less than it had been hoped to be.

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Here's a website on the Tribal Climate Resilience Program

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Mission

The purpose of the Branch of Tribal Climate Resilience is to enable climate preparedness and resilience across all Indian Affairs programs and for all Federally-recognized Tribal Nations and Alaska Native villages through technical and financial assistance, access to scientific resources, and educational opportunities.

Important Information

Register now for the Alaska Region 2022 Providers Conference, taking place virtually April 6th & 7th, 2022. Register here: https://biaprovidersconference31.vfairs.com/en/. The Providers are a team comprised of Alaska Natives, Tribes, federal employees, individuals, groups, agencies and partners working together to enhance the quality of life, promote economic opportunity, and protect and improve the trust assets of American Indian, Indian tribes and Alaska Natives. The team of providers are "Empowering Our Future Together" in an effort to make positive change. Together we share common core values, goals and unity of purpose. We are Empowering Together! Our movement has direction, a target. The target is a brighter future for Alaska Natives, building on the past, while preserving a proud legacy. This journey will continue to empower one another. BIA welcomes you to the 31st Provider's Conference.

The Institute for Tribal Environmental Professionals (ITEP) is excited to host the second Biennial National Tribal and Indigenous Climate Conference (NTICC) which will be offered as a hybrid event to ensure that our relatives from across turtle island can join us whether in-person or virtually. As in 2020, ITEP welcomes all who are interested in participating or attending. This event will convene knowledge holders on climate change and resilience efforts with an emphasis on the intersection, inclusion and honoring of Traditional and Indigenous Knowledges. All U.S. Tribal and Indigenous nations and Indigenous Peoples from throughout the world, including our Elders and Youth, are welcome.

Call for proposals are now open and will be accepted until Friday, April 22nd. For more information please visit https://sites.google.com/view/nticc-itep/home.

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The purpose of the Branch of Tribal Climate Resilience is to enable climate preparedness and resilience across all Indian Affairs programs and for all Federally-recognized Tribal Nations and Alaska Native villages through technical and financial assistance, access to scientific resources, and educational opportunities.

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The ways in which Tribes are combatting climate change through their own specific knowledges. Planning ahead.

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Photo courtesy of Swinomish Indian Tribal Community

With their deep ties to the land and reliance on fishing, hunting, and gathering, indigenous tribes are especially vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. Now, native communities across North America are stepping up to adopt climate action plans to protect their way of life.

On a hot summer's day, marine ecologist Courtney Greiner walks the shore of a rocky Washington beach at low tide with a handful of staff and interns. They stake out the ground and hunch down, digging up the top two inches of mud, silt, and gravel looking for baby clams.

For thousands of years, the indigenous peoples of the West Coast would build rock walls at the low tide line, allowing sand to pile up behind them, making the slope of the beach gentler, and expanding the area of the intertidal zone that clams like to call home. These simple clam gardens are effective at boosting shellfish numbers, and have long been used to improve food security for traditional peoples.

Now the Swinomish are reviving the old idea to build the first modern clam garden in the United States. Greiner, who works for the Swinomish tribe, is collecting the data that will help the tribe determine the garden's best location. The project aims to boost clam numbers, providing both a sense of purpose for the community and additional food as other resources, like salmon, decline.

This is just part of the Swinomish's plan to ensure the ongoing prosperity of their people in the face of a changing climate. "They were the first native community - and really one of the first communities, period - to make climate adaptation a priority," says Meade Krosby, a conservation biologist with the University of Washington's Climate Impacts Group. The tribe's climate proclamation came out in 2007, and their action plan, published in 2010, was one of the first such documents in the United States. "They're early adopters and really innovative," she says.

The Swinomish have already launched projects aimed at helping the community adapt to a shifting climate in the Pacific Northwest. To protect salmon runs, the tribe is working on the Skagit River to create better spawning beds and is planting trees to provide shade and reduce river temperatures. In addition, the tribe is fighting to block mining operations in the headwaters of the Skagit in British Columbia, which could impact waters downstream.

"Tribes have always been adapting to climate change - now we have to adapt even faster," says one Navajo leader.

Another project aims to restore a healthy population of native Olympia oysters, long threatened by pollution and crowding out by competitive Pacific oysters and now impacted by ocean acidification. Workers have brought in truckloads of oyster shells and dumped them on beaches to provide new homes for imported natives; the imports grow well, says Greiner, but so far have yet to produce a next generation of shellfish. "It's a learning process," she says. A site for the first clam garden should be chosen by next year. And a wetlands project is documenting the local plants that have ecological and cultural importance to the Swinomish, as part of efforts to better manage the changing coast for salmon and farmers alike.

Across North America, other indigenous communities are stepping up to formulate and enact climate action plans to protect their way of life. In 2019, the Karuk tribe of northern California released its climate adaptation plan with a recommendation to return to prescribed burning, an old idea that might help to ease California's wildfire problems. The Tulalip tribes of Washington state are relocating nuisance beavers from urban areas back to traditional watersheds to help lower river temperatures and aid salmon populations; they are also redirecting agricultural runoff for electricity generation. The Jamestown S'Klallam tribe in Washington is removing invasive butterfly bushes from the banks of the Dungeness River to help protect its salmon. The Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes of Montana are gathering and planting seedlings of the whitebark pine that are more resistant to warming-related diseases such as blister rust. Alaskan tribes are using microscopy to identify harmful algae blooms spurred by warming waters. The list goes on.

"Indigenous peoples have always been on the front lines," says Nikki Cooley, who grew up without electricity or running water on the Navajo Nation reservation and now co-manages the Tribes and Climate Change Program for the Institute for Tribal Environmental Professionals (ITEP) in Flagstaff, Arizona. "Tribes have always been adapting to climate change. Now we have to adapt even faster."

As Krosby puts it, indigenous peoples "have unique connections to the land and are feeling impacts the earliest and most severely." One study found that coastal indigenous communities eat 15 times as much seafood as non-indigenous people in the same country - food that is being heavily impacted by everything from pollution to warming waters and ocean acidification. In the far north, buildings are collapsing and indigenous communities relocating as permafrost thaws, and traditional practices like reindeer herding are being threatened as winter snow changes to freezing rain, which locks up winter forage like lichens under ice.

"It's happening all over the world," says Brian Cladoosby, chairman of the Swinomish tribal community. "I have seen an elder standing on their cemetery in [the Pacific island nation of] Tuvalu and it was covered with water - they can't bury their people there anymore."

These are communities that have relied on the land for generations, building an intimate knowledge of the natural cycles of plants, animals, and weather. Unlike the traditional Western worldview that humanity can and should seek dominion over the environment, indigenous populations tend to view humanity as part of an interconnected whole. "We knew if we impacted one part of the web, the whole thing could fall apart," says Cladoosby.

Adds Cooley, "We put our non-human relatives first, meaning the trees, the sky, the water. We don't treat them as objects to be studied in a lab. We revere them."

Indigenous communities tend to think many generations ahead when planning how to utilize resources.

Native Knowledge: What ecologists are learning from indigenous people. Read more.

Indigenous communities also tend to think many generations ahead when planning how to utilize resources - a lot further than a U.S. presidential cycle allows. "America can't even think past 4 years," says Don Sampson, Umatilla Tribe member and head of the climate change project for the Affiliated Tribes of Northwest Indians (ATNI), a 57-tribe consortium. "It's a short-sighted country."

The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's recent reports have acknowledged with "high confidence" that adaptation efforts benefit from the inclusion of local and indigenous knowledge. "One of the things that comes across really clearly is the fact that indigenous peoples are by far the most effective stewards of biodiversity," says Krosby. "They do the best job." One study showed, for example, that deforestation rates across the Amazon were two to three times lower in indigenous-held lands. According to the UN Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, indigenous peoples hold or manage a disproportionate amount of formally protected areas and areas with low human impact: these groups occupy 28 percent of the planet's land, but more than 40 percent of protected areas. In Canada, the government funded an Indigenous Guardians program in 2017, recognizing that First Nations communities are well placed to serve as stewards of the land.

Cooley estimates that ITEP has worked with representatives of some 300 of the 574 tribes in the United States and that there are now more than 50 tribal climate action plans in effect. "In the past five years, tribal climate action plans have exploded," she says. Sampson's goal is to ramp that up to 100 percent within five years: "We have to accelerate the ability and capacity of the tribes; we want all tribes to identify the impacts and have a plan for that."

Sampson also notes that many tribes are making huge strides on energy independence, weaning themselves off fossil fuels to protect both the environment and their economic future: the Navajo nation, for example, long reliant on coal, has made big investments in solar power.

The Swinomish tribe makes its home in western Washington, on an island carved out by the narrow Swinomish Channel. The land is low and at risk from sea level rise: A five-foot increase this century - at the high-end of sea level rise estimates - could swamp more than 1,100 acres of the 10,000 acre reservation, including all its agricultural lands. Part of the Swinomish territory is particularly sacred as a fishing and shellfish gathering spot, says Cladoosby. "One year, just a normal tide, not a storm surge, covered up that area," he recalls. "That had never happened before. It was eye opening for us."

About half of the reservation's acreage is forested, and so is at risk from wildfire, especially in a hotter, drier climate. The tribe has just over 1,000 members, many of them relying on "first foods" - from shellfish to deer - for their welfare. The surrounding Salish Sea has seen salmon populations crash mysteriously over the past 30 years; the impacts of climate change - including reduced stream flows and warmer stream temperatures - have been cited as one culprit. Dungeness crab and shellfish larvae are in some places literally dissolving from ocean acidification.

For many indigenous groups, environmental health and human health are deeply intertwined.

In the Skagit River Basin, a shift from snowfall to rain in the surrounding mountains is projected to boost winter river flow but reduce summer flow, drying up tributaries and making waters warmer just as salmon spawn in late summer and fall. "When there's no water for the salmon to return to, that's a serious problem," says Cladoosby.

"There've been times I've been really negative looking forward," says Joseph Williams, a Swinomish tribal senator with five children. "Things are looking pretty bleak, especially for our salmon." But these projects, he says, are proving inspirational to the next generation, helping to bring people together. "As long as we keep our kids excited about taking care of our environment, things remain optimistic," he says.

For the Swinomish, as for many indigenous groups, it makes little sense to talk about environmental health and human health separately; they are deeply intertwined, with community cohesion and traditional food security being equally vital. Resilience to sea level rise doesn't just mean managing wetlands, but also combating feelings of despair. Work led by the Swinomish tribe's environmental health analyst Jamie Donatuto and tribal historic preservation officer Larry Campbell has created a set of health indicators based on these cultural values. They hope this approach will help researchers across the world think beyond simple morbidity and mortality as the only important measures of welfare.

Such work is often done in collaboration with non-indigenous scientists and governments. The University of Washington's Climate Impacts Group last year released a Tribal Climate Tool, developed in close partnership with relevant tribes, that highlights specific climate impacts expected in local regions - from the number of hot summer days to inches of rainfall expected in coming decades - so tribes can see what they are facing and make decisions about how to adapt.

A number of such organizations are pushing this work forward in collaboration with local tribes, including the U.S. Geological Survey's regional Climate Adaptation Science Centers; Krosby is deputy director for the northwest division. And there's the Pacific Northwest Tribal Climate Change Network, based at the University of Oregon, which partners with Sampson's division at the ATNI. In October, ATNI's climate summit in Seattle is expected to attract tribal leaders from across North America, as they work on a national tribal climate crisis agenda for 2020 and beyond. "It's a revolution that's happening," says Sampson. "Watch the tribes: they are going to lead us."

For Cladoosby, part of that revolution involves re-awakening traditional connections to the land, which have eroded in recent centuries. "Part of the assimilation policy was taking stewardship of the environment out of our hands," he says, leaving many communities locked in a cycle of trauma and cultural loss, along with drug and alcohol abuse. "Part of breaking that cycle is getting back that respect for the environment."

Food Insecurity: Arctic heat is threatening indigenous life. Read more.

"Right now, we are taking baby steps," says Cladoosby. The Swinomish are still collecting data, securing treaty rights, educating their own people and others, he says. Alongside efforts to adapt and ensure resilience in the face of local change, political activism is also a big part of the picture as it can prevent some development and ensure that tribes maintain control over their lands. He acknowledges it will take time to establish long-term sustainable solutions. "We live in a pollution-based economy; it is based on making money and polluting the landscape," Cladoosby says. "Trying to change that mindset is like trying to turn a tanker. It doesn't happen over night."
Correction, February 13, 2020: A caption in an earlier version of this article incorrectly identified a photo as showing Swinomish tribal members preparing a new clam garden in Washington state. They were participating in a clam garden restoration in British Columbia.

Nicola Jones is a freelance journalist based in Pemberton, British Columbia, just outside of Vancouver. With a background in chemistry and oceanography, she writes about the physical sciences, most often for the journal Nature. She has also contributed to Scientific American, Globe and Mail, and New Scientist and serves as the science journalist in residence at the University of British Columbia. More →

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How Native Tribes Are Taking the Lead on Planning for Climate Change

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With their deep ties to the land and reliance on fishing, hunting, and gathering, indigenous tribes are especially vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. Now, native communities across North America are stepping up to adopt climate action plans to protect their way of life.

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How climate change is hurting sacred spaces in Northern California and elsewhere in the US.

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Climate change is endangering sacred land. For these Native women, it threatens ‘everything we are.’

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Wildfires in Western states have razed structures, displaced residents and altered air quality - and fundamentally changed the relationship between Native women and the land they have historically stewarded.

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How climate change is affecting religious tradition associated with music.

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Indigenous music sustainability during climate change

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Indigenous music sustainability forms a cohesive concept due to shared sustainability threats globally among different Indigenous peoples historically…

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The ways in which climate change may also change Native religious practices, with a focus in the Southwest.

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What does the shrinking of the Colorado River mean for Native American religions? Ken Lund, CC BY-SA

The Colorado River, one of the longest rivers in the United States, is gradually shrinking. This is partly a result of overuse by municipalities and seasonal drought. The other reason is global warming.

The decline in the river reservoir will have serious implications for large U.S. cities, such as Los Angeles, that depend on the Colorado River as their water source. In addition, this will also have an impact on the Native American tribes who view the Colorado River as sacred to their religions.

As Ka-Voka Jackson, a member of the Hualapai tribe and a graduate student working to address climate change on the Colorado River and restoring native plant species along its banks, stated,

"The Colorado River is so sacred not just to my tribe, but to so many others."

As a scholar of Native American religions and the environment, I understand how indigenous people's religions and sacred places are closely tied to their landscape. For the past 100 years, indigenous peoples have been forced to adapt to changes in their environments and modify their religious rituals in the United States. The U.S. government made certain Native American religious practices illegal in the 19th and early 20th century. Although these policies have since been rescinded, they led to changes in many indigenous practices.

Global warming, however, is different. The question is whether indigenous people will be able to adapt their beliefs all over again due to the impact of global warming on the natural world.

Adapting to change

The Blackfeet tribe in Montana brought changes in their relationship with the natural world as a result of the policies of the U.S. government from the 1880s to the 1930s.

For example, the Blackfeet purposefully moved religious ceremonies from one time on their liturgical calendar to completely different times to avoid the U.S. government penalizing native people for dancing or participating in religious ceremonies.

The Blackfeet moved their annual O'kan, or sundance festival, from late summer (usually held at the end of August) to the Fourth of July celebration. They avoided U.S. government punishment by masking their ceremonies within state-sanctioned public events.

Policies related to the mining of natural resources and damming of rivers on indigenous lands have also led to changes in Native Americans' religious practices.

Historian David R. M. Beck interviewed elders and researched how the Menominee tribe in Wisconsin adapted to the loss of their sacred fish, the sturgeon, after a paper mill built a dam across the Wolf River.

USFWSmidwest, CC BY

The sturgeon disappeared after the dam was built in 1892, because they could no longer swim upstream to spawn. For over 100 years, the Menominee tribal members continued to pray and conduct their annual "returning of the sturgeon" ceremony in the spring - even though there were no more sturgeon in the river. The Menominee ultimately won the right to return the sturgeon to the Wolf River in 1992 and the tribe revitalized the full ceremony and celebration of their sacred fish.

In all these situations, Native American tribes learned to adapt to the challenges placed before them, modify their religious practice and embrace a different relationship with the natural world.

Global warming and religion

When it comes to global climate change, it affects everyone, not just specific groups in specific places. But for many indigenous peoples, natural resources are closely linked to religious beliefs and practices.

Historically, indigenous peoples used the natural seasonal cycles of weather, plants and animals as part of their liturgical or religious calendar. The Blackfeet held their annual "beaver bundle ceremony" in the early spring as ice melted off rivers and beavers returned to the open waters. In Blackfeet mythology, a beaver served as a deity who taught humans how to cultivate tobacco, which the tribe used for important religious ceremonies and as a peace offering to their enemies.

Bryn Davies, CC BY-NC-ND

There are signs, though, that beavers are now moving north due to global warming. Biologists are currently studying both beavers and the birch and alder shrubs that beavers eat, as both move north into new regions. Scientists worry that as a keystone species, the movement of beavers will change the northern ecosystems as they cut off waterways and build beaver dams. And shrubs will change the local waterways that they grow by. This will affect local animal species.

What will happen when there are no more beaver in Blackfeet territory? Will their religious traditions adapt similar to the Menominee when they faced the loss of their sacred sturgeon?

Religion and resiliency

From the arctic tundra to the American desert southwest, and places worldwide, indigenous peoples will be facing the impact of global climate change.

Regarding the shrinking of the Colorado River, researchers Brad Udall and Jonathan Overpeck have concluded that, "Failing to act on climate change means accepting the very high risk that the Colorado River basin will continue to dry up into the future."

If this river faces a drier future, it will likely affect the Mojave, a people indigenous to the Colorado River basin, who believe the river was created by their ancient deity Mastamho as part of their sacred landscape.

As the G-20 convenes in Germany this week to discuss global issues including climate change, indigenous scholars, such as myself, are wondering what the future holds for indigenous peoples, their environments and their religions.

Indigenous communities can be resilient and adapt their internal religious beliefs to outside challenges, as Native American tribes from the turn of the 20th century have proven. Climate change presents yet another challenge.

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Will global warming change Native American religious practices?

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The Colorado River, one of the longest rivers in the United States, is gradually shrinking. This is partly a result of overuse by municipalities and seasonal drought. The other reason is global warming. The decline in the river reservoir will have serious implications for large U.S.

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An oldie but a goodie. Also how climate change is affecting southwestern tribal religions.

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MISHONGNOVI - At the base of a sandstone mesa, the ground descends in a series of stone terraces and steps, forming an oval-shaped ceremonial gathering place with flat rocks arranged around a central pit. At the bottom, a pool of water shimmers in the sun.

This natural spring, called Toreva Spring, is a sacred place for Hopi people. For centuries, they have held religious ceremonies here while looking into its serene waters.

When he was a boy, Howard Dennis sat by the water during ceremonies and dangled his feet in the cool spring.

"See that little ledge right there? At the bottom, that's how high it used to be," Dennis said, motioning to the dry edge of the pit.

Over the past four decades, he said, the water level in the spring has dropped 8 to 10 feet.

Water still percolates out of the ground and pools in the lower portion of the spring. But Dennis fears the spring could eventually go dry, taking away the essential heart of this religious site.

The Hopi have lived for thousands of years on the mesas of the Colorado Plateau. Flowing springs and seeps have sustained them, providing sources where they have collected drinking water, grown corn and beans, and maintained a spiritual connection to life-giving water.

But the springs are dwindling. Some are completely dry.

Looking down at Toreva Spring, Dennis said he hopes the remaining water doesn't vanish.

"Without us having this water source here, how are we going to continue to practice our religion?" Dennis said. "Our whole religion is water-based. And without this water being here, if it was ever to disappear - which I hope it doesn't - where will we go? How will we continue our religion? How will we be a people?"

The Hopi Tribe's lands in northeastern Arizona, like other areas of the Southwest, have been drying out during years of persistent drought and rising temperatures. Scientists call it aridification. Climate change caused by the burning of fossil fuels is driving up temperatures and intensifying dry spells. When conditions are drier, less runoff seeps into the ground to replenish the aquifers and the springs.

The declining springs have also figured in long-running disputes over coal mining and the effects of groundwater pumping on aquifers beneath the Hopi and Navajo reservations. Over the past half century, Peabody Energy Corp. pumped tens of billions of gallons from the aquifer that supplies drinking water for the Hopi Tribe and the Navajo Nation.

For years, many tribal members have voiced fears that the extraction of water is affecting the ancient reserves of groundwater, reducing underground sources that feed springs.

Bitter disagreements over the environmental effects of the coal mining operations at Black Mesa have continued after the two mines were shut down, one in 2005 and the other in 2019. Since the mines closed, groundwater pumping dramatically decreased. Even so, some Hopi people who opposed the coal industry say they're still deeply worried about the potential long-term effects on their aquifers.

Dennis is involved in environmental groups such as Living Rivers, Waterkeeper Alliance and Black Mesa Trust, and has for years advocated for protecting water on Hopi lands. He offered to show me the springs to explain the changes he's seen and the threats these water sources face.

Dennis belongs to the Squash Clan and his Hopi name is Bahyouma, which means Water Running - or more specifically, as he puts it, water running over the earth, like when rain falls and water runs, or when snow melts and water runs.

He is 55 and serves as a mongwi, a local religious leader in his village, Mishongnovi, which sits on top of Second Mesa overlooking Toreva Spring.

As part of his religious responsibilities, Dennis leads the village's flute society. During ceremonies, the flutes harmonize with shaking rattles and singing. People offer prayers for all living things, for rain, for their corn crops to flourish.

Over the years, people from the community have periodically gathered at the spring to clean it, removing mud and vegetation.

Following Hopi spiritual beliefs, Dennis makes prayer-feather sticks called pahos and lays them down at different springs.

"I see a lot of change in them," Dennis told me. "Seeing these things start to disappear, it's really affecting us."

Dennis sat under a shady tree beside the spring, the breeze rustling in the leaves. He said troubling questions have been on his mind, including what would happen if the springs dry up, and what the Hopi would do.

"It's been on my mind for a while," he said, pausing. "It hurts."

"But I think, all in all, that we were the first, and we'll be the last," Dennis said. "We have to keep our religion going. That's what Hopi is about."

Much of the Southwest has grown drier during one of the most severe droughts ever recorded. Scientists say the dry spell in the West over the past two decades ranks as one of the biggest "megadroughts" of the past 1,200 years, and unlike the decades-long droughts of the past, this one is being intensified by global warming.

The Hopi Reservation has had many dry years since the late 1990s. As the land has become parched, people have noticed the desert vegetation becoming sparser, the greenness fading.

On farm plots where families rely on moisture from snow and rain, they've seen their rows of corn stunted by dryness. Some plants have shriveled in the heat.

The Hopis' crops have also withered in spring-fed gardens on the sides of the mesas. These garden plots have been planted for generations on terraced fields next to springs.

In the past, Hopi people traditionally collected water in round pottery canteens, wrapped them in cloth and slung them over their backs. To sustain their gardens, they scooped up water and poured it into channels running to the fields.

At a spring on the rocky flank of Second Mesa, people still descend the stone steps and carry buckets of water to their gardens. Around this walk-in source, the ground descends in a sloping depression reinforced with stone walls. At the bottom of the steps, a dark green pool glistens.

The Hopi call the spring Lemeva and consider it a sacred site.

On one plot by the spring, Dennis planted seeds this year with his wife, as they have for many years. They grew corn, squash, beans and watermelon. They were able to harvest some of the crops, but the plants withered in the heat when temperatures hit the 100s.

They managed to harvest a corn crop from other rain-fed fields nearby.

Standing beside shriveled corn plants in the garden, Dennis motioned to a spot where fruit trees once stood with peaches and pears. Now the trees are gone.

"They all dried out," Dennis said. "It used to be better a long time ago."

The water level in the spring has also declined over the years, Dennis said. Since his childhood, there has been "a definite change."

Yet people still come to this spring and others to collect water to use in ceremonies.

In their religious beliefs, the Hopi see profound connections between themselves, these water sources and all life. As Dennis put it, "We're all water."

But with fewer springs flowing, Dennis said he's concerned there is less water to support life.

"We see the lack of bees and the other insects that used to be here," he said. "We don't see the amount of vegetation that there used to be."

Dennis said he keeps Lemeva and all the springs in his prayers.

"We can't let her die," he told me. "We keep praying."

On another sweltering day, we visited Lemeva during a tour of water sources with representatives of the Hopi tribal government.

Max Taylor, a technician with the Water Resources Program, explained that this spring has been used for over a thousand years.

"Some of the old archaeological sites around here indicate it's been here for a long time," Taylor said, standing beside the spring. "It's still pretty actively used."

Taylor is a lifelong farmer and rancher who has worked at springs for the tribe carrying out what he calls "renovation" projects. The work often involves removing invasive plants or protecting a water source by fencing it off to protect it from livestock.

From a vantage point on top of the mesa, Taylor looked out across the rock faces and pointed to a green streak running down the lower slope.

"There's a spring there, too," he said. "There's a lot of springs in this area."

Most of the springs that flow from the mesas depend on weather conditions, Taylor said.

"You get your rain and snow, and they'll infiltrate through the rocks and cracks and then come out as a spring," Taylor said. "There's been a lot less snow, a lot less rain, so these springs are slowly drying up."

Duane Humeyestewa, Hopi filmmaker

As a people, how do you respond to it when the environment and your landscape that you've grown up in is changing and shifting?

Many people here have noticed the climate getting drier and water sources diminishing. In places on the Navajo Nation, people say springs where they once led sheep to drink have been drying up.

Duane Humeyestewa, a Hopi filmmaker, said he remembers as a boy climbing in those fruit trees by Lemeva Spring to pick peaches and small, tart apples.

"It is so super dry," Humeyestewa said, motioning to the bare soil in the gardens. "It feels like a drier desert."

As a boy, he rode with his grandfather in an old pickup to the spring, where they filled buckets to bring water home. Growing up, Humeyestewa was taught to take the minimal amount of water needed, just for the essentials, a principle ingrained in cultural values based on harmony with the natural world.

Now, that balance seems to be slipping off-kilter.

"As a people, how do you respond to it when the environment and your landscape that you've grown up in is changing and shifting?" Humeyestewa said.

In addition to seeing symptoms of climate change, many Hopi people say they're deeply concerned about what has occurred with the groundwater beneath their lands.

Their concerns center on Black Mesa, a tableland that rises north of the Hopi villages and that lies partly in the Navajo Reservation and partly in the Hopi Reservation. The 5,400-square-mile area includes Black Mesa itself, with its 2,000-foot cliffs, as well as other mesas, plains, hills and canyons.

At Black Mesa in the late 1960s, wells and pumps began pulling vast quantities of water from the Navajo Aquifer, also called the N Aquifer, to support the extraction of coal and send electricity across the Southwest.

The Hopi and Navajo tribal councils signed leases allowing mining, and in 1968 Peabody Western Coal Co. started strip-mining at Black Mesa.

For nearly four decades, the coal industry accounted for 63% of the groundwater pumped from the aquifer, according to government figures. From 1972 through 2005, an average of more than 1.3 billion gallons were drawn from the aquifer per year.

Much of the water was mixed with coal at Black Mesa Mine to form a slurry mixture, which was sent through a 275-mile pipeline to the Mohave Generating Station in Laughlin, Nevada, producing power for Phoenix, Las Vegas and Los Angeles. A second operation at the Kayenta Mine sent coal by railway to fuel the Navajo Generating Station in Page.

Some tribal members vehemently opposed the coal industry's use of water, and disputes over the environmental impacts have been intertwined with their deep mistrust of the company and government regulators.

The history of how water and coal were extracted from Black Mesa includes a well-documented case of deceit and betrayal.

In the 1960s, the Hopi Tribe's leaders trusted Salt Lake City attorney John Boyden to represent them. Based on Boyden's advice, the Hopi agreed to the coal-mining lease and began selling water to support the operation.

What Boyden didn't reveal was that at the same time, he was also working for Peabody.

Vernon Masayesva, founder and director of Black Mesa Trust

In the Western mind, water is a commodity - that's the word for it - which can be put to what they call beneficial uses. And beneficial use all boils down to money, greed.

His double representation was discovered by University of Colorado law professor Charles Wilkinson, who in 1992 received a call from his research assistant saying papers released after Boyden's death revealed he had been representing Peabody - an egregious ethical violation that critics of the deals had long suspected.

Wilkinson told the story of how Boyden worked both sides and convinced the Hopi Tribe to accept unfavorable deals in his 1999 book " Fire on the Plateau: Conflict and Endurance in the American Southwest."

Wilkinson described a period of "conquest" from 1955-75 that he called the "Big Buildup," in which leaders in cities from Phoenix to Las Vegas to Los Angeles "organized a concerted campaign for the rapid, wholesale development of the energy and water of the Colorado Plateau."

This Big Buildup "made the modern Southwest" and fueled rapid growth, he wrote, but had consequences for the tribes, who "leased their coal and water at prices far below market value."

In the 1960s, plans took shape to buildthe Central Arizona Project Canal to bring Colorado River water to desert cities.And those plans depended on coal from Black Mesa.

When President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the 1968 law authorizing construction of the CAP Canal, the legislation said the Navajo Generating Station would send 24% of its electricity to run the pumps of the CAP. The coal-fired power pushed water uphill and sent it flowing to support booming growth in Phoenix, Tucson and surrounding areas.

As mining operations expanded, other conflicts led to upheaval. In 1974, Congress passed the Navajo-Hopi Land Settlement Act, which redrew reservation boundaries to address a long-standing dispute. The legislation led to the forced relocation of thousands of people, most of them Navajos.

By the 1990s, some Hopi were voicing concerns that the tribe had gotten a raw deal, saying they believed the groundwater pumping was drying up springs and reducing flows in washes.

Former tribal chairman Vernon Masayesva was one of those who spoke out about these concerns. In 1998, Masayesva founded the nonprofit group Black Mesa Trust to press for protecting the waters beneath Hopi lands.

He argued the water extraction was doing lasting damage and affecting the flow of springs. His arguments put him at odds not only with the company but also with government scientists and federal regulators.

Masayesva said he thinks government officials and scientists view the issues with a "Western mindset."

"In the Western mind, water is a commodity - that's the word for it - which can be put to what they call beneficial uses," Masayesva said in an interview. "And beneficial use all boils down to money, greed."

He said while government regulators have used studies to make determinations about the impacts of pumping, "they never really have studied the springs."

And even if there were more studies of springs, Masayesva said, the regulators wouldn't take Hopi knowledge seriously.

"That's where we're at. That's why we are playing a ballgame in their playing field, playing by their regulations," Masayesva said. "And how can we possibly have justice in this unfair setting? To Hopi, water is not a commodity. It's life. It's sacred."

For Masayesva and other Hopi who campaigned for shutting off Peabody's wells, their struggle began to shift as the coal industry encountered headwinds.

In 2005, the Mohave Generating Station was shut down in a legal agreement with environmentalists, who had sued over air pollution. The Black Mesa Minealso closed.

In 2017, Masayesva praised the announcement that Navajo Generating Station would be shut down after two years. He said in a statement that "the price for allowing industrial use of pristine drinking water has been unconscionably high."

Peabody Energy Corp. maintains that the effects of its water use at Black Mesa were negligible.

"Use of water is governed through lease agreements, and studies demonstrate there have been no adverse impacts to municipal water supplies, springs or streams from the mine's minimal water use," Stephanie Weiler, the company's communications director, said in an email. "In addition, Peabody is in compliance with all permit requirements."

Scientists with the U.S. Geological Survey have been monitoring the effects of groundwater pumping in the area. Their studies say that from 1968 through 2016, Peabody's wells drained more than 49 billion gallons from the N Aquifer.

In a 2018 report, USGS hydrologists described declines in groundwater levels in the Black Mesa area using measurements from monitoring wells. Comparing the 2016 water levels with the "prestress period" prior to 1965, they found the median change in 32 wells was a decline of 10 feet, while half the wells saw a larger median drop of about 36 feet.

The hydrologists have monitored the flow of four springs, a small fraction of the many springs scattered across Hopi lands. They've found that two of the four springs showed a trend of decreasing flow, while the other two had either fluctuated or remained relatively constant.

The USGS studies have focused on the N Aquifer, which supplied the coal industry and also provides drinking water for towns and villages.

Runoff from rain and snow slowly recharges the aquifer north of Black Mesa, and much of the water has been underground for thousands of years. A deep, thick portion of the aquifer sits beneath the coal-mining areas. To the south, the aquifer thins out and eventually reaches the surface, like the lip of a bowl, in low-lying washes south of the Hopi mesas.

Much of the aquifer holds water under pressure, confined between rock layers. Above it sits another separate aquifer, the Dakota Aquifer, from which government regulators said a "limited" amount was pumped for a time by Peabody's wells.

Above that aquifer and a layer of shale lies an upper aquifer in the Hopi mesas called the Toreva Sandstone Aquifer.

The USGS doesn't collect information about springs fed from this upper aquifer, such as Toreva Spring, because based on the geology, this water is thought to be separated by rock layers and not connected to the deeper aquifer, said Jon Mason, a USGS hydrologist.

This perspective hasn't convinced Masayesva and other Hopi people who strongly believe the pumping has affected their springs.

"In our worldview, all waters - rivers, groundwaters, glaciers, whatever - they're all interconnected, because Earth is like a human body, and we survive with all the hundreds of bloodlines circulating through all of our body," Masayesva said. "Based on that disturbance of a huge amount of water underground, which is highly pressurized, it affects the flow of the blood, these springs."

Masayesva also suspects the groundwater drawdown has had an effect in increasing the concentration of toxic arsenic in the drinking water in Hopi communities. The water in portions of the reservation contains levels of naturally occurring arsenic exceeding the federal drinking water limit, but Masayesva said no study has been done examining how the pumping might have affected arsenic levels.

At the end of 2005, Peabody reduced its groundwater pumping by about 70% when it shut down the coal-slurry pipeline. According to USGS data, that reduced the total amount of groundwater pumped in the Black Mesa area by about 44% in subsequent years.

With less pumping occurring, water levels in some wells - even miles away - have stabilized and slowly begun to rise.

Masayesva said one important chapter remains in his fight "before we shut the books" on Black Mesa: the reclamation process to restore the lands and waters after the mining.

To understand the disagreements over mine cleanup, it helps to know that Masayesva and other Hopi people have long accused the federal Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement, or OSM, of failing in its regulatory responsibilities.

"OSM, the regulatory agency, treats Peabody like a special customer," Masayesva said. "They do everything according to what Peabody wants."

Together with former Hopi Chairman Benjamin Nuvamsa, Masayesva wrote to the agency in June to demand action, saying Peabody has "effectively ignored" its reclamation obligations at Kayenta Mine and Black Mesa Mine.

Rep. Raúl Grijalva, chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee, raised similar concerns with OSM, saying in a letter that "Peabody is seeking to conduct reclamation more slowly, and the public has been nearly shut out of the process."

Lanny Erdos, then the agency's deputy director, said in his response that Peabody is "in compliance" with its current five-year plan and that his agency continues to "review and process all proposed permit revisions."

The two former Hopi chairmen made their argument in an Oct. 6 article in the Navajo-Hopi Observer, saying the agency "has failed to come close to meeting its obligation to ensure reclamation of either mine."

They said the agency has a duty to ensure that waters damaged by mining, including groundwater and springs, are restored. The reclamation plans for the mines, however, do not include any plan to replenish the groundwater that was extracted.

"When the deal to begin coal mining on Black Mesa was crafted in the 1960s, officials assured us we would gain enormous wealth," Nuvamsa and Masayesva wrote. "Now, after a half century of providing cheap coal and water to power growth and prosperity in places like Phoenix, Los Angeles and Las Vegas, we can see the emptiness of that promise."

They recalled how the attorney Boyden had convinced Hopi leaders to sign the original coal deal through deception. And they pointed out that decades later, many Hopi people haven't seen financial benefits and still live in poverty, many without electricity or running water.

"Unless we act now, by demanding a significant revision to Peabody's permit, the spoils of over 50 years of mining will remain a mess," they wrote, urging the tribe's leaders to demand that Peabody be held accountable.

When asked about those concerns, Peabody responded that the reclamation process is on track.

"We are engaged in monitoring and compliance work at Kayenta as we work toward final reclamation, which we expect to be a multiyear process," Weiler said.

For decades, the coal industry brought revenues and jobs to the Hopi and the Navajo. With the end of mining, those economic benefits are drying up.

The utility Arizona Public Service recently proposed a " Just Energy Transition" plan that would provide $144 million to help the Navajo Nation, the Hopi Tribe and the Joseph City area transition their economies away from coal to new industries. The proposal includes $3.7 million for the Hopi Tribe over the next five years.

Daniel Higgins, environmental scientist

They pumped far more groundwater than they said they were ever going to. Water level decline at distant wells is greater than they said it was going to be.

As for the tribe's water supplies, federal regulators have sided with the company in finding no red flags. In a June report, the Office of Surface Mining analyzed data from wells and a groundwater flow model to assess whether there has been "material damage to the hydrologic balance outside the permit area." The agency concluded that material damage to the aquifer "has not occurred."

Nuvamsa strongly disagreed with that conclusion. For one thing, he said, the N Aquifer holds "Ice Age water" that will take hundreds of years to recharge.

"That's why I think that there is material damage, significant damage to the water table, for not only Hopi but Navajo communities as well," Nuvamsa said. "It has a direct impact on our springs."

At one spring, which Nuvamsa believes is fed by the Dakota Aquifer, people from his village, Shungopavi, occasionally gather for ceremonies.

Over the past several years, with the spring mostly dry, they've resorted to hauling water to the spring in tanks mounted on trucks. Before the ceremonies, they've let the water run from the tanks into the spring.

"We've had those springs for, like, forever. And then to have to do that, it's not good," Nuvamsa said. "That is so painful and sad."

Masayesva said he doesn't trust OSM's conclusions and wants independent scientists to take a deeper look.

Environmental scientist Daniel Higgins, in research since the mid-2000s, has found that Peabody's mining operations have consumed more groundwater and caused a greater decline in the aquifer than the company had stated in its initial plans. He submitted his research findings in comments to government regulators in 2011.

"They pumped far more groundwater than they said they were ever going to," Higgins said in an interview. "Water level decline at distant wells is greater than they said it was going to be."

In its reports, Higgins noted, Peabody said the drawdown of groundwater wouldn't have significant impacts in areas around the Hopi villages. But Higgins said the data indicates otherwise.

He pointed to USGS data for wells in the village of Kykotsmovi and Keams Canyon, where over the past several years water levels have begun to rise after decades of steady declines - indicating the drop-off of mine-related pumping has eased the pressures, even on wells located nearly 40 miles away.

Higgins works as a water management consultant and leads a nonprofit group called Resilience Outreach. He has criticized OSM's approach, saying the agency has repeatedly weakened its own regulatory thresholds.

"There's a clear pattern of regulatory decision-making that has served to ensure that mining continues without interruption rather than prioritizing the protection of the Hopi Tribe and Navajo Nation's water resources," Higgins said. "They keep moving the goalposts."

For example, in 1989 OSM established damage thresholds for protecting groundwater, springs and streams, Higgins said, but later changed the thresholds three times.

OSM didn't respond to emails requesting comments.

Higgins said the agency has relied heavily on a groundwater model designed by Peabody's consultants.

He said there hasn't been enough monitoring of springs, and without measurements of flows over time, the potential effects of the groundwater drawdown on many springs haven't been tracked.

Dennis said he believes multiple factors are affecting the springs, including global warming, pumping for the coal industry and pumping from other wells.

He has spoken out against Peabody's use of the aquifer and has criticized what he calls unfair government decisions related to the mining operation.

Several years ago, he traveled to the company's headquarters in St. Louis to try to speak with representatives, "but they wouldn't talk to us."

To collect his thoughts, Dennis jotted down a few paragraphs with pencil and paper, then read them aloud to me.

"As Peabody pumped great amounts of pristine water from the N Aquifer, untold damages were being created. Many springs have gone dry," Dennis said. "It saddens me and many other Hopi religious people that our springs are not healthy. There are springs with great religious significance. What will the people do when they are dry? I feel that now comes a time when we have to find a solution."

When Dennis was a boy, he went with his mother to a spring where they filled metal cans. They loaded the water onto a burro and brought it home.

Dennis and his family still don't have running water in their village, so they collect water at a windmill. They fill plastic jugs at the spigot and load them into their car.

The tribal government, using federal funds, has plans to build a pipeline and other infrastructure to expand water access on the reservation.

Dennis said he'd like to see more water collection points built so people could fill up closer to home.

Some Hopi talk about how years of water extraction helped light up cities and sent water flowing to make the desert bloom. They say when they visit Phoenix and see swimming pools and lush golf courses, they think about how the Hopi have paid dearly for that bounty with their own water, leaving their lands with less.

Among some Hopi, there is a sense that a precious resource has been taken away and that they deserve to regain some of what they've lost.

"I know that we were really unjustly done," Dennis said.

He said he hopes to see the injustices addressed one day. And he offered a hypothetical idea: What if people in Arizona's cities could choose to donate an extra few cents on their utility bills to help the Hopi?

"It's time for somebody to pay a little bit back to help out the people back here," Dennis said.

He said he also thinks the Hopi Tribe should gain access to more water. If the tribe could tap into the Colorado River, for example, infrastructure could be built to use the water to replenish the N Aquifer.

The Hopi are also concerned about the effects of groundwater pumping on springs that emerge from deep aquifers and gush out of the canyon walls along the Little Colorado River. Some of their most sacred places lie along the river, including Siipa'pu ( also called Siipa'puni), a revered site with a flowing spring that the Hopi consider their place of emergence into this world.

Dennis and other Hopi have seen the flow of the Little Colorado River diminish, and they worry that pumping by landowners around the area is affecting springs along the river.

Long ago, the Hopi ranged widely across the Southwest. They left petroglyphs and pictographs on rocks telling of events in their history, how they lived and what they valued. In these images, they spoke of deities, clouds, animals, plants, water and springs, among other things.

Hopis say their ancient ancestors traveled on migrations as clans before settling on the mesas.

They say the Hisat'sinom, or the ancient ones, included the Ancestral Puebloans, who centuries ago built cliffside dwellings in Chaco Canyon, Mesa Verde and Canyon de Chelly, and who left these villages by about 1300 following severe decades-long droughts.

When their reservation was established by the U.S. government in 1882, the Hopi ended up with only a small portion of their traditional lands, cut off from streams and rivers where their ancestors had roamed for millennia.

Leaders of the Hopi Tribe have been trying for years to clarify their rights to water from the Little Colorado. This year, the tribe's leaders returned to court in a case that will determine their rights to water in the Little Colorado River basin.

Securing additional water will be critical given the stresses on groundwater and the shift to a hotter, drier climate, said Jarrett Calnimptewa, manager of the tribe's Water Resources Program.

"If climate change is still going to continue the way it is, where we're not getting the rainfall for recharging the N Aquifer, we have to look for other sources of water," Calnimptewa said. "And that would have to come from sources outside of the reservation."

The Hopi have traditionally collected water not only from springs but also from cisterns carved into sandstone on the tops of the mesas.

Long ago, people hollowed out depressions and holes in the solid rock, creating storage spaces for rainwater. They used the natural contours of the rock, selecting a low point and carving out a symmetrical chamber beneath a gaping hole.

On the sloping ground around each cistern, they used cracks in the rock to capture rivulets and carved channels to carry runoff from rain and melting snow, sending the water trickling through the opening into the chamber.

Beside the centuries-old village of Oraibi, these cisterns remain, obscured in brush. They now sit empty.

Beatrice Norton, who is 69, said she remembers that during her childhood the cisterns had plenty of water. People would lower a bucket on a rope, scoop up the water and fill jugs.

Norton followed her grandmother, who used metal milk cans and wheeled them home in a wooden wagon.

"Sometimes they would really fill up because rainfall was plentiful a long time ago," Norton said. "But now, it hardly ever rains."

Visiting her clan's cistern, she leaned over the opening - a square shaft with rounded corners - and peered into the darkness. At the muddy bottom, about 10 feet down, three snakes sat tangled and motionless, unable to escape.

The last time she collected water here was more than a decade ago, she said.

"I feel sad when I come here, to see the way it is," Norton said.

Most of the time, the cistern lies covered with an old box spring to prevent animals from falling in.

When she was growing up, people from the village would clean out the cisterns once a year. They would pull shrubs from the cracks to help the waters run. They would lay down prayer feathers.

Norton, who serves as chairperson of her village board, said she wants to maintain these traditions.

"We can clean it out," she said, "and then the men folks will make a prayer feather."

Just like those cisterns were once full to the brim, Dennis said he remembers a deep pool at the bottom of Toreva Spring.

"When we had our ceremony, we'd sit in there. And your legs would be in the water," Dennis said.

A glimpse of that wetter past was captured in 1905, when photographer Edward S. Curtis made an image of people gathered at the spring for a ceremony, some sitting on a ledge, reflected in the wide pool.

Now those days seem as distant as the history of the old stone schoolhouse next to the spring, which has been closed and empty for decades. The school once had a pump that sent spring water to its faucets.

"That was how much water there used to be here, a lot," Dennis said. "Now everything is drying up."

He offered to show us another spring and we drove to Keams Canyon.

At the end of a dirt road, the desert brush turned to thick vegetation. Reeds sprouted from a pond, fed by a stream.

A spring flowed from underneath a rock face, forming a swirling puddle where bees hovered.

"This whole area has good water," Dennis said. He picked some mint and smelled the fragrance.

His wife, Colleen Seletstewa, gathered a handful of mint. She also picked cattails, saying the plant is hard to find and she needs it for ceremonies.

"Wow, and they are big!" she exclaimed.

Dennis walked on past the cattails, around the pond.

"I like how the water runs down and it trickles down and it feeds everything down along the way," Dennis said. "It gives us hope. It gives us inspiration to keep our religion going, not to give up."

When he was younger, he said, water sources around his village teemed with life like this.

"There's not too many healthy springs anymore," he said. "A lot of them are dry."

Sometimes, Dennis goes to visit springs that have dried up. He finds the spaces in the rocks where water once ran. He still has hope that the springs may come back.
Ian James is a reporter with The Arizona Republic who focuses on climate change, water and the environment in the Southwest. Send him story tips, comments and questions at ian.james@arizonarepublic.com and follow him on Twitter at @ByIanJames.
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Environmental coverage on azcentral.com and in The Arizona Republic is supported by a grant from the Nina Mason Pulliam Charitable Trust. Follow The Republic environmental reporting team at environment.azcentral.com and @azcenvironment on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

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'Everything is drying up': As springs on Hopi land decline, a sacred connection is threatened

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MISHONGNOVI - At the base of a sandstone mesa, the ground descends in a series of stone terraces and steps, forming an oval-shaped ceremonial gathering place with flat rocks arranged around a central pit. At the bottom, a pool of water shimmers in the sun.

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Native Alaskans reflect on the ways in which climate change has affected their lives.

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Alaskan Native Elders Tell Their Climate Change Story | After the Ice

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A short personal story from an Indigenous Russian reindeer herder on how climate change is affecting their community and landscape.

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Throughout the 2021 United Nations climate change conference, the Guardian will be publishing the stories of the people whose lives have been upended - sometimes devastated - by the climate breakdown.
Gennadiy Shukin, Taymyr, Russia

I was born in 1962 in a family of deer herders in Taymyr, on a peninsula in the very far north of Russia. I am part of the Dolgan community: we are an indigenous Russian group and there are around 6,000 left of us living in the tundra. Growing up, the Soviet Union tried to deny us our traditional way of life, but since then climate change has become the biggest challenge to our survival.

Our community lives by hunting, fishing and herding deer. Scientists say that Taymyr has the most rapid temperature increase in Russia, and we can really feel it.

Because of the warmer winters, we have seen that deer are giving birth earlier in the year. Many are born too weak and don't survive the long journeys they have to make. This means there is much less deer for us to hunt and it hurts the whole ecosystem.

Rivers and lakes that we use for fishing have also started to dry out. Others are too polluted after all the big oil and gas plants have sprung up over the years in our lands. Some days we don't catch any fish at all.

For generations, we have sold the food we caught to local towns and cities to buy basic products like sugar and wheat. Without animals, we cannot survive.

Big craters are also forming because the Arctic permafrost is starting to melt under our feet. This means the routes that we have used for decades to travel, hunt and fish have to be adjusted as whole roads have sunk. It is also dangerous as you never know where the next crater will form.

Our ecosystem is changing quickly: animals such as sables that I have never seen before in my life have appeared in the tundra. And now we also have to deal with giant mosquitoes and bugs that attack our livestock. The summers are becoming unbearable. It's madness.

The youth sees that climate change makes our traditional way of life impossible and they are forced to move to the bigger cities to find jobs, which are often low-paid. Our culture is disappearing.

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'Summers are becoming unbearable': living on the frontline of global heating

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Throughout the 2021 United Nations climate change conference, the Guardian will be publishing the stories of the people whose lives have been upended - sometimes devastated - by the climate breakdown. I was born in 1962 in a family of deer herders in Taymyr, on a peninsula in the very far north of Russia.

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Traditional Ecological Knowledge in the time of climate change- how Native people are viewing the climate crisis.

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Introduction

Western climate science and Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) represent complementary and overlapping views of the causes and consequences of change. In particular, observations of changes in abundance, distribution, phenology, or behavior of the natural environment (including plants and animals) can have a rich cultural and spiritual interpretation in Indigenous communities that may not be present in western science epistemologies.

Results

Using interviews with Indigenous elders and other Traditional Knowledge holders, we demonstrate that assumptions about the nature, perception, and utilization of time and timing can differ across knowledge systems in regard to climate change.

Conclusions

Our interviewees' focus on relationality predisposes them to notice interactional changes among humans and other species, to be sensitive to smaller scale examples of change, to be more likely to see climate change as part of a broader time scale, and to link changes to a greater suite of socio-political phenomena, including the long arc of colonialism. One implication of this research and the interactions among humans and other species is that policies restricting Native and non-Native access to resources (i.e., hunting and fishing) to certain calendar seasons may need to be revisited in a changing climate.

Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK)

Traditional Knowledge (TK)

Indigenous Knowledge (IK)

Climate change

Phenology

Seasonality

Time

Indigenous peoples around the world have been some of the most vocal in acknowledging that (a) climate change is visibly occurring; and (b) that their communities, and all communities, should mitigate, plan for, and adapt to those changes (Harrington ; Maldonado et al. ; The Mystic Lake Declaration ; Wildcat ). This vocality, and the organizing around it (Salick and Byg , Maldonado et al. ), has brought new prominence of TEK within climate science that takes many different forms. Some mainstream scholars acknowledge the unique and complementary value of TEK in providing additional information about changes in the natural world (e.g., phenology) that are not as readily available through western science observations (Berkes et al. ; Huntington ; Drew ). This utilitarian view can selectively admit TEK into the western view of climate change or climate change adaptation. Here, TEK often serves as data that are useful for scientific research, for describing climate change impacts, or for adaptation wisdom that may support community-level planning efforts.

Another form is to focus on how climate change uniquely affects Indigenous communities (e.g., Bennett et al. ). For example, Field et al. () note that one risk connected with sea-level rise is "Loss of common-pool resources, sense of place, and identity, especially among Indigenous populations in rural coastal zones." In the USA at least, recognition that Indigenous peoples face special challenges connected to climate change has led to some dedicated research and engagement resources directed toward Indigenous communities and nations from governments, non-governmental organizations, universities, and the media (Bennett et al. ; Wotkyns ). A third alternative (that may include one or both models above) is research conducted by Indigenous scholars and scientists themselves (formally or informally), either through university and government research institutions, or as community-driven knowledge production. These latter examples often take the form of practical climate change adaptation planning such as the Climate Adaptation planning with the Institute for Tribal Environmental Professionals at Northern Arizona University ( https://www7.nau.edu/itep/main/Home/ ).

However, while these two primary sets of knowledge (mainstream and Indigenous) can and do inform one another, their epistemological differences are significant and deserve examination. Indigenous peoples often interpret the nature and significance of climate change differently from non-Indigenous scientists (Bennett et al. ; Chief et al. ; Maldonado et al. ; Vinyeta et al. ; Willox et al. ). These differences may significantly affect the production of science, and the relationships among non-Indigenous scientists, Indigenous scientists, and communities experiencing change (Williams and Hardison ).

The literature points to several differences between these two sets of knowledge. First, while western scientists usually describe vulnerability to climate change in economic or ecological terms, or occasionally mention deeper effects (as in the Field et al. quote above, about identity, or Lynn et al. about tribal first foods), many Indigenous peoples and communities approach the question of how climate change affects them quite differently. They see themselves additionally vulnerable psychologically and existentially, and see climate change as threatening the integrity of their communities' cohesion, or as altering the existential, personal, and intimate (as opposed to metaphorical or consumptive) relationships with the natural world (Maldonado ; Maldonado et al. ; Marino ; Willox ; Willox et al. ; LaDuke ; Whyte et al. ).

Second, climate science-when describing changes to the environment-draws sharp distinctions between empirical data (whether observed or modeled) and the sociocultural context of those data. By contrast, Indigenous peoples often understand the nature and significance of their knowledges within political, environmental, cultural, and social systems that differ greatly from those of many scientists (Climate and Traditional Knowledges Workgroup ; Whyte ; Williams and Hardison ).

Third, related to cause, scientists and other non-Indigenous persons distinguish natural climate variability from anthropogenic (human-caused) climate change through a rigorous statistical process aimed at determining, e.g., how much of the warming in the past half-century was caused by rising greenhouse gases (Stocker et al. ). Yet Indigenous peoples, and some scholarly and activist commentators, link climate change with other environmental and social changes that are related to longstanding issues of power, especially colonialism (both historically and today) and exploitative business practices (Cameron ; Haalboom and Natcher ; Marino ; Whyte ; Wildcat ).

Missing from this literature is a comparison of the epistemology of time between scientific and Indigenous Knowledge sets. Moreover, because one important aspect of climate change is changes in seasonality (the regular occurrence of natural events), understanding how different knowledge sets relate to time and seasonality is essential for understanding these different ways of knowing, how they are complementary, and how they may differ. The specific objective of this paper is to present Indigenous Knowledge holders' understanding of ecological change, and any shifts that may be climate change driven, as perceived through the lens of TEK in their communities and to identify the assumptions about time and seasonality that are made therein based on western scientific understandings. We argue that traditional ways of knowing are not only valid, they are built on a different intellectual and cultural framework that needs to be understood in its own right. We compare those assumptions with assumptions in the climate science literature on time and timing in the same region. This comparison provides important insights into assumptions (when studying climate change) about the nature of time, what subsequent to those assumptions becomes more likely to be observed, and what counts as information within these epistemological systems, as well as the outcomes and adaptation possibilities that stem from that knowledge. Furthermore, this study demonstrates how Indigenous Knowledge of the environment and/or TEK may detect changes that are imperceptible to western science, in part, because of a unique and holistic relationship with the timing of change.

Knowing about time and the timing of knowing

Knowledge systems, which derive from institutions that furnish their reliability, represent approaches to gaining a reliable understanding of the world we inhabit so that societies flourish. Scientific peer review is such an institution, as is gaining promotion and rank in organizations. In Indigenous communities, complex knowledge systems are sometimes referred to as Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK). For the purposes of this paper, TEK is defined as the application of the specific area of Indigenous Traditional Knowledge and Indigenous Science Knowledge that relates to the environment in a given traditional homeland of Indigenous groups and/or Usual and Accustomed (U&A) areas. This may include but is not limited to botany knowledge, medicinal application (collection and/or administration), hunting, fishing, gathering, processing of material(s), caretaking such as burning, coppicing, thinning, astronomy, phenology, time, ecological markers, species markers, weather and climate knowledge (Hong et al. ). TEK is complex, unique, and can include a suite of experts, institutions, referendums on knowledge, and checks and balances for ensuring the successful creation, accumulation, and transfer of knowledge, information, and ethical guidance on how to use that information (Cochran et al. ; Barnhardt and Kawagaley ). Ceremonies, such as potlatch ceremonies, and training protocols for harvesters, as just two examples, have been discussed in the literature as institutions that support the reliability of Indigenous Knowledge systems (Trosper ). Ceremonies and ceremonial areas vary from tribal group, area, and location. Some ceremonial practices are intellectual property and are not released information, while other ceremonial practices are adjusted and moved depending on TK and TEK.

Perceptions of time and temporality are deeply intertwined with knowledge creation, accumulation, and transfer, as well as cultural orientation (Gingrich et al. ), and can vary greatly from one knowledge community to another. In some contexts, time is presumed to be the linear progression of certain events happening one after another. This presumption is now understood as profoundly ethnocentric and "brazenly cultural in character." (Hodges ). As Bates writes "Assumptions about time as a linear flow of constant rate, with neat chronologies linking events in the past, present, and future are convictions that are deeply embedded in Western thought" (Bates ), and thus, embedded in Western, non-Indigenous scientific discourses.

Conversely, conceptions of time in Indigenous contexts can vary widely and are often encoded in Indigenous languages or methods of discourse and knowledge exchanges, including storytelling and explanations about the relationships among things in place. Different ontologies also highlight different metaphorical constructions to explain the flow of time. For example, among Aymara speakers of South America, the present-past is visible and perceivable, but the future is behind a person and, therefore, un-seeable and unknowable. Similar constructions of present-past and future are present in Tuvaluan languages and larger Pacific cultural groups, and these constructions can clash with Western scientific discourses on climate change which posit that an adequate understanding of processes and other information permit reasonably accurate quantitative predictions and are thus oriented toward the future (Marino and Lazrus ). Indigenous scholars and scholars of Indigenous studies discuss the differences in concepts of time. Stewart-Harawira () claims that "Within Māori ontological and cosmological paradigms it is impossible to conceive of the present and the future as separate and distinct from the past, for the past is constitutive of the present and, as such, is inherently reconstituted within the future" (Stewart-Harawira ). In the Anishinaabemowin ( Neshnabémwen) language, the expression aanikoobijigan ( yankobjegen) (Whyte , pg. 5) means ancestor and descendent at the same time. This meaning suggests an Anishinaabe perspective on intergenerational time-a perspective embedded in cyclicality in which it makes sense to consider ourselves as living alongside future and past relatives simultaneously as we walk through life. Cyclical time or cyclical temporality, here, refers to various ways of experiencing ourselves in the world as participants within narratives involving our ancestors and descendants.

We know, additionally, that climate change will include changes in temporality, timing, and seasonal shifts. These changes in seasonality have been widely noted. Particularly in the Arctic, researchers and Indigenous residents have noted changing in the timing and intensity of weather patterns such as rain, snow, or cloud cover (Huntington and Fox ; McNeeley and Shulski ; Robinson and Frei ). Some research has indicated that these changes, while relatively small when measured by climate scientists, can indicate important seasonality shifts for people engaged in subsistence practices (McNeeley and Shulski ; Weatherhead et al. ).

Seasonality does not refer to the commonly accepted four seasons, but rather how annual environmental changes affect harvesting, monitoring, storing, and consuming of sometimes hundreds of plants, animals, and insects. Seasonal perceptions of climate change may be tied to detailed accounts of movements of plant, animal, and insect populations and conditions such as ice cover or water levels that differ from perceptions of climate change rooted only in changes of precipitation or temperature on a four seasons model of annual change. For example, many Indigenous peoples perceive more than four seasons, such as the Anishinaabe 13 moons system or "seasonal round" (Davidson-Hunt and Berkes ; Benton-Banai ).

Indigenous perspectives on time, seasonality, and the impacts of climate change have not previously been compared with perspectives from climate science in the western USA. Natural scientists have demonstrated significant changes in climate (e.g., Abatzoglou et al. ) and some consequences of those changes (e.g., Dalton et al. ). Native American communities are also recognizing change (Charnley et al. ; Alexander et al. ). Our original goal in this research was to investigate the observations of five tribes in the western USA, utilizing a TEK perspective, to discover whether they perceived impacts of climate change impacts, and whether any adaptive strategies were being implemented. Research can produce surprises, and the same was true with this project. We initially expected to focus on visible expressions of culture, including songs, stories, dances, and ceremonies, but the dominant emphasis in interviews led us to emergent results concerning deeper notions of how one frames change, responses to change, and the interactions among species, ecosystems, and culture. These observations are linked to notions and perceptions of time and seasonality that appeared quite different, in certain ways, from their climate science counterparts.

The overall research objective of this project at its inception was to identify the behaviors and patterns of Native American culturally relevant natural resources through a TEK lens and note responses, if any, to climate change. We did this by the following: (1) interviewing tribal elders and cultural experts from five carefully chosen tribes (Fig. ): the Confederated Salish Kootenai Tribes, the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians, the Paiute Shivwits Band, the Duckwater Shoshone, and the Quinault Indian Nation, and classifying their responses about cultural impacts; (2) comparing responses and adaptation measures; and (3) comparing those findings with climate science findings in the same region. The five tribes selected were all from the west and included the Pacific Northwest and Great Basin regions.

The categories of questions included (a) plants and animals responding to changing climate conditions; and (b) elements of tribal tradition and culture that depend heavily on those plants and animals. However, our interviews were intended to establish, primarily, the last causal step: (c) whether the fluctuations in the abundance and distribution of plants and animals and other environmental factors have resulted in modifications or adaptations of tribal cultural traditions or other aspects of culture. Interviewees were not asked to speculate on the influence of global or regional climate change, and it was not the intention of this research to establish, through new analysis, whether any of these changes mentioned by interviewees are a consequence of climate change.

Selection of tribes

We chose the aforementioned five tribes with high engagement and promotion of traditional cultural activity on their websites, similar enrollment numbers, and breadth of geographic distribution ranging from coastal to mountain to desert. None of the tribes selected are directly connected to each other, but are autonomous, federally recognized sovereign tribes located within the western USA.

Recruitment and data collection

The lead author interviewed 24 members of the five tribes. The participants were chosen based on their cultural expertise, and were identified by tribal resource managers who assisted in the selection process for this project. Snowball technique was applied, as was purposeful sampling and identification. Data was analyzed utilizing TEK information, relating to the topics addressed previously as they related and were utilized in traditional Native American culture practices and behaviors. Stories, anecdotes, and traditional information systems were all scanned and analyzed for TEK information. Sensitive information and/or intellectual property was not disclosed to the public and is not included in this information because of sovereignty and intellectual property rights of the respective tribes. Analyses were based on documented information systems that have been passed down, as well as traditional information systems that are based in TK and are applied, utilized TEK methodologies. These knowledge systems operate on well-defined and precise practices, and are adjusted in a variety of ways to account for changes in environmental factors. These adjustments were noted and comparisons were made to self-reported previous behaviors to decipher the levels of change and seasonality that have been impacted. Terminology which is rooted in TK and/or TEK was noted and adjusted for as it differs from western science terminology just as a foreign language would. Some TEK terms are rooted in Native base languages, and cannot be fully translated.

Interviews lasted for 1 h, on average. Interviews were informal and semi-structured, allowing participants to lead discussions. Interviews were audio recorded, brought to Oregon State University, evaluated, and transcribed for further review. All interviews were subject to intellectual property rights restrictions of the tribe (Williams and Hardison ). We provide analysis and examples of data here, with permission; but full transcripts are owned by the respective tribes.

Our analysis of the interviews suggested four significant conclusions, which are each outlined in the next four subsections. We reflect on (1) tribal perspectives on time and seasonality, (2) temporal adaptations, (3) construction of time from the perspective of climate science, and (4) perceived association of climatic change in relation to other changes.

The importance of time, seasonality, and relationship

For these tribes, the most culturally significant aspect of climate change is how it affects the definition of time, and particularly seasons. Our study found that the tribal understandings of time are defined by cues and patterns observed in the natural world. As such, time is then relied on, operated in, and based on a 3D construction rather than the westernized linear time system. Their concepts of time are important not least because they indicate when certain traditional behaviors should begin, for example, hunting, fishing, and gathering. They are also strikingly relational, so that seasonal patterns are observed as an intricate system of connectivity and integration among plant, animal, insect, and human experience.

These cues for human behavior include weather events, like the first appearance of snow on a certain mountain, botanical indicators like when berries emerge, and animal behaviors like the emergence of a certain species of ant.

"... in the spring, you got carpenter ants, big black carpenter ants, and [eel hunters] didn't go eeling until they saw those carpenter ants, they came out to mate, grow wings and fly off and start new colonies and stuff and that was what they marked when the weather was right to start eeling.... they marked other things the same way, but you can't do that anymore because our weather's changed so much that you can't mark anything like that; there's no way to do it." (Oscar Hatfield, CTSI Elder)

In the above example, the carpenter ants have no direct biological connection to the spawning times of "eels" (Pacific Lamprey) or water levels, yet the emergence of the ant colonies historically corresponded to eel patterns in the river, and the Siletz relied on this correspondence to know when to go eeling, like a timer going off. This example is also directly (if implicitly) related to climate change caused by rising greenhouse gases, as noted by the comments on changing weather. Winter seasons are shorter and spring seasons are notably occurring earlier in the Pacific Northwest.

Quinault tribal member Doug James gave a similar account relating to Blueback salmon: "The older guys used to tell us that when the salmon berries start coming out, you'd start throwing your net out for blueback, and when we start seeing the salmon berries start coming out, we'd start seeing one or two even if they were games (not full runs, but isolated fish that indicated runs were arriving)." Figure shows a Quinault tribal member fishing.

Disruption of the seasonal cycle, consequently, has profound effects for Native cultures. When a changing climate alters long-established associations between phenological events as in the examples above, the consequences are not merely an inconvenience or a set of information; instead, they challenge the fundamental belief about how elements of the natural world are connected, as well as the timing of when traditional patterns occur and behaviors are performed. Bonds between species such as those between carpenter ants and eels, between salmon berries and blueback, represent a fundamental order of the universe; when these bonds dissolve, the sense of order begins to fray and several interviewees expressed confusion, dismay, and concern, as in the last part of Hatfield's remark.

These phenological events are indicators of what is referred to sometimes in Native communities as Indian time-understood here as precision in timing, oriented in relationship to other environmental phenomena and in relationship to appropriate behavior and action. Cycles of events, bound together, not only show these patterns of seasonality, but illustrate the sensitivity with which relationships among people, animals, plants, and landscape may be observed and interpreted. While phenology and relationality do appear in Western science, particularly in noting climatic changes (e.g., Menzel et al. ), the primacy of relationality as a mechanism of knowing and identifying change, and the inclusion of right human behavior within these relations, we see as distinct from most western science frameworks and understand it as an epistemological difference between these ways of knowing.

Some aspects of traditional culture are adapting to timing shifts

Some traditional cultural elements or events are being altered in ways that many members see as temporary, and short term, compared with the extensive period that Natives have been in their aboriginal landscapes. Examples that arose in our interviews included those linked with seasonal indicators.

A seasonally important time period (generally winter, but it varies with each tribe's customs and beliefs) are those days, weeks, or months when some tribes deem it traditionally appropriate to "talk story," and thereby to transmit and sustain traditional information. The term "story" is a misnomer, as this period of time is quite literally an Indigenous informational data system within respective tribes. For Confederated Salish Kootenai Tribes, traditional "talk story" time began when a snowfall of several inches visibly covered the nearby mountains. Owing to the shifts in autumn snowfall timing, the beginning of this time has changed. Due to lessened snowfall amounts, adaptations have taken place. Now less snow is required to indicate when "talk story" time begins. Time, measured as periodic, and timing, understood as onset or co-occurrence of related events, are both important in traditional practice. Adaptive responses, in this case, is offsetting the change in snow with a change in defining appropriate behavior, or timing, thus minimize the effects of climate change on some practices.

Climate science and assumptions about time and seasonality

In our study region, the Pacific Northwest, changes in climate have been observed over roughly the last century. The most recent and comprehensive study calculated an annual mean warming of 0.6-0.8 °C (1.3 °F) in the Pacific Northwest from 1901 to 2012 and demonstrated that the warming is anthropogenic (Abatzoglou et al. ). Several other metrics of climate changed too, including a large rise in the coldest night of the year, lengthened freeze-free season, and increased growing-season evapotranspiration. Abatzoglou et al. () found no change in annual total precipitation since 1901, though there were shorter term trends in precipitation during certain seasons. Numerous studies have documented other aspects of climate change in the western USA, including timing in the arrival of spring (Cayan et al. ), spring runoff arriving earlier (e.g., Stewart et al. ; Fritze et al. ), reduced mountain snowpack (Mote et al. ), changed timing of spring fish migration (Robinson and Bayer ), and increased wildfire activity (Abatzoglou and Williams ), to name a few.

In order to meet stringent statistical requirements, such studies typically describe change over periods comparable to the change in radiative forcing (decades) and dismiss as "noise" shorter term variations, especially if they are not statistically attributable to identifiable causes (as is the case for precipitation). Indeed, shorter term trends can be so dominated by statistical 'noise' that they are in the opposite direction as the forced response (e.g., spring cooled 1980-2012, Abatzoglou et al. ). By contrast, Indigenous and other experiential views of climate may be more sensitive to more subtle changes because they are focused on the interactions among constituents in an environment in nuanced ways. This relational quality is a benchmark of significance in our interviews.

In mainstream climate science, seasonality can be defined in several ways. Climate data are often averaged into 3-month seasons (December-February is winter, etc.), but seasons can also be defined in other ways, like growing season or rainy season. Some studies also focus on the timing of key events and how they are shifting: first fall freeze is coming later (Kunkel et al. ), lilacs are blooming earlier in the spring (Cayan et al. ), peak spring flow is shifting earlier in snowmelt-driven basins (Stewart et al. ), and lakes are freezing later in fall and melting earlier in spring (Benson et al. ), to name a few. In the Northwest, the freeze-free season has lengthened by about 9 days (Abatzoglou et al. ).

Such descriptions of seasonal change, focusing on timing, are relatively rare in academic papers describing climate; most papers focus on the changes in quantitative attributes within a 3-month season (i.e., spring is always March through May, MAM). Even rarer in the climate science literature is a holistic description of change; for example, Cayan et al. () describe both interannual variability and long-term change in spring (MAM) temperature, date of lilac bloom, and date of spring snowmelt runoff. By contrast, the Native TEK view of seasons is entirely about timing and connections; seasonality is emergent and describes how the whole system changes, and how interactions among things are moving in relationship to one another.

Grounding the view: climate change in perspective

Perhaps the most striking difference between our interviews and climate science is that our interviewees described the changes in environment, culture, ceremony, and socio-politics together, as a body of observable changes over a centuries-long period of time. Regardless of cause, all interviewees were hesitant and anxious about the manner, rate, and sustainability of resource use. This anxiety, which extends to resources not yet in decline, stems from uncertainties that cannot be explained with the traditional stories, songs, or cycles that have been witnessed and conveyed for generations. TEK, then, has been rendered inconsistently reliable by climate-driven uncertainty. This longstanding traditional way of discussing change as a whole was contrasted with the generally more compartmentalized climate science literature, which only rarely produces a holistic or integrated view of climate change within larger socio-political or human-ecological contexts (e.g., Pachauri et al. ).

The scope of observable change demonstrated by interviewees is profound, even to the point of altering foundational ceremonies. For example, in the traditional marriage ceremony of the Siletz, a woman accepted a man's marriage proposal, in response he gave a dowry to her family, she then would move into their new home and make ceremonial acorn soup; the soup completed the marriage ceremony, and the couple was then considered married. For complex reasons including the Tribe's relocation in the 1850s but also the dwindling population of oak trees in western Oregon, the acorn soup part of this ritual is no longer practiced. Invasive species like Scotch broom and Himalayan blackberry prevent survival of oak seedlings, which require moist soil and ground cover of leaf litter for propagation and survival.

Additionally, the Quinault Indian Nation described the traditional practice that Elders had for collecting eels (Pacific Lamprey) during the spring. Because the eel population has declined, this collection practice has largely died out, and even the Elders who prepare and consume eels rely primarily on the fish hatchery, which collects a few every spring, mainly for the Elders who request them. Justine James (QIN) states: "A lot of the eels in this area, they started going out in about the 60s, some of the Elders still follow that old life-way of eating, preparing eels, and it's kind of a dietary change and the logging practices have kind of altered the environment and so you don't get the eels as much." Close et al. () suggest that the decline may have been exacerbated by a Euro-American notion that the Pacific lamprey is a pest and managed it as such.

Nearly every participant described changes they had observed and expressed anxiety about these changes, but also expressed apprehension about future changes. These perspectives included changes resulting from a host of factors connected to the cataclysmic replacement of an Indigenous management system of the socio-political and natural environment in North America, with a Western management system. The latter system has brought assimilation pressures, economic upheaval, increases in invasive species, ecosystem changes, and climate change together. In other words, by not compartmentalizing climate change from other human-environmental changes, connections among human action and resulting risk to animal and plant species are more visible in a TEK epistemological construction of climate change.

We argue this difference in assessment, in part, has to do with the organization of knowledge, knowledge construction, and understandings of time and temporality. Understanding inter-relational change puts the events described above in a temporal field that understands changes as dense, intimate to place, interrelated, and across systems, including and especially in changes to socio-political systems and the impacts of colonialism writ large (Killsback ). Whereas the primary emphasis in TEK is holistic, the primary emphasis in climate science literature is in thoroughly understanding each component (e.g., physics of sea ice), with much less attention given to seeking connections (as in Cayan et al. ) or understanding strong interrelationships. Climate science has developed complex earth system models representing the physical and biophysical components and their interactions (e.g., Flato et al. ) and also integrated assessment models representing the interactions between humans (chiefly as their activities affect the radiative energy balance of the planet) and the climate system (e.g., Clarke et al. ). Such tools are intended to emphasize interactions and connections among components, and though the two epistemological constructions might share many overarching goals, they also have clearly different approaches and aims.

Epistemological differences and suggestions moving forward

Differences between these perspectives on time are multifaceted and range from pragmatic to deeply philosophical. To begin with, there are species management implications to our work. We find that with disruptions in seasonality and availability, tribal communities need flexibility in management systems in order to access traditionally harvested resources. However, the "calendar-driven" agency rules about harvest present a challenge. Namely, the defined "season" for harvesting salmon, deer, and shellfish is in some cases in conflict with the actual season of availability. As one elder said, "Our weather is changing, our seasons are not definite like they used to be and you used to be able to count on the rains coming, in October, that brought you the fish up the river so we could catch fish and now sometimes you don't have any rain clear into December." (Oscar Hatfield, CTSI Elder). Specifically, Oregon salmon harvesting season is established by the state department of Fish and Wildlife. The season generally begins in the middle of September and goes through the end of November, depending on location (ODFW ). Our research suggests that, not only should the "timing" of the "salmon season" be revisited under conditions of climate change, but that tribal communities need flexibility in determining when is the most appropriate time to harvest species because seasons of "onset" are in flux. In other words, management should be more on Indian time.

Second, we recognize that Traditional Ecological Knowledge may be particularly sensitive to changes in co-occurring temporality-shifts because of a focus on relationality, as per our examples above. Traditional Knowledges maintain vast cultural information, in addition to TEK maintaining profound knowledge of landscapes and seascapes over time, and may observe temporal relationships and changes that exceed the capacity of Western science methods to measure. Thus, we suggest that there is potential for collaboration among Indigenous TEK holders and climate scientists. However, there must be appropriate sharing of epistemological underpinnings if this relationship is to be fruitful and maintain respect for all knowledge holders.

Last, we want to acknowledge that Indigenous communities are disproportionately impacted by climate change because of the strong reliance on subsistence resources, and because of the lack of flexibility to adapt to changes because of colonial legacies and other social and environmental change including inequitable access to economic capital and resources, invasive species disruptions, and other changes over the last 150 years, discussed above (Marino ; Whyte ; Wildcat ). Adaptation to climate change in tribal communities, therefore, is not absolutely distinct from other cataclysmic changes in tribal communities within Traditional Knowledge sets. Following, adaptation to climate change cannot be done realistically without addressing rights to sovereignty, land rights, treaty rights, and other environmental injustices and changes.

Ultimately, we see Indigenous concepts of time in this study as 3D, integrating observations and knowledge about the environment, knowledge of cultural tradition, environmental awareness, application of longstanding Traditional Knowledges, reliance on and understanding of environmental cues, and finally, finding the right moment or "time" to act based on environmental indicators. These frameworks for time are built into systems of knowing that are complex and sensitive to change. As environmental systems change and there is a decline of certain resources, it poses a challenge to the very basis of how Native identity is formed and maintained. The identity and the robustness of socio-ecological relationships that Natives have been basing themselves on and with for many generations is steeped in this Traditional Knowledge and relationship of reciprocity with the environment. For scientists who wish to work with Native peoples, and for the purposes of advancing climate knowledge in general, special attention should be paid to the relational and seasonal frameworks with which Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Indigenous scientists interpret the natural world. Awareness of differences in temporal constructions of knowledge is essential for cross-epistemological sharing, for maintaining respect across knowledge holders, and for seeing climate change as it really is.

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank the Confederated Salish Kootenai Tribes, the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians, the Paiute Shivwits Band, the Duckwater Shoshone, and the Quinault Indian Nation for their gracious hosting and sharing of selected information about traditional culture. The project described in this publication was supported by the Department of the Interior Northwest Climate Science Center (NW CSC) through a Cooperative Agreement G13AC00264, by NOAA (grant NA10OAR4310218), and the Great Basin Landscape Conservation Cooperative.

Ethical approval and consent to participate

The participants were chosen based on their cultural expertise, and were identified by tribal resource manager who assisted in the selection process for this project.

Recruitment Tribal Cultural Resource Departments were contacted via phone calls and/or emails to initially identify interest in the project and to provide guidance on key tribal individuals as possible participants. Purposeful sampling is then commenced by identifying key respondents who held critical information. Individuals identified as having critical information to this research study were then contacted through the respective tribal cultural resources department, or through phone calls. Interviews were arranged through the respective tribes' cultural resources department when possible. The researcher directly contacted individuals not arranged through the tribal department representatives to schedule interviews when it was appropriate. Upon agreement of the individuals, a meeting date and time was established for the interview.

Oral Consent Process: The oral consent process occurred as outlined in the Oregon State University Institutional Review Board guidelines

( http://oregonstate.edu/research/irb/exempt%2D-review ), and the Northwest Portland Area Indian Health Research Board

( http://www.npaihb.org/health-research/ ). Standard informed consent information was provided.

Consent obtained in person: Participants were handed the printed verbal consent document after they had been contacted and agreed to meet, prior to being interviewed. The project was explained verbally following the outline of the printed verbal consent document. Participants were notified that copies of the taped interviews would be sent to their tribe, and other redacted copies would be stored at USGS, and/or the Oregon State University Library Archives. The participants would be interviewed at the location they suggested for the interview, or at the respective tribal center if no specific suggestions were made. The estimated time commitment for a participant's involvement was approximately an hour, though actual time depended on participant's responses. Interviews were informal and semi-structured, allowing for participants to lead discussions where they felt information was relative to the question prompts.

Funding

This study was funded by the Department of the Interior Northwest Climate Science Center (NW CSC) through a Cooperative Agreement G13AC00264, by NOAA (grant NA10OAR4310218), Great Basin Landscape Conservation Cooperative grant.

Availability of data and materials

Transcriptions of research interviews are housed at Oregon State University, and with the tribal governments.

Authors' contributions

Each author wrote specific contributions, and all edited all sections prior to the agreement of the final manuscript approval.

Authors' information

Chisholm Hatfield is an enrolled member of the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians and is also Cherokee. Her expertise is in that area Traditional Ecological Knowledge of Indigenous peoples. She is an active sitting board member for the Oregon State University Klatowa Eena Native American Longhouse and regularly mentors Native students. She has been a Korea Foundation Field Research Fellow and HJ Andrews Academic Writers in Residence Visiting Scholar. She assisted with facilitation, coordination, and advisement of the Northwest Climate Science Center Climate Boot Camp as well as being a featured speaker. She has had her Traditional Ecological Knowledge writings featured in special blogs in Union of Concerned Scientists, Whitefish Review Literary Journal, and Apogee Journal. She has been a speaker at National Congress of American Indians conference, Affiliated Tribes of Northwest Indians conferences, a TEDxSalem speaker, a frequent keynote speaker, and is an active international speaker giving talks about TEK and Indigenous culture.

Marino is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Sustainability at Oregon State University - Cascades. Elizabeth is an author on the forthcoming National Climate Assessment, has worked with the Humboldt Forum in Berlin on representations of climate change and disasters, and has worked with the Emmet Environmental Law and Policy Clinic at Harvard Law on issues of environmental refugees and displaced peoples. She has also worked with the United Nations University Institute for Environment and Human Security (UNU-EHS) on migration, climate change and humanitarian crisis issues.

Pows Whyte is an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation in Shawnee, Oklahoma. Kyle holds the Timnick Chair in the Humanities in the Department of Philosophy at Michigan State University, is an Associate Professor of Philosophy and Community Sustainability, a faculty member of the Environmental Philosophy & Ethics graduate concentration, and a faculty affiliate of the American Indian & Indigenous Studies and Environmental Science & Policy programs.

Dello is the Associate Director of the Oregon Climate Change Research Institute and the Deputy Director of the Oregon Climate Service, which is the state climate office for Oregon. Kathie is a skilled climate communicator. She is featured often in the press and gives multiple talks around the region and country. Kathie maintains an active social media presence on her twitter account, @kathiedello.

Mote is the director of the Oregon Climate Change Research Institute (OCCRI) and Associate Dean and professor in the College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences. He is the co-leader of the NOAA-funded Climate Impacts Research Consortium (CIRC) for the Northwest. He has served as a lead author for the Fourth and Fifth Assessment Reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), on three US National Climate Assessments, and seven reports of the National Academy of Sciences. He is President-Elect of the Global Environmental Change Section of the American Geophysical Union.

Consent for publication

The participants in this study gave their consent to publish this research.

Competing interests

The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

Publisher's Note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Open AccessThis article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ ), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.

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Indian time: time, seasonality, and culture in Traditional Ecological Knowledge of climate change

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Western climate science and Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) represent complementary and overlapping views of the causes and consequences of change. In particular, observations of changes in abundance, distribution, phenology, or behavior of the natural environment (including plants and animals) can have a rich cultural and spiritual interpretation in Indigenous communities that may not be present in western science epistemologies.

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The Rappahannock Tribe worked with conservationists to get a little under 450 acres of land back!

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Rappahannock Tribe gets some of its land back - Grist

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Rappahannock Tribe members were joined by conservation leaders and U.S. officials on Friday to commemorate the return of a 465-acre parcel of land that was seized by European settlers in the 17th century

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Hindou Oumarou Ibrahim speaks on how her Indigenous community in Chad is working to combat climate change using their traditional knowledge.

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Indigenous knowledge meets science to take on climate change | Hindou Oumarou Ibrahim

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A Native Elder reclaims land and undoes historical trauma!

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How This Native American Elder Reclaimed Sacred Land in the Bay Area| KQED Truly CA

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A link to a Choctaw farm incorporating native plants, as well as using Choctaw knowledge to tend the earth!

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An experiment in implementing land-based Choctaw traditional knowledge in a 21st century family farm

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Some information on the Preserving Choctaw Culture by Growing Hope project. It's a seed bank filled with heirloom seeds, designed to help revitalize Choctaw culture and institute better diets for Choctaw families.

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sustainable agriculture and economic development

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Preserving Choctaw Culture by Growing Hope - CHOCTAW NATION OF OKLAHOMA

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The Choctaw’s Preserving Choctaw Culture by Growing Hope project will address the following critical elements of the food security needs among our low-income, low access communities: 1.Improve Access to Food2.Encourage healthy eating and physical activity3.Increase Self-Reliance4.Create Capacity for…

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An exhibit on survivance

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For every object that ends up in a library or museum collection - whether it's a manucript, a photograph, or something more approaching the concept of "art" - there is a narrative, a story that gets told. The story a visitor to an exhibit ends up hearing, of course, is dependent upon who is telling the story and the slant of their own perspective. When the subject of the exhibit is Native Americans in the Upper Midwestern United States during the extraordinary upheaval of the 19th century, one must be particularly careful about the story being told since the narrative that largely exists is one of cultural denouement, of endings, as told by a colonizing population to its descendants.

The dominant narrative of the demise of traditional Native American culture in the face of colonization, conversion to Christianity, confinement to reservations and economic collapse is, however, not the only story that can be told. The accounts of the lives of Native Americans during the 19th century that are told by Native peoples themselves are strikingly different to those recounted in history books, movies, and all too frequently in museums. Rather than narratives solely recounting destruction and demise, Native stories about Native history tend to focus on what White Earth Ojibwe scholar Gerald Vizenor has called survivance - a narrative incorporating themes of survival and resistance that insist on the inclusion of the Native presence.

The following is an exhibit of resources that can be found within the Digital Public Library of America retold through the lens of Native American survivance in the Minnesota region. Within are a series of objects of both Native and non-Native origin that tell a story of extraordinary culture disruption, change and continuity during 19th c., and how that affects the Native population of Minnesota today.

Credit: Minnesota Digital Library. http://www.mndigital.org

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History of Survivance: Upper Midwest 19th-Century Native American Narratives

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For every object that ends up in a library or museum collection - whether it's a manucript, a photograph, or something more approaching the concept of "art" - there is a narrative, a story that gets told.

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Indigenous Tribe's Clam Gardens Adapt to Climate Change

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How Indigenous writers are asserting themselves into sci-fi, fantasy, and horror- using historical trauma as inspiration.

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Long underrepresented in genre fiction, Native American and First Nations authors are reshaping its otherworldly (but still often Eurocentric) worlds.

Cherie Dimaline near her home in Midland, Ontario. "There's a big push now for the telling of Indigenous stories," she said. Credit... Arden Wray for The New York Times

When Cherie Dimaline was growing up near Penetanguishene, a small town on the Georgian Bay in Ontario, her grandmother and great-aunts told her stories about a werewolf-like monster called the rogarou. It wasn't spoken of as a mythical creature but as an actual threat, the embodiment of danger in a place where Indigenous women face heightened risk of violence.

"This wasn't like, here's a metaphor," she said. "They would say, 'The rogarou's out, and he's really hungry.'"

Decades later, Dimaline, a member of the Métis Nation in Canada, was working on a novel about a woman whose missing husband reappears with no memory of her, seemingly under a spell. She needed a charismatic villain, and when the rogarou - a wily trickster figure in Métis oral traditions - popped into her head, she realized the creature had never been given its due in popular culture.

That flash of inspiration turned into " Empire of Wild," a genre-bending novel whose modern Indigenous characters confront environmental degradation, discrimination and the threat of cultural erasure, all while battling a devious monster.

Dimaline, along with Waubgeshig Rice, Rebecca Roanhorse, Darcie Little Badger and Stephen Graham Jones, who has been called " the Jordan Peele of horror literature," are some of the Indigenous novelists reshaping North American science fiction, horror and fantasy - genres in which Native writers have long been overlooked.

Their fiction often draws on Native American and First Nations mythology and narrative traditions in ways that upend stereotypes about Indigenous literature and cultures. And the authors are gaining recognition in a corner of the literary world that has traditionally been white, male and Eurocentric, rooted in Western mythology.

"There's a big push now for the telling of Indigenous stories," Dimaline said. "The only way I know who I am and who my community is, and the ways in which we survive and adapt, is through stories."

Cherie Dimaline's book, "Empire of Wild," came out last month. Credit... Arden Wray for The New York Times

Credit... .

As more Indigenous authors break into the genres, there has been an explosion of novels, comics, graphic novels and short stories from writers blending sci-fi and fantasy with Native narratives, writing everything from "slipstream" alternate realities to supernatural horror to post-apocalyptic stories about environmental collapse.

"There's so much variety and so much experimentation," said Grace L. Dillon, a professor in the Indigenous Nations Studies Program at Portland State University, who edited "Walking the Clouds," an anthology of Indigenous science fiction published in 2012.

Tommy Orange, whose novel " There There " was a finalist for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize, said the growing prominence of Native authors in genre fiction is long overdue. "It's not just one Native author a year anymore," he said. "Given the history of us not being able to tell our stories, the people who are from these communities need to be telling them, and telling them like this."

Some authors say that sci-fi and fantasy settings allow them to reimagine the Native experience in ways that wouldn't be possible in realistic fiction. Writing futuristic narratives and building fantasy worlds provide a measure of freedom to tell stories that feel experimental and innovative, and aren't weighted down by the legacies of genocide and colonialism.

"We've already survived an apocalypse," said Roanhorse, who is of Ohkay Owingeh Pueblo descent.

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"It almost feels like in fiction, people think we didn't survive, but we did, and we're still flourishing," said Darcie Little Badger, the author of "Elatsoe."

Little Badger's debut novel, "Elatsoe," out later this month, is a young adult fantasy about a 17-year-oldLipan Apache girl who can awaken the ghosts of dead animals and sets out to solve her cousin's murder. Little Badger, 32, who is a member of the Lipan Apache Tribe of Texas, said she wanted to write about young Indigenous characters in an alternative, magic-filled, contemporary America because so much fiction featuring Native characters is historical and feels outdated.

"A lot of times when there's an Apache main character, it takes place in the 1800s," she said. "It almost feels like in fiction, people think we didn't survive, but we did, and we're still flourishing."

In Jones's new horror novel, " The Only Good Indians," friends who grew up on a Blackfeet reservation in Montana are haunted by an elk-hunting trip they took 10 years earlier. The young men, who were caught hunting illegally on land reserved for tribal elders, are stalked by a vengeful spirit who sometimes takes the form of a woman with an elk head. It evokes Deer Woman, a menacing fertility goddess in North American Indigenous mythology, but Jones mainly drew inspiration from movie villains like Jason from "Friday the 13th," he said.

"In the slasher story, wrong is punished," Stephen Graham Jones, author of "The Only Good Indians," said. "The intent is to rebalance the world, and the world we live in is not like that."

Jones, a member of the Blackfeet tribe who grew up in Texas, often uses the framework of horror to examine inequality that Native Americans face. He was drawn to slasher fiction because of its emphasis on justice and order. "In the slasher story, wrong is punished," he said. "The intent is to rebalance the world, and the world we live in is not like that."

For Indigenous authors, writing themselves into sci-fi and fantasy narratives isn't just about gaining visibility within popular genres. It is part of a broader effort to overcome centuries of cultural misrepresentation.

"What most people know about Native people was created by outsiders, so it's no surprise that it's faulty," said Debbie Reese, who is tribally enrolled at Nambé Pueblo and founded the site American Indians in Children's Literature, which analyzes representations of Native people and beliefs in children's books.

While Indigenous writers are still underrepresented in the literary world, especially in genre fiction, their work is having an outsize impact. Roanhorse won two of the genre's most prestigious awards, the Hugo and the Nebula, for her 2017 short story, "Welcome to Your Authentic Indian Experience™," and the Locus Award for best first novel for "Trail of Lightning." Both works have been optioned for screen adaptations.

Dimaline's novel, "The Marrow Thieves," which unfolds in a dystopian future where Indigenous people are hunted for their bone marrow, won the Kirkus prize for young adult literature and is being adapted into a television series. She and Roanhorse have signed multi-book deals with major publishing houses in recent years.

Roanhorse said she started out writing "Tolkien knockoffs about white farm boys going on journeys" because she figured that's what epic fantasy was supposed to be. After deciding to feature a Native woman as the hero, in 2018 she released " Trail of Lightning," the first novel in a four book fantasy series. Set on a reservation after a flood destroys most of North America and reawakens traditional gods and monsters, the series centers on a Navajo woman named Maggie, who has superhuman monster-slaying powers, and features sacred figures from Navajo mythology like Coyote and Neizghání, one of the Hero Twins.

"The stories that I'm writing, these are the traditional American gods," Roanhorse said.

Some see the rise of Indigenous sci-fi as a natural extension of Native American narrative traditions, which often have sci-fi elements, like tales about visitors from outer space and a creation myth about humanity descending from the sky. Decades ago, authors like Leslie Marmon Silko, Melissa Tantaquidgeon Zobel and Gerald Vizenor incorporated fantastical themes in their fiction.

Rebecca Roanhorse's next book, "Black Sun," comes out in October.

"Indigenous people have always been writing and telling science-fiction stories, but it hasn't been labeled as such," said Blaire Topash-Caldwell, a citizen of the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi Indians who has written about the rise of Indigenous sci-fi. "We've always been interested in prophecy, alternate realities and different spheres of existence."

There has been some resistance to repurposing venerated ancestral narratives as plot elements in popular fiction. Some members of the Navajo Nation have objected to Roanhorse's depiction of Navajo religious beliefs and teachings.

"There are things that are not meant for entertainment," Jennifer Nez Denetdale, a professor of American Studies at the University of New Mexico, said of Roanhorse's work.

Roanhorse, who lived on the Navajo Nation in New Mexico, said she worked with a Navajo cultural consultant to make sure her depictions were accurate. Young Navajo readers have responded enthusiastically to the representation of Navajo characters and culture, she said, as well as her use of Diné or Navajo language in the dialogue.

One of her aims in writing post-apocalyptic narratives, Roanhorse said, is to depict a world where Native culture, language and people have endured, in spite of efforts over the centuries to wipe them out.

"I set it in the future specifically so I could say hey, Natives exist," she said, "and we'll exist in the future."

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'We've Already Survived an Apocalypse': Indigenous Writers Are Changing Sci-Fi

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Long underrepresented in genre fiction, Native American and First Nations authors are reshaping its otherworldly (but still often Eurocentric) worlds. When Cherie Dimaline was growing up near Penetanguishene, a small town on the Georgian Bay in Ontario, her grandmother and great-aunts told her stories about a werewolf-like monster called the rogarou.

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Nick Estes speaks on how Indigenous resistance is operating in the post-apocalyptic world

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Indigenous Resistance Is Post-Apocalyptic, with Nick Estes

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Nick Estes discusses the deep historical roots of Standing Rock, why Indigenous peoples have taken a leading role in the climate justice movement, and why decolonization must be part of any left-wing agenda.

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The Lenni Lenape strive to reclaim and revitalize in the heart of NYC.

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When the Dutch arrived in the 17th century in what's now New York City, their encounters with the indigenous peoples, known as the Lenape, were, at first, mostly amicable, according to historical records. They shared the land and traded guns, beads and wool for beaver furs. As the myth goes, the Dutch even "purchased" Manahatta island from the Lenape in 1626. The transaction, enforced by the eventual building of wall around New Amsterdam, marked the very beginning of the Lenape's forced mass migration out of their homeland.

The wall, which started showing up on maps in the 1660s, was built to keep out the Native Americans and the British. It eventually became Wall Street, and Manahatta became Manhattan, where part of the Lenape trade route, known as Wickquasgeck, became Brede weg, later Broadway. The Lenape helped shape the geography of modern-day New York City, but other traces of their legacy have all but vanished. In one of the most diverse cities in the United States, there are tellingly few native New Yorkers. Some Lenape today, however, are working to bring their heritage back to the city.

"We love New York. We have a history there before the white man ever showed up, but the Lenape are forgotten because they haven't had a presence there in decades, centuries," says Curtis Zunigha, co-director of the Manhattan-based Lenape Center. The center's mission is to promote Native American arts and humanities, environmental stewardship and Lenape identity.

Zunigha, however, lives in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, where he also works as the director of cultural resources for the Delaware Tribe of Indians. Like many Lenape, he uses the term "Delaware" - the federally recognized name for the Lenape - interchangeably with the group's own name for itself. None of the three co-directors of the Lenape Center live in New York City, but they decided to base their organization there because of its ties to their ancestry.

The area the Lenape occupied before the Europeans arrived was known to them as Lenapehoking, and it covered roughly the area between New York City and Philadelphia, including all of New Jersey, eastern Pennsylvania and part of the state of Delaware. Like Zunigha, most Lenape today don't live in New York City or the surrounding area. There are only two federally recognized Delaware tribes in the U.S., and both of them are in Oklahoma, where large groups of the Lenape ended up due to forced migration.

According to Zunigha, his people agreed to move out of Lenapehoking, giving up lands they were promised in treaties, and first migrated to Pennsylvania. From there, they settled in Ohio, then Indiana, then St. Louis, and then elsewhere in Missouri before purchasing a reservation in Kansas in 1830 using funds from previous treaties. After the Civil War, the U.S. government forced the Lenape in Kansas to sell their land so railroad companies could build tracks on it. They then purchased a reservation from the Cherokee in Oklahoma, where they reside today, in Bartlesville and Anadarko. Their kinfolk also reside in Ontario, Canada: the Delaware Nation at Moraviantown and the Munsee Delaware Nation. Smaller bands of Lenape still live in New England and the mid-Atlantic, but most are self-recognized, one exception being the Ramapough Lenape Nation, recognized by the state of New Jersey but not the U.S. government.*

The Lenape who remained in their native lands still have descendants in the area, even if they aren't part of an official tribe. Margaret Boldeagle of Staten Island is one of them-her grandfather was a Lenape who married an Irish woman.

"In this area you'd be very hard-pressed to find anybody that will tell you that they are full-blood Lenape," says Boldeagle.

Boldeagle's family was typical of many Native American families who were pressured to assimilate in order to avoid discrimination. Growing up, she said her grandmother wouldn't allow her to tell people she was part Native American. When her grandfather gave her some traditional Lenape clothing, her grandmother took it away.

"Back in the day, there was a stigma to being native," says Boldeagle. "So, a lot of families did not admit to it, would say they're of another culture."

As an adult, Boldeagle works to combat some of that stigma. With the help of New York state Sen. Andrew Lanza, Boldeagle resurrected the fight for a national monument to Native Americans at Fort Wadsworth on Staten Island. The land was granted for the monument by an act of Congress in 1911, but it was never built. At that time, department store magnate Rodman Wanamaker came up with the idea to build the National American Indian Memorial, which would feature a 165-foot statue of a Native American - taller than the Statue of Liberty - sitting atop a museum. President William Howard Taft traveled to Staten Island in 1913 to break ground on the project, but the outbreak of World War I in Europe, and the U.S. subsequent involvement, meant the project would soon be abandoned.

Today, two memorials in New York City acknowledge the Lenape, and both contain historical inaccuracies. A monument in Battery Park in lower Manhattan and a bronze plaque in Inwood Hill Park, located far uptown, both commemorate the "sale of Manhattan," perpetuating a myth that won't die. Zunigha calls the story an outright "fabrication."

The Battery Park monument was gifted by the Dutch government to the city of New York in 1926. It depicts a Dutch man and a Native American standing together, but the Native American's dress is typical of a Plains Native American rather than the Lenape, says David Penney, associate director of museum scholarship at the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian and curator of a 2020 exhibit on "native New Yorkers."

The plaque in Inwood Hill Park reads: "According to legend, on this site of the principal Manhattan Indian village, Peter Minuit in 1626 purchased Manhattan island for trinkets and beads then worth about 60 guilders." The deal was most likely made at Fort Amsterdam, located in lower Manhattan, according to Penney. The Lenape, however, did live in that area, and visitors can still view caves they allegedly used for shelter.

The Lenape likely viewed the "sale" of Manhattan as a deal to share the land, but not to sell it, both Penney and Zunigha say. The Dutch, however, viewed it as a proper sale, and they wanted the indigenous people to leave what they considered as "their" land. Letters and notes from the time document the Dutch frustration with the indigenous who would not leave the land, including one complaint logged from a New Amsterdam council meeting on May 25, 1660, that "the savages would not remove from the land that they had bought" to which the indigenous responded that they had only sold the grass on the land, not the land itself.

The never-built monument on Staten Island would have been the largest and most visible monument to Native Americans in the area, but it would have portrayed them as a "vanishing race," as Wanamaker viewed them. The Congressional record of the land grant even speaks of the monument as dedicated to "the memory of the North American Indian," as if they're already gone.

But while memorials might commemorate the history - or myth - of the Lenape people, their culture remains alive in modern-day tribal communities. In Bartlesville, where Zunigha lives, the Delaware Tribe of Indians hosts summer camps for children to learn Lenape spiritual practices, dances and songs. They have also secured grants to help revitalize the endangered Lenape language, of which there are only a few fluent speakers left in Canada and the United States.

Jim Rementer has studied the Lenape language for more than 50 years. Originally from Pennsylvania, where he first learned about the Lenape, he moved to Oklahoma in the 1960s and learned the language from tribal elders in Bartlesville. Since then, he's taught classes and helped create the Lenape Talking Dictionary, which includes online lessons with audio. There are no native Lenape language speakers in Oklahoma today, but Rementer says interest in learning the language remains.

"It has a lot of the cultural ties to the Lenape people," Rementer said. "It at least gives them a basic knowledge of not only the language but also the religious beliefs and so on. And it's always nice to be able to pray in their native language."
*Editor's note, October 8, 2018: This story has been edited to reflect that the Ramapough are recognized by New Jersey, not the state of Delaware.

Zunigha considers himself "barely a partial speaker" of the Lenape language, but he does know how to pray. He admits a lot of the ancestral knowledge has been lost over time, as the Lenape were killed or forced to assimilate or migrate, but he insists the culture has never been lost, partly due to the survival of the language.

"A way is always shown because we're still here," Zunigha said. "We have people, including myself, that can pray in our language, conduct ceremonies and remember the ancestors. When we do that we're blessed with the gift of the creator, with the continuance of our culture for yet another generation. We just try to learn and practice."

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The True Native New Yorkers Can Never Truly Reclaim Their Homeland

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Nearly 400 years after the alleged "sale of Manhattan," some Lenape strive to reawaken their cultural heritage on the islands where their ancestors thrived

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Describing a program to help urban Natives reconnect to traditional spirituality.

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Tactics and techniques to combat climate change using TEK

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Climate change threatens traditional ways of life

Of the 5.2 million American Indians and Alaska Natives registered in the U.S. Census, approximately 1.1 million live on or near reservations or native lands, located mostly in the Northwest, Southwest, Great Plains, and Alaska, although indigenous communities can be found throughout the U.S. Climate change poses particular threats to indigenous culture, well-being, and ways of life in every region of the United States.

Chronic stresses such as extreme poverty are being exacerbated by climate change impacts: these impacts include reduced access to traditional foods, decreased water quality, and increasing exposure to health and safety hazards. In Alaska, Maine, the Pacific Northwest, and other coastal locations, erosion and inundation related to climate change are so severe that some communities are already relocating from historical homelands to which their traditions and cultural identities are tied.

Loss of traditional foods

Climate change impacts Tribal Nations' access to traditional foods. Fare such as salmon, shellfish, crops, and marine mammals have provided sustenance as well as cultural, economic, medicinal, and community health for countless generations. Some plants used for medicines and food are becoming increasingly difficult to find, or are no longer found in historical ranges.

Subsequent shifts from traditional lifestyles and diet-compounded by persistent poverty, food insecurity, the cost of non-traditional foods, and poor housing conditions-have led to increasing health problems in native communities. Climate change is likely to amplify other indirect effects to traditional foods and resources, including limited access to gathering places, hunting grounds, and environmental pollution.

A key uncertainty is how indigenous people will adapt to climate change, given their reliance on local, wild foods and the geographic isolation of some communities. For example, increased wildfire frequency and intensity due to fuel loading brought on by drought and other factors may affect tribal homes, safety, economy, culturally important species, medicinal plants, traditional foods, and cultural sites. Additionally, tribes have varying levels of preparedness and some have a limited ability to cope with extreme events.

Impacts on ecosystems and water quality and quantity

Climate change also affects the integrity and stability of the ecosystems on which indigenous peoples depend by altering ecosystem processes and biodiversity. Ecosystems provide a rich array of benefits and services including habitat for fish and wildlife, drinking water storage and filtration, fertile soils for growing crops, buffering against a range of stressors, and aesthetic and cultural values. Changes in these resources have social, cultural, and economic effects on native communities in particular. Events such as droughts, floods, wildfires, and pest outbreaks associated with climate change (for example, bark beetles in the West and Alaska) are already disrupting ecosystems. In the longer term, there is increasing risk of species extinction, which could be particularly devastating to native communities reliant on specific species for food, medicine, and ceremonies.

Decreases in water quality and quantity are affecting Native Americans' drinking water supplies, food, cultures, ceremonies, and traditional ways of life. Native communities' vulnerabilities and lack of capacity to adapt to climate change are exacerbated by historical and contemporary federal and state land-use policies and practices, political marginalization, legal issues associated with tribal water rights, water infrastructure deficiencies, and poor socioeconomic conditions.

Extreme impacts on Alaska Native communities' way of life

Scientists across the Arctic have documented regional temperatures over the past few decades rising at twice the global average rate, and indigenous Arctic communities are observing this change in their daily lives. Trends of increasing temperatures and variable precipitation patterns are expected to continue with future climate change. The cascading effects of these changing conditions are illustrated by significant reductions in sea ice thickness and extent, increased permafrost thaw, more extreme weather and severe storms, changes in timing of seasonal ice melt/freeze of lakes and rivers, water temperature, sea level rise, flooding patterns, erosion, and snowfall timing and type. For more information, tools, and case studies specifically addressing Arctic climate impacts, also see this Toolkit's Arctic topic.

In turn, these climate-driven changes increase the number of serious problems for Alaska Native populations. Issues include injury from extreme or unpredictable weather and thinning sea ice, which can trap people far from home; changing snow and ice conditions that limit safe hunting, fishing, or herding practices; malnutrition and food insecurity from lack of access to subsistence food; contamination of food and water; increasing economic, mental, and social problems from loss of culture and traditional livelihood; increases in infectious diseases; and the loss of buildings and infrastructure from permafrost erosion and thawing.

The increased thawing of permafrost (permanently frozen soil) along the coasts and rivers is an especially potent threat to Alaska Native villages because it causes serious erosion, flooding, and destruction of homes, buildings, and roads from differential settlement, slumping, and/or collapse of the underlying base. As of April 2015, more than 30 Native Villages in Alaska are either in need, or are already in the process, of relocating their entire village. In addition, permafrost thaw is causing food insecurity in Alaska Native communities due to the thawing of ice cellars or ice houses used for subsistence food storage. This thawing can lead to food contamination and sickness, as well as dependence upon more expensive, less healthy, non-traditional "store-bought" foods. To learn how some North Slope Inupiat are adapting to this challenge, see the case study Inupiaq Work to Preserve Food and Traditions on Alaska's North Slope.

The preceding text was excerpted and adapted from the report Climate Change Impacts in the United States: The Third National Climate Assessment ( Chapter 22: Alaska).

Traditional knowledges

Indigenous traditional knowledges (TKs) have emerged in national and international arenas as rich information for indigenous and non-indigenous climate assessments, policies, and adaptation strategies. With this growing recognition, however, comes potential risks to indigenous peoples in sharing TKs in federal and other non-indigenous climate change initiatives. Traditional knowledges have been defined as "a cumulative body of knowledge, practice, and belief, evolving by adaptive processes and handed down through generations by cultural transmission, about the relationship of living beings (including humans) with one another and with their environment." Traditional knowledges are emergent from the symbiotic relationship of indigenous peoples and places-a nature-culture nexus. Tribes and indigenous peoples use "knowledges" to emphasize that there are diverse forms of traditional knowledge and knowledge systems that must be recognized as unique to each tribe and knowledge holder. 1 From an indigenous perspective, traditional knowledges encompass all that is known about the world around us and how to apply that knowledge in relation to those beings that share the world.

Native cultures are directly tied to native places and homelands, reflecting the indigenous perspective that includes the "power of place." Many indigenous peoples regard all people, plants, and animals that share our world as relatives, rather than resources. Language, ceremonies, cultures, practices, and food sources evolved in concert with the inhabitants, human and non-human, of specific homelands. The wisdom of native people includes songs, dances, art, language, science, and music that reflect these places. By regarding all things as relatives-not resources-natural laws dictate that people care for their relatives in responsible ways. As climate change increasingly threatens Tribal Nations, cultural identities, and practices, documenting the impacts on traditional lifestyles may strengthen adaptive strategies.

Featured Tools

Guidelines for Considering Traditional Knowledges in Climate Change Initiatives

In 2014, the Climate and Traditional Knowledges Workgroup developed Guidelines for Considering Traditional Knowledges in Climate Change Initiatives. These Guidelines examine the significance of traditional knowledges in relation to climate change and the potential risks to indigenous peoples in the United States for sharing traditional knowledges in federal and other non-indigenous climate change initiatives. The Guidelines include an annotated bibliography to provide access to research that addresses ongoing issues surrounding the protection and use of traditional knowledges, including appropriation of Indigenous cultural and intellectual property and the development of research protocols to ensure just collaboration between traditional knowledge holders and researchers. The site also includes a link to Climate Change and Indigenous Peoples: A Primer, which provides tribal perspectives on foundational information on policy and historical information relevant to climate impacts on indigenous peoples. 1 The Guidelines and Primer, as well as training and workgroup activities, have been combined into an indispensable Guidelines for Considering Traditional Knowledges in Climate Change Initiatives tool to enhance all assessment, planning, and adaptation activities involving tribes and partners.

Featured Tribal Nations Tools for the Steps to Resilience

① Explore Hazards

② Assess Vulnerability & Risks

③ Investigate Options

④ Prioritize & Plan

⑤ Take Action

Combining ways of knowing to adapt

Recent examples where traditional knowledges and new approaches are used together to address climate change and related impacts include:

The Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium Local Environmental Observers (LEO) Network chronicles climate change impacts on the landscape and on human health and also develops adaptation strategies. This Consortium employs interdisciplinary science, traditional knowledges, and a vast network of Local Environmental Observers to develop comprehensive, community-scaled, climate change health assessments.

During a recent drought on the Navajo Reservation, traditional knowledges were combined with other approaches as scientists worked with Navajo elders to observe and document meteorological and hydrological changes and other phenomena to assess and reduce disaster risks and vulnerabilities. Individual native responses will be grounded in the particular cultural and environmental heritage of each community, their social and geographical history, spiritual values, traditional knowledges, and worldview.

Except where noted, the preceding text was excerpted and adapted from the report Climate Change Impacts in the United States: The Third National Climate Assessment ( Chapter 12: Indigenous Peoples, Lands, and Resources).

Learn More

To learn more about how Tribal Nations are effectively addressing the impacts of climate change, visit the subtopic pages:

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Of the 5.2 million American Indians and Alaska Natives registered in the U.S. Census, approximately 1.1 million live on or near reservations or native lands, located mostly in the Northwest, Southwest, Great Plains, and Alaska, although indigenous communities can be found throughout the U.S.

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"...those who know what it means to lose our world and live might have something to lend to a broader humanity that now faces its own existential crises in the form of disease and climate change."

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EDITOR'S NOTE:&nbsp The Nation believes that helping readers stay informed about the impact of the coronavirus crisis is a form of public service. For that reason, this article, and all of our coronavirus coverage, is now free. Please subscribe to support our writers and staff, and stay healthy.

An Indian named Cowboy once told a lecture hall full of Frenchmen that us Natives are a postapocalyptic people. Cowboy is a Blackfoot filmmaker from the Piikani and Kainai Nations near Calgary, in the Canadian province of Alberta. And like almost every Indian I've met, he is on a mission to reclaim things. He even changed his last name to Smithx-a rejection of Smith, the name missionaries imposed on his family, and an ode to Malcolm X. Cowboy and I were two Natives invited to a literary festival in Paris, where they put the Indians in the auditorium. Maybe we got the big room because the French are still entranced by the myth of the noble savage, but I think, even in a crowd that included luminaries like Colson Whitehead and Michael Chabon, the Indians really did have some of the most interesting and brilliant things to say.

Although I had never heard it articulated the way Cowboy expressed it, I already knew that we are a postapocalyptic people. My dad is a recovering-alcoholic Indian artist, and parts of our family story would seem over-the-top in a Sherman Alexie novel. In our language, Secwepemcstin, the traditional way to say "good morning" is tsecwínucw-k, pronounced "chook-we-nook." But it doesn't mean "good morning." It literally translates to "you survived the night."

One time, after a night at the bar, my dad pulled a buck knife on the police in Red Lodge, Mont. The cops tased him, and the judge convicted him of a felony. About a decade later, when I was in college, I had to bail him and his long-haired Chihuahua named Angus out of a jail in Goldfield, Nev. He had been driving too fast in a vehicle that wasn't registered in his name, leaving a trail of purple haze behind-and, well, he was also a large Native man. A few weeks ago, when the world was on lockdown, one of my cousins got shot in the chest in a drug-related altercation. He survived. When I heard about what happened, I called his mom. After we spoke, I sang one of our ancestors' songs to myself-though not so loud that my white neighbors would hear. Then I prayed, then I cried. Who gets shot during a pandemic, anyway? Especially in Canada, where gun deaths totaled just 249 people in 2018. As Indians, I think we've been told that we're supposed to be dead and gone so many times that we've internalized it. Some of us don't want to be anymore. In a society built atop our graves, survival has become an act of resistance.

Through my own experience and reporting on postapocalyptic Indigenous people like me, I've come to believe, like Cowboy, that those who know what it means to lose our world and live might have something to lend to a broader humanity that now faces its own existential crises in the form of disease and climate change. So when this latest apocalypse, the coronavirus, hit, I picked up my notebook and recorder and contacted a few wise friends and sources across Indian Country to check Cowboy's hypothesis.

One of the first people I called was Representative Deb Haaland, a member of the Laguna Pueblo. Haaland, a Democrat, represents New Mexico's First Congressional District and was one of the first two Native American women elected to Congress. She assumed office during the presidency of Donald Trump, who hung a portrait of slave owner and Indian killer Andrew Jackson in the Oval Office. That portrait was stationed behind the lectern when a group of elderly Navajo code talkers, war heroes whose language formed the basis of an unbreakable code that helped the United States win World War II, were honored at the White House. (At the event, Trump also called Democratic Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, who has claimed Native American ancestry, "Pocahontas.") When the pandemic struck, the White House initially recommended zero dollars in federal aid to tribes. And when Congress passed a bill that included $8 billion in relief for Indian Country, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin did not disburse the funds for six weeks. By then, reservations like the Navajo Nation had more coronavirus cases per capita than Wuhan at the height of the outbreak in China.

This was the political system into which Haaland was elected and tasked with the dual responsibilities of representing her district and her race. Amid the pandemic, Haaland has been fighting to stop Washington lawmakers from ignoring and overruling tribes. I asked the congresswoman how she approaches such a weighty responsibility. She talked about her Pueblo ancestors, who migrated to the Southwest in the 1200s and planted fields of corn, beans, and squash in the desert. Haaland grew up around grandparents who lived without running water and electricity. When they needed water, they hauled it from the only spigot in the village. And when it got dark, they went to bed. "I'm grateful that tribes have somebody who they feel like they identify with," she said. "We have been resilient, and we have soldiered through so much-all the terrible errors of the United States government that took our land and killed us with disease and starved us and kept moving us farther and farther from our homelands." She added, "It's time for us to make things right. And I intend to be in that fight until I can't be in it any longer."

Beyond Capitol Hill, Fawn Sharp, the president of the National Congress of American Indians and of the Quinault Indian Nation in Taholah, Wash., is already imagining what the Native fight for dignity and rights might look like after the pandemic. When I called her, it was a Friday evening. She was sitting on the reservation beside Lake Quinault, looking out at the Olympic Mountains. Right at dusk, she said, the fish started to jump in the lake.

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Sharp was at her wits' end. "I'm at the point of thinking to myself, 'Under what circumstances would this administration actually do something to help tribal nations in the face of a pandemic?'" she said. "Is this the time that tribal nations have to file a breach of trust case [for violation of treaty rights] against the United States?"

The Quinault are no strangers to that sort of fight. In the 1970s they joined other Pacific Northwest tribes in a campaign to get the US government to recognize their treaty rights over their ancestral waters. They purposefully got themselves arrested for fishing, a right guaranteed in their treaties. Sharp learned from the leaders of those fish-ins-Indian rights legends like Joe DeLaCruz of the Quinault and Billy Frank Jr. of the Nisqually-and has become an outspoken advocate for the environment. Rising seas have forced the Quinault to relocate hundreds of residents of the village of Taholah to higher ground. Her people's staple food, the sockeye salmon, has almost entirely disappeared. In the 1950s and '60s, hundreds of thousands of salmon swam up the Quinault River every year. Last year, there were barely 6,500, and the tribe had to close its salmon fishery. "We had to go through a genocide, and now our relatives in the natural world are also facing a genocide, and they have no voice," Sharp said. "There is a long-standing leadership void around climate policy, and tribal nations are uniquely poised to rise."

On the Yankton Reservation in South Dakota, Faith Spotted Eagle, a Dakota activist and kunsi (grandmother, pronounced "koo-she"), has some ideas about what it might look like for Native people to lead such a fight. The week before I called, Spotted Eagle put a few Dakota youths to work planting gardens on the reservation. The teenagers had to dodge barking dogs to plant the corn-a gift from the Mandan and Pawnee people to the Dakota hundreds of years ago-in the yards of homes still damaged by flooding from last year's record rainfall. One of the girls had lupus, an autoimmune disease that can leave a person vulnerable to the sun, so Grandma Faith gave her a big goofy hat to protect her skin. And one of the young men was showing leadership potential, so Spotted Eagle had her son Kipp teach him how to drive the tractor. Under her watch, the young people tilled the ground and burned the weeds, replenishing the rich, black soil that lines the banks of the Missouri River. "Mother Earth forces us-it's not even in a loving way, it's more like in a tough love sort of way-to appreciate what we can do for ourselves," she said. "Mother Earth and her tough love."

When the gardens were planted, she told the young farmers as well as the owners of these new cornfields to pray and to take care of what the earth might give them. They, like their ancestors, were now stewards of this land. Dakota were once denied their right to this soil because, according to the US government, they did not practice agriculture like "civilized" Europeans. Against this history, every stalk is a rebuttal.

This is serious stuff, but it's not without comic relief. Spotted Eagle recalled that one Yankton resident couldn't tell the difference between the weeds and the corn, so she just watered everything. "I figured they'd make it through it," the woman explained to her. "They'd be tough plants." A resilient garden for a resilient people.

One night, after speaking with Haaland, Sharp, and Spotted Eagle, I thought back to a plan that Cowboy hatched to buy Castle Calgary in Scotland and rename it mohkínstsis, which means "elbow" in his language. It's the original Blackfoot name for Calgary, Alberta. "Inverted colonization," that's how he put it. "Knock down the gates and invite in our brothers and sisters."

Then I opened my laptop and scrolled through my Facebook news feed, where I keep in touch with family and friends back on the rez and across Indian Country. In the first weeks of the pandemic, I noticed Native people posting videos of themselves dancing and praying for a sick world. The last time Native life seemed on the brink of apocalypse, at the end of the 19th century, the Indians were also dancing. They called it the Ghost Dance. It foretold a world in which the colonists disappeared, the buffalo returned, and the land was restored to the people.

That spiritual movement ended on December 29, 1890, when the United States military gunned down hundreds of Lakota ghost dancers and buried their bodies in a mass grave. A week after the massacre, L. Frank Baum, who later wrote The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, penned an editorial in the Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer. "Our only safety depends upon the total extermination of the Indians," he wrote. "Having wronged them for centuries we had better, in order to protect our civilization, follow it up by one more wrong and wipe these untamed and untamable creatures from the face of the earth." Then his nation called us savages and made our people into mascots for their sports franchises. Maybe they were so haunted by us and what they did to take this land that they had to forget about their crimes-to put it out of their nation's memories and history books.

As Native people, we have endured some of the darkest chapters in history and emerged knowing who we are, where we come from, and what we stand for. We've inherited a vision so audacious, it terrified our oppressors. It's a worldview that celebrates beauty, defiance, and a playful wagging of the finger at the people who tried to kill us. After the pandemic but as the climate crisis unfolds, maybe more people will understand what it means to survive and still dream, like us.

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How to Survive an Apocalypse and Keep Dreaming

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EDITOR'S NOTE:&nbsp The Nation believes that helping readers stay informed about the impact of the coronavirus crisis is a form of public service. For that reason, this article, and all of our coronavirus coverage, is now free. Please subscribe to support our writers and staff, and stay healthy.

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Perhaps the most important aspect of indigenous cosmic visions is the conception of creation as a living process, resulting in a living universe in which a kinship exists between all things. Thus the Creators are our family, our Grandparents or Parents, and all of their creations are children who, of necessity, are also our relations.

An ancient Ashiwi (Zuñi) prayer-song states:

That our earth mother may wrap herself
In a four-fold robe of white meal [snow]; . . .
When our earth mother is replete with living waters,
When spring comes,
The source of our flesh,
All the different kinds of corn
We shall lay to rest in the ground with the earth mother's
living waters,
They will be made into new beings,
Coming out standing into the daylight of their Sun father, to
all sides
They will stretch out their hands. . . .

Thus the Mother Earth is a living being, as are the waters and the Sun.

Juan Matus told Carlos Castaneda that Genaro, a Mazateco, "was just now embracing this enormous earth . . . but the earth knows that Genaro loves it and it bestows on him its care. . . . This earth, this world. For a warrior there can be no greater love. . . . This lovely being, which is alive to its last recesses and understands every feeling. . . ."

Or, as Lame Deer puts it:

We must try to use the pipe for mankind, which is on the road to self-destruction. . . . This can be done only if all of us, Indians and non-Indians alike, can again see ourselves as part of the earth, not as an enemy from the outside who tries to impose its will on it. Because we . . . also know that, being a living part of the earth, we cannot harm any part of her without hurting ourselves.

European writers long ago referred to indigenous Americans' ways as "animism," a term that means "life-ism." And it is true that most or perhaps all Native Americans see the entire universe as being alive-that is, as having movement and an ability to act. But more than that, indigenous Americans tend to see this living world as a fantastic and beautiful creation engendering extremely powerful feelings of gratitude and indebtedness, obliging us to behave as if we are related to one another. An overriding characteristic of Native North American religion is that of gratitude, a feeling of overwhelming love and thankfulness for the gifts of the Creator and the earth/universe. As a Cahuilla elder, Ruby Modesto, has stated: "Thank you mother earth, for holding me on your breast. You always love me no matter how old I get."Or as Joshua Wetsit, an Assiniboine elder born in 1886, put it: "But our Indian religion is all one religion, the Great Spirit. We're thankful that we're on this Mother Earth. That's the first thing when we wake up in the morning, is to be thankful to the Great Sprit for the Mother Earth: how we live, what it produces, what keeps everything alive."

Many years ago, the Great Spirit gave the Shawnee, Sauk, Fox, and other peoples maize or corn. This gift arrived when a beautiful woman appeared from the sky. She was fed by two hunters, and in return she gave them, after one year, maize, beans, and tobacco. "We thank the Great Spirit for all the benefits he has conferred upon us. For myself, I never take a drink of water from a spring, without being mindful of his goodness."

Although it is certainly true that Native Americans ask for help from spiritual beings, it is my personal observation that giving thanks, or, in some cases, giving payment for gifts received, is a salient characteristic of most public ceremonies. Perhaps this is related to the overwhelmingly positive attitude Native Americans have had toward the Creator and the world of "nature," or what I call the "Wemi Tali," the "All Where" in the Delaware-Lenápe language. Slow Buffalo, a teacher, is remembered to have said about a thousand years ago:

Remember . . . the ones you are going to depend upon. Up in the heavens, the Mysterious One, that is your grandfather. In between the earth and the heavens, that is your father. This earth is your grandmother. The dirt is your grandmother. Whatever grows in the earth is your mother. It is just like a sucking baby on a mother. . . .

Always remember, your grandmother is underneath your feet always. You are always on her, and your father is above.

Winona LaDuke, a contemporary leader from White Earth Anishinabe land, tells us that:

Native American teachings describe the relations all around-animals, fish, trees, and rocks-as our brothers, sisters, uncles, and grandpas. . . .

These relations are honored in ceremony, song, story, and life that keep relations close-to buffalo, sturgeon, salmon, turtles, bears, wolves, and panthers. These are our older relatives-the ones who came before and taught us how to live.

In 1931 Standing Bear, a Lakota, said when reciting an ancient prayer:

To mother earth, it is said . . . you are the only mother that has shown mercy to your children. . . . Behold me, the four quarters of the earth, relative I am. . . . All over the earth faces of all living things are alike. Mother earth has turned these faces out of the earth with tenderness. Oh Great Spirit behold them, all these faces with children in their hands.

Again in 1931, Black Elk, the well-known Lakota medicine man, told us that "The four-leggeds and the wings of the air and the mother earth were supposed to be relative-like. . . . The first thing an Indian learns is to love each other and that they should be relative-like to the four-leggeds." And thus we see this very strong kinship relation to the Wemi Tali, the "All Where": "The Great Spirit made the flowers, the streams, the pines, the cedars-takes care of them. . . . He takes care of me, waters me, feeds me, makes me live with plants and animals as one of them. . . . All of nature is in us, all of us is in nature."

At the center of all of the creation is the Great Mystery. As Black Elk said:

When we use the water in the sweat lodge we should think of Wakan-Tanka, who is always flowing, giving His power and life to everything. . . . The round fire place at the center of the sweat lodge is the center of the universe, in which dwells Wakan-Tanka, with His power which is the fire. All these things are Wakan [holy and mystery] and must be understood deeply if we really wish to purify ourselves, for the power of a thing or an act is in the meaning and the understanding.

Luther Standing Bear, writing in the 1930s, noted:

The old people came literally to love the soil and they sat or reclined on the ground with a feeling of being close to a mothering power. It was good for the skin to touch the earth and the old people liked to remove their moccasins and walk with bare feet on the sacred earth. . . . The soil was soothing, strengthening, cleansing, and healing. . . . Wherever the Lakota went, he was with Mother Earth. No matter where he roamed by day or slept by night he was safe with her.

Native people, according to Standing Bear, were often baffled by the European tendency to refer to nature as crude, primitive, wild, rude, untamed, and savage. "For the Lakota, mountains, lakes, rivers, springs, valleys, and woods were all finished beauty. . . ."

Of course, the indigenous tendency to view the earth and other nonorganic entities as being part of bios (life, living) is seen by many post-1500 Europeans as simply romantic or nonsensical. When Native students enroll in many biology or chemistry classes today they are often confronted by professors who are absolutely certain that rocks are not alive. But in reality these professors are themselves products of an idea system of materialism and mechanism that is both relatively modern and indefensible. I have challenged this materialist perspective in a poem, "Kinship is the Basic Principle of Philosophy," which I will partially reproduce here as indicative of some common indigenous perspectives:

. . .For hundreds of years
certainly for thousands
Our Native elders
have taught us
"All My Relations"

About a thousand years ago, White Buffalo Calf Woman came to the ancestors of the Lakota, giving them a sacred pipe and a round rock. The rock, Black Elk said,

. . . is the Earth, your Grandmother and Mother, and it is where you will live and increase. . . . All of this is sacred and so do not forget! Every dawn as it comes is a holy event, and every day is holy, for the light comes from your father Wakan-Tanka; and also you must always remember that the two-leggeds and all the other peoples who stand upon this earth are sacred and should be treated as such.

Here we see not only the expression of relatedness on a living earth, but also the sacredness or holiness of events that some persons take for granted: the dawn, the day, and, in effect, time and the flow of life in its totality. In relation to all of these gifts, human beings are expected to be humble, not arrogant, and to respect other creatures. An ancient Nahua (Mexican) poem tells us that

Those of the white head of hair, those of the wrinkled face,
our ancestors. . .
They did not come to be arrogant,
They did not come to go about looking greedily,
They did not come to be voracious.
They were such that they were esteemed on the earth:
They reached the stature of eagles and jaguars.

Lame Deer says: "You can tell a good medicine man by his actions and his way of life. Is he lean? Does he live in a poor cabin? Does money leave him cold?" Thus, humility and a lack of arrogance are accompanied by a tendency toward simple living, which reinforces the ideal of nonexploitation of other living creatures. A consciousness of death also adds to the awareness of the importance of concentrating on the ethical quality of one's life as opposed to considerations of quantity of possessions or size of religious edifices. "A man's life is short. Make yours a worthy one," says Lame Deer.

Juan Matus, in Carlos Castaneda's Journey to Ixtlan, captures very well the attitude of many Native people: ". . .You don't eat five quail; you eat one. You don't damage the plants just to make a barbecue. . . . You don't use and squeeze people until they have shriveled to nothing, especially the people you love. . . ." This kind of attitude is found over and over again in the traditions of Native people, from the basketry and food-gathering techniques of Native Californians to the characters in the stories of Anna Lee Walters (as in her novel Ghostsinger, the stories in The Sun is Not Merciful, or in Talking Indian).

Respect and humility are the building blocks of indigenous life-ways, since they not only lead to minimal exploitation of other living creatures but also preclude the arrogance of aggressive missionary activity and secular imperialism, as well as the arrogance of patriarchy.

But Anglo-American "ecologists" often have a very narrow conception of what constitutes "ecology" and the "environment." Does this contrast with the Native American attitude? Let us examine some definitions first. The root of the concept of environment has to do with "rounding" or "that which arounds [surrounds] us." It is similar to Latin vicinitat (Spanish vecinidad or English vicinity), referring to that which neighbors something, and also to Greek oikos (ecos), a house and, by extension, a habitation (Latin dwelling) or area of inhabiting (as in oikoumene, the inhabited or dwelled-in world). Ecology is the logie or study of ecos, the study of inhabiting/dwelling, or, as defined in one dictionary, the study of "organisms and their environment."

Ecos ( oikos) is "the house we live in, our place of habitation." But where do we live and who are we? Certainly we can define ecos in a narrow sense, as our immediate vicinity, or we can broaden it to include the Sun (which is, of course, the driving power or energy source in everything that we do), the Moon, and the entire known universe (including the Great Creative Power, or Ketanitowit in Lenápe). Our ecos, from the indigenous point of view, extends out to the very boundaries of the great totality of existence, the Wemi Tali.

Similarly, our environment must include the sacred source of creation as well as such things as the light of the Sun, on which all life processes depend. Thus our surroundings include the space of the universe and the solar/stellar bodies that have inspired so much of our human yearnings and dreams.

Ecology, then, in my interpretation, must be the holistic (and interdisciplinary) study of the entire universe, the dynamic relationship of its various parts. And since, from the indigenous perspective, the universe is alive, it follows that we could speak of geo-ecology as well as human ecology, the ecology of oxygen as well as the ecology of water.

Many indigenous thinkers have considered humans part of the Wemi Tali, not separate from it. As I have written:

For us, truly, there are no "surroundings."

I can lose my hands and still live. I can lose my legs and still live. I can lose my eyes and still live. . . . But if I lose the air I die. If I lose the sun I die. If I lose the earth I die. If I lose the water I die. If I lose the plants and animals I die. All of these things are more a part of me, more essential to my every breath, than is my so-called body. What is my real body?

We are not autonomous, self-sufficient beings as European mythology teaches. . . . We are rooted just like the trees. But our roots come out of our nose and mouth, like an umbilical cord, forever connected with the rest of the world. . . .

Nothing that we do, do we do by ourselves. We do not see by ourselves. We do not hear by ourselves. . . . We do not think, dream, invent, or procreate by ourselves. We do not die by ourselves. . . .

I am a point of awareness, a circle of consciousness, in the midst of a series of circles. One circle is that which we call "the body." It is a universe itself, full of millions of little living creatures living their own "separate" but dependent lives. . . . But all of these "circles" are not really separate-they are all mutually dependent upon each other. . . .

We, in fact, have no single edge or boundary, but are rather part of a continuum that extends outward from our center of consciousness, both in a perceptual (epistemological-existential) and in a biophysical sense-our brain centers must have oxygen, water, blood with all of its elements, minerals, etc., in order to exist, but also, of course, must connect to the cosmos as a whole. Thus our own personal bodies form part of the universe directly, while these same bodies are miniature universes in which, as noted, millions of living creatures subsist, operate, fight, reproduce, and die.

Anna Lee Walters, the Otoe-Pawnee teacher and writer, in speaking of prayers, notes:

"Waconda," it says in the Otoe language, Great Mystery, meaning that vital thing or phenomenon in life that cannot ever be entirely comprehensible to us. What is understood though, through the spoken word, is that silence is also Waconda, as is the universe and everything that exists, tangible and intangible, because none of these things are separate from that life force. It is all Waconda. . . .

Thus ecos for us must include that which our consciousness inhabits, the house of our soul, our ntchítchank or lenapeyókan, and must not be limited to a dualistic or mechanistic-materialistic view of bios. Ecology must be shorn of its Eurocentric (or, better, reductionist and materialist) perspective and broadened to include the realistic study of how living centers of awareness interact with all of their surroundings.

At a practical level this is very important, because one cannot bring about significant changes in the way in which the Wemi Tali is being abused without considering the values, economic systems, ethics, aspirations, and spiritual beliefs of human groups. For example, the sense of entitlement felt by certain social groups or classes, the idea of being entitled to exploit resources found in the lands of other groups or entitled to exploit "space" without any process of review or permission or approval from all concerned-this sense of superiority and restless acquisitiveness must be confronted by ecology.

The beauty of our night sky, for example, now threatened by hundreds or thousands of potential future satellites and space platforms, by proposed nuclear-powered expeditions to Mars and space-based nuclear weapons, cannot be protected merely by studying the physical relations of organisms with the sky. The cultures of all concerned have to be part of the equation, and within these cultures questions of beauty, ethics, and sacredness must play a role. Sadly, the U.S. government is the greatest offender in the threat to space.

When a mountain is to be pulled down to produce cement, or coal, or cinderstone, or to provide housing for expanding suburbanites, the questions that must be asked are not only those relating to stream-flow, future mudslides, fire danger, loss of animal habitat, air pollution, or damage to stream water quality. Of paramount importance are also questions of beauty, ownership, and the unequal allocation of wealth and power that allows rich investors to make decisions affecting large numbers of creatures based only upon narrow self-interest. Still more difficult are questions relating to the sacredness of Mother Earth and of the rights of mountains to exist without being mutilated. When do humans have the right to mutilate a mountain? Are there procedures that might mitigate such an aggression? Are there processes that might require that the mountain's right to exist in beauty be weighed against the money-making desires of a human or human group?

We hear a great deal about "impacts" and how "impacts" must be weighed and/or mitigated. But all too often, these considerations do not include aesthetics (unless the destruction is proposed for an area where rich and powerful people live), and very seldom do we hear about sacredness or the rights of the earth. Indeed, we have made progress in the United States with the concept of protecting endangered species, but it is interesting that, for many people, the point of such protection is essentially pragmatic: we are willing to preserve genetic diversity (especially as regards plant life) in order to meet potential human needs. The intrinsic right of different forms of life each to have space and freedom is seldom evoked. (Even homeless humans have no recognized right to "space" in the United States).

All over the Americas, from Chile to the arctic, Native Americans are engaged in battles with aggressive corporations and governments that claim the right to set aside small areas (reserves) for Native people and then to seize the rest of the Native territory and throw it open to Occidental Petroleum, Texaco, or other profit-seeking organizations. Often, as in the case of the U'wa people, the concept of the sacredness of the living earth directly conflicts with the interests of big corporations and the revenue-hungry neocolonial governments that support them.

It has to be said that some indigenous governments and groups have also allowed devastating projects to be developed on their territories. Sometimes there has been grassroots resistance to the extraction of coal, uranium, and other minerals, but very often the non-Native government has encouraged (or strong-armed) the indigenous peoples into agreeing to a contract providing for little or no protection to the environment.

In her recent book, All Our Relations, Winona LaDuke focuses on a number of specific struggles involving Native people in the United States and Canada. She points out that "Grassroots and land-based struggles characterize most of Native environmentalism. We are nations of people with distinct land areas, and our leadership and direction emerge from the land up." LaDuke shows in each of her chapters how different groups of First Nations people are facing up to serious problems and are seeking to address them at the local, community level. They are also forming national and international organizations that seek to help individual nations, in great part through the sharing of information and technical assistance. In the final analysis, however, each nation, reserve, or community has to confront its own issues and develop its own responsible leadership. This must be stressed again and again: each sovereign Native nation will deal with its own environmental issues in its own way. There is no single Native American government that can develop a common indigenous response to the crisis we all face.

Mention should be made here of the work of Debra Harry, a Northern Paiute activist from the Pyramid Lake Reservation who is spearheading an information campaign relative to biopiracy and the dangers of the Human Genome Diversity Project. The collection of Native American tissue samples and DNA/mtDNA information represents a very serious environmental threat, since the discovery of unique genetic material could be used not only for patenting and sale but also for future campaigns of germ or biological warfare. The latter may seem extreme, but Native peoples have reason to be cautious about sharing potentially dangerous information with agencies, governments, and organizations not under their own control. The entire field of biopiracy, the theft of indigenous knowledge about plants and drugs, represents another area of great concern, since Native peoples could find themselves having to pay for the use of their own cultural heritage or for treatment using genetic material of indigenous origin.

Many activists are concerned primarily with the environmental responses of Native Americans belonging to specific land-based communities recognized as sovereign by the U.S. or Canadian governments. But in addition, there are millions of Native people who do not have "tribal" governments that are recognized as legitimate by a state. In California and Mexico, numerous Mixtec communities must deal with the hazards of agricultural pesticide, crop-dusting on top of workers, poor housing, inadequate sanitation, poor or polluted water sources, and a host of other issues. The Mixtec have responded by organizing around farm-labor issues, as well as developing their own ways of coping. For example, in Baja California they are often forced to build their own houses on steep hillsides where they must use old cast-off truck and auto tires as retaining walls to provide a level area for living.

Many Native groups, including Kickapoos, Navajos, Papagos, Zapotecs, and Chinantecs, produce a number of migrant agricultural laborers. These workers often remain rooted in home villages to which they may return seasonally. Such persons have a primary responsibility to their families; they cannot be expected to devote much energy to environmentalism, apart from attempting to obtain clean water, healthy food, and sanitary living conditions.

On a positive note, the environmental awareness of many indigenous American groups translates into a high respect for women in their communities. It would be hypocritical to seek to control women or restrict their opportunities for full self-realization while pretending to respect living creatures. This is a significant issue, because a great deal of evidence has shown that when women have high status, education, and choices, they tend to enrich a community greatly and to stabilize population growth. Many traditional American societies have been able to remain in balance with their environments because of the high status of women, a long nursing period for children, and/or the control of reproductive decisions by women. Many of the leaders in the Native struggle today are women.

Many Native homelands are much reduced in size from former years and are often located on land of poor quality. These conditions can create overuse of resources. Human population growth is, of course, one of the fundamental issues of environmental science. Along with the unequal distribution of resources and the taking away of resources (such as the removal of oil from indigenous lands, leaving polluted streams and poisoned soil) from militarily weaker peoples, human population growth is one of the major causes of species loss and damage to ecos. These are major issues in ecology but also must be overriding concerns for economists, political scientists, and political economists. In fact, the tendency in North America to ignore the impact of money-seeking activities upon nonmarket relations is a major source of environmental degradation. The recent effort to "charge" the industrial nations for the damage they have caused to world environments (as a new form of "debt" from the capitalist world to the rest of the world) is an example of how we must proceed.

To many of the more materialistic peoples of the world, indigenous people have often seemed "backward" or "simple." They have seemed ripe for conquest or conversion, or both. The fact is, however, that the kind of ethical living characteristic of so many indigenous groups, with its respect for other life forms and its desire for wholeness of intellect, may be the best answer to the problems faced by all peoples today.

Yet there are some who challenge the environmental record of Native Americans, seeking to prove that in spite of the ideals expressed in indigenous spirituality, Native peoples were actually large-scale predators responsible some ten thousand years ago for widespread slaughter and even species annihilation. This viewpoint, shared primarily by a few anthropologists, overlooks the fact that during the Pleistocene era and later extinctions occurred in Eurasia and elsewhere, and that Native Americans cannot be blamed for a global phenomenon. In any case, indigenous Americans have always belonged to numerous independent political and familial units, each with its own set of values and behavioral strategies. One can hardly assign blame to modern Native people as a whole group when the "culprits" (if there were any) cannot even be identified.

In dealing with the sacred traditions of original Americans and their relationship to the environment, we must keep in mind a common-sense fact: not only do different Native groups have different traditions, stories, ceremonies, living conditions, challenges, and values, but each family or group has its own unique approach to "together-living" or "culture." We must also factor in time, since different days, years, and epochs have presented different circumstances. In short, humans do not live by abstract rule alone. They live as well through a unique set of decisions informed by inspiration, personality, situation, and opportunity.

Native Americans, like any other group, are capable of acts that might well conflict with the major thrust of their sacred traditions. We must, therefore, differentiate between the concrete behavior of a people and their ideals. But in the case of indigenous Americans, such a distinction is perhaps less important than in other traditions. Why? Because Native Americans often lack a single, authoritative book or set of dogmas that tells them what their "ideals" should be. On the contrary, Native American sacred traditions are more the result of choices made over and over again within the parameters of a basic philosophy of life. Thus, we must look at the ideals expressed in sacred texts (including those conveyed orally), but also at the choices that people actually make.

Nonetheless, I believe that we can make the kinds of generalizations that I have, at least as regards those Native North Americans still following traditional values.

. . .The Old Ones saybecause
outward is inward to the heart
and inward is outward to the center

for us
there are no absolute boundaries
no borders
no environments
no outside
no inside
no dualisms
no single body
no non-body

We don't stop at our eyes
We don't begin at our skin
We don't end at our smell
We don't start at our sounds. . . .

Some scientists think
they can study a world of
matter separate from themselves
but there is no
Universe Un-observed
(knowable to us at least)
nothing can be known
without being channeled
through some creature's senses,
the unobserved Universe
cannot be discussed
for we, the observers,
being its very description
are its eyes and ears
its very making
is our seeing of it
our sensing of it. . . .

Perhaps we are Ideas in the mind
of our Grandfather-Grandmother
for, as many nations declare,
the Universe
by mental action
was created
by thought
was moved
So be it well proclaimed!
our boundary is the edge of the Universe
and beyond,
to wherever the Creator's thoughts

Native people are not only trying to clean up uranium tailings, purify polluted water, and mount opposition to genetically engineered organisms; they are also continuing their spiritual ways of seeking to purify and support all life by means of ceremonies and prayers. As LaDuke tells us: "In our communities, Native environmentalists sing centuries-old songs to renew life, to give thanks for the strawberries, to call home fish, and to thank Mother Earth for her blessings."
ENDNOTES
Ruby Modesto and Guy Mount, Not For Innocent Ears: Spiritual Traditions of a Desert Cahuilla Medicine Woman (Angelus Oaks, Calif.: Sweetlight Books, 1980), 72.

John Gneisenau Neihardt, The Sixth Grandfather: Black Elk's Teachings Given to John G. Neihardt, ed. Raymond J. DeMallie (Lincoln, Nebr.: University of Nebraska Press, 1984), 312.

Black Elk, The Sacred Pipe: Black Elk's Account of the Seven Rites of the Oglala Sioux, rec. and ed. Joseph Epes Brown (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1971), 31-32.

Jack D. Forbes, A World Ruled by Cannibals: The Wetiko Disease of Aggression, Violence, and Imperialism (Davis, Calif.: D-Q University Press, 1979), 85-86. See also Jack D. Forbes, Columbus and Other Cannibals (Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 1992), 145-147.

Debra Harry is executive director of Indigenous Peoples Council on Biocolo-nialism, 850 Numana Dam Road, P.O. Box 818, Wadsworth, NV 89442, USA.

This is a proposal made by Third World nations that seeks to "capitalize" the costs of environmental damage.

Jack D. Forbes, "The Universe Is Our Holy Book," unpublished poem, 1992.

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Indigenous Americans: Spirituality and Ecos

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Perhaps the most important aspect of indigenous cosmic visions is the conception of creation as a living process, resulting in a living universe in which a kinship exists between all things. Thus the Creators are our family, our Grandparents or Parents, and all of their creations are children who, of necessity, are also our relations.

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The history of the killing of the buffalo, and in turn, the killing of Native people and their lifeways.

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“Kill Every Buffalo You Can! Every Buffalo Dead Is an Indian Gone”

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The American bison is the new U.S. national mammal, but its slaughter was once seen as a way to starve Native Americans into submission.

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European genocide towards Native Americans was so vast that the decrease in carbon dioxide emissions from Indigenous people cooled the planet.

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When Europeans arrived in the Americas, they caused so much death and disease that it changed the global climate, a new study finds.

European settlers killed 56 million indigenous people over about 100 years in South, Central and North America, causing large swaths of farmland to be abandoned and reforested, researchers at University College London, or UCL, estimate. The increase in trees and vegetation across an area the size of France resulted in a massive decrease in carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere, according to the study.

Carbon levels changed enough to cool the Earth by 1610, researchers found. Columbus arrived in 1492,

"CO2 and climate had been relatively stable until this point," said UCL Geography Professor Mark Maslin, one of the study's co-authors. "So, this is the first major change we see in the Earth's greenhouse gases."

Before this study, some scientists had argued the temperature change in the 1600s, called the Little Ice Age, was caused only by natural forces.

But by combining archaeological evidence, historical data and analysis of carbon found in Antarctic ice, the UCL researchers showed how the reforestation - directly caused by the Europeans' arrival - was a key component of the global chill, they said.

"For once, we've been able to balance all the boxes and realize that the only way the Little Ice Age was so intense is ... because of the genocide of millions of people," Maslin told CNN.

The methodology

Researchers analyzed Antarctic ice, which traps atmospheric gas and can reveal how much carbon dioxide was in the atmosphere centuries ago.

"The ice cores showed that there was a larger dip in CO2 (than usual) in 1610, which was caused by the land and not the oceans," said Alexander Koch, lead author of the study.

A small shift in temperatures - about a 10th of a degree in the 17th century - led to colder winters, frosty summers and failing harvests, Koch said.

The implications

The implications of the study go beyond climate science and also contribute to research in geography and history, Maslin said, noting that deaths of indigenous Americans directly contributed to the success of the European economy.

Natural resources and food shipped from the New World helped Europe's population to expand. It also allowed people to stop farming for sustenance and begin working in other industries for spare money.

"The really weird thing is, the depopulation of the Americas may have inadvertently allowed the Europeans to dominate the world," Maslin said. "It also allowed for the Industrial Revolution and for Europeans to continue that domination."

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European colonizers killed so many Native Americans that it changed the global climate, researchers say | CNN

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When Europeans arrived in the Americas, they caused so much death and disease that it changed the global climate, a new study finds. European settlers killed 56 million indigenous people over about 100 years in South, Central and North America, causing large swaths of farmland to be abandoned and reforested, researchers at University College London, or UCL, estimate.

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How the Swinomish Tribe is fighting climate change.

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For 10,000 years, the Swinomish tribe has fished the waters of northwestern Washington, relying on the bounty of salmon and shellfish not only as a staple of its diet but as a centerpiece of its culture. At the beginning of the fishing season, the tribe gathers on the beach for a First Salmon ceremony, a feast honoring the return of the migratory fish that binds the generations of a tribe that calls itself the People of the Salmon.

At the ceremony's conclusion, single salmon are ferried by boat in four directions - north to Padilla Bay, east to the Skagit River, south to Skagit Bay and west to Deception Pass - and eased into the water with a prayer that they will tell other salmon how well they were treated.

In recent years, though, the tribe's harvest, diminished by vanishing habitat and warming waters fueled by climate change, hasn't been sufficient to feed the hundreds of people who come to pay homage to their ancestors and to the fish that sustained them.

"We don't have that abundance anymore," said Lorraine Loomis, an elder who has managed the tribal fishery for 40 years. "To get ceremonial fish, we buy it and freeze it."

For the Swinomish, perched on a vulnerable, low-lying reservation on Fidalgo Island, the effects of a warming world have been a gut punch.

The tribe has responded with an ambitious, multipronged strategy to battle climate change and improve the health of the land and the water and the plants, animals and people who thrived in harmony for generations. In 2010, the Swinomish became one of the first communities to assess the problems posed by a warming planet and enact a climate action plan. An additional 50 Native American tribes have followed, creating climate strategies to protect their lands and cultures, ahead of most U.S. communities.

The Swinomish see the tasks beyond addressing shoreline risk and restoring habitats. They look at climate adaptation and resilience with the eyes of countless generations. They recognize that the endangered "first foods" - clams, oysters, elk, traditional plants and salmon - are not mere resources to be consumed. They are central to their values, beliefs and practices and, therefore, to their spiritual, cultural and community well-being.

Loomis is 80. Every member of her family, from her grandfather to her nine great-grandchildren, has fished the tribe's ancestral waters. She has watched over the decades as the salmon disappeared and her family turned to crab, geoduck and sea cucumbers. She's seen the salmon season drop to only a few days per species from the eight months - May through December - of decades past in order to protect populations. The Skagit River is the last waterway in the continental United States that's home to all five species of Pacific salmon.

Progress has been slow; some researchers say it could be 90 years before the salmon recover. Loomis is taking the long view. "If I didn't believe we would recover [the fishery], I guess I wouldn't still be working on this," she said.

In recent years, the tribe has fostered salmon recovery through a variety of projects. It has restored tidelands and channels, planted trees along streambeds to cool warming waters, and collaborated with farmers to increase stream setbacks to improve water quality.

Restoring salmon populations is just part of an ambitious climate action plan to blunt the effects of increased flooding, ocean acidification, rising river temperatures, more-destructive storms and habitat loss.

The Swinomish are rebuilding oyster reefs for the native Olympia oyster. They're planning the first modern clam garden in the United States on the reservation's tidelands, reviving an ancient practice. They're monitoring deer and elk populations through camera traps to understand the climate change pressures and to inform hunting limits. And they have ongoing wetland restoration projects to explore preserving native plants and to help naturally manage coastal flooding.

"They're doing really innovative climate adaptation," said Meade Krosby, a senior scientist with the Climate Impacts Group at the University of Washington. "They were way ahead of the curve. And that really shouldn't be surprising, because the tribes have shown tremendous leadership in climate adaptation and mitigation."

While the Swinomish have been pioneers, they are among an increasing number of Indigenous communities across the country that have created climate plans guided by science and culture.

The Tulalip tribes, neighbors to the south, are relocating nuisance beavers from urban areas to streams with salmon to improve water quality and lower the temperature, reduce sediment flowing into streams and mitigate the effects of increasingly intense storms. The Karuk tribe of Northern California has a 232-page plan that calls for prescribed burning to reduce increasing wildfires and removing dams to help decreasing salmon and eel populations.

The Confederated Salish and Kootenai tribes of Montana have a resilience plan that calls for prescribed burns and restoring whitebark pine, a key part of tribal culture. They plan to identify trees resilient to blister rust - a fungus exacerbated by climate change - collect their seeds and eventually plant 100,000 seedlings on their lands.

And in Alaska, a partnership of 11 tribes has formed to identify harmful algae blooms so that it's clear when shellfish can be safely harvested.

Native Americans acutely feel the effects of the changing climate because they were forced onto the most vulnerable lands, places that were of little use to others, said Nikki Cooley, co-manager of the Tribes and Climate Change Program for the Institute for Tribal Environmental Professionals.

"There's that big push to address climate change because we're feeling the effects more so than other places," said Cooley, 40, who grew up without electricity or running water, herding sheep in the sprawling Navajo Nation reservations of the Arizona desert.

The institute has consulted with more than 300 of the 574 tribes in the United States, Cooley said. It's natural that Indigenous people who have lived with the land for generations, attuned to the cycles of nature, would be leaders in adapting to climate change and marrying that to culture and health. "We've always been taught and are still being told we have to preserve for the future generations," she added.

'A symbiotic respect'

An 1855 treaty established the Swinomish Reservation, a 15-square-mile skinny rectangle on Fidalgo Island with 2,900 acres of tidelands and 7,450 acres of uplands. The tribe, which has about 1,000 members, owns a casino, an RV park and a golf course on the island 80 miles north of Seattle. It leases 420 acres of the reservation to a planned community of 2,000 people.

The hydrology of the area has been radically altered over a century, destroying critical habitat for fish and wildlife. For example, the Swinomish Channel, once a complex waterway on the eastern edge of the reservation, was dredged and 900 acres of tidelands were diked and drained in 1937, blocking the way for young salmon to reach the tidal channels critical to their development as places to feed, grow and rest.

In early 2006, a 100-year storm struck the island, causing damaging flooding. Later that year, another storm downed trees and power lines, isolating the residents and causing evacuations. Those extreme weather events helped spur the tribe to examine a future imperiled by climate change.

Their plans merge traditional and academic resources. When looking at ways to protect wetlands, Todd Mitchell, the tribe's director of environmental protection, discovered that knowledge about traditional plantings passed down through the generations was lost. So he turned to the University of Washington, which had archived notes by ethnographers and anthropologists who had interviewed tribe elders in the 1950s and 1960s.

A tribal member who earned a geology degree from Dartmouth College and a master's degree at Washington State University, Mitchell returned to work for the tribe 20 years ago. "I think the missing piece - and I've been working on it ever since I got here - is how to take this straight-up science in the academic sense and put it together with traditional knowledge."

One way the tribe's approach differs from others is an innovative focus on community health. While the health effects of a changing climate have become a focus in recent years, the Swinomish, typically, have developed a broader view.

Jamie Donatuto, the tribe's environmental health officer, and Larry Campbell, a 71-year-old tribal elder, have created a tool, Indigenous Health Indicators, that goes beyond typical morbidity and mortality measures and considers ecosystem health, social and cultural beliefs, and values integral to a community. "It's a very different way of thinking about health," she said.

Seen through that lens, restoring "first foods" is important not just for diet and nutrition but for nourishment of the soul. Living somewhere for a long time fosters a sense of place, and a sense of place fosters stewardship.

"It's a different worldview," said Donatuto, who has a doctorate in resource management and environmental sustainability from the University of British Columbia. "The salmon and the crabs and the clams are relatives. They're living relatives. They're not just resources. And so you treat them with a symbiotic respect. They feed you because you take care of them. It's a very different way of thinking about why these areas are important."

Donatuto and Campbell have created an index of six health indicators: cultural use, community connection, self-determination, resiliency, transferring traditional knowledge across generations, and natural resource security.

"We believe that if we can go back to the foundation of our teachings, the foundation of what our elders knew, that it would help us in the long run," Campbell said, adding that merging traditional knowledge with Western science is "the best of both worlds."

Plans for the clam garden exemplify the intersection of community health and climate adaptation. Donatuto and Campbell surveyed tribal members about three possible sites on the west side of the reservation. They discovered that one, which had been returned to the tribe after years in private hands, had a meaningful history. Elders told stories about growing up playing on the beach all day. It had been a popular clam-digging spot and place to net fish from the beach. But for years, members had been chased off the tidelands by the property owners.

Creating the garden at that spot would not only provide first foods - including the return of native littleneck clams that were once a Swinomish staple - but symbolize community health.

A clam garden requires tribal members to work together to build and maintain a low rock wall at the shoreline. Once in place, the garden will create a spot for elders to share stories, passing on tribal knowledge. It will supply a first food while serving as an example of the tribe's resilience, self-determination and cultural stewardship, all health indicators.

Krosby said the tribe's outreach is a lesson. "When we engage communities and when we incorporate their knowledge and concerns into climate planning, you wind up with a more equitable and robust outcome," she said. "You wind up with the backing of the community. You end up with the benefit of their knowledge and expertise. And that's especially important for front-line communities."

Mitchell and Shelly Vendiola, a tribal elder, are chairs of the Protect Mother Earth Committee, working on involving the community in the plan's update and creating a climate change curriculum for schoolchildren and adults that marries an introduction to tribal lore with climate science.

The idea is to interest members in exploring science, going away to study and perhaps returning to help develop and implement future climate adaptation.

"Climate change," Mitchell said, "is going to last for a long time. So what we set up now builds the foundation."

Consider it newly traditional knowledge to pass down across the generations.
An earlier version of this story incorrectly said the Skagit River is the last waterway in the continental United States that's home to all five species of Pacific salmon. It is the last waterway in the continental United States to host all five species. This story has been updated.

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An ancient people with a modern climate plan

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A native American tribe living on an island off the coast of Washington long ago recognized the threat of climate change. They implemented a climate action plan in 2010, melding traditional practices with science. Now, 50 other native tribes across the country have similar strategies, way ahead of U.S. communities.

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Small interviews with Native people discussing where they find hope.

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What Native Hope Looks Like - Native Max

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Our Native American culture is a living, breathing entity. It is a tapestry of tradition and values passed on from generation to generation. Today, many of us are aware of the challenges facing Indian Country and the struggle to join together in unity and preserve our vibrant culture and history. As…