by Bob Henson
Nisqually leader Billy Frank Jr. delivered the
keynote address at the Planning for
Seven Generations meeting.
(Photos by Carlye Calvin.) “Our world has really changed in my 77 years.” So
says Billy Frank Jr., a Nisqually leader
and winner of the Albert Schweitzer Prize for Humanitarianism.
He has chaired the Northwest Indian Fisheries
Commission since 1986, working to manage dwindling
salmon populations on behalf of 19 western Washington
tribes.
Frank and other Native American Indians
and Alaska Natives discussed the changes
they’ve
observed in climate and ecosystems, and voiced
their concerns about preserving their communities
and their connections to Earth, at a unique
conference in Boulder on 19–21 March.
The meeting, dubbed Planning for Seven Generations—a
nod to the Great Law of the Iroquois—approached
climate change from the vantage points of
both indigenous knowledge and western science.
At the conference, which was sponsored by UCAR/NCAR
and the American Indian and Alaska Native
Climate Change Working Group, more than 100
participants hunted for common ground of understanding,
adapting to, and mitigating climate change,
with a focus on American Indian lands and expertise.
Daniel Wildcat. One
of the most visible leaders working with
tribal communities on climate change awareness
and education is Daniel Wildcat (Haskell Indian
Nations University), author of the upcoming book
Red Alert! Saving the Planet with Indigenous Knowledge.
He joined James Rattling Leaf (Sinte Gleska University)
and UCAR’s
Raj Pandya to organize Planning for Seven Generations.
“We’ve just started,” Wildcat
told attendees near the end of the meeting.
He called on scientists to consider “indigenous
realism”—which is based on the interconnectedness
and unity of the Earth system and its components—as
they examine climate change. Wildcat noted
the disinclination of American Indians to
claim universal validity for their way of seeing,
adding that each tribe has pieces to add to the
climate puzzle—“truths
that emerged out of their long histories
and interactions with
particular landscapes and seascapes on this
planet.”
Elisabeth Holland. NCAR’s Elisabeth Holland and Caspar Ammann
discussed how scientists study the Earth system,
along with recent findings on climate change. Calling
herself an “elder” of the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change, Holland said she was “born
a scientist, like every one of you. That’s
how we taught ourselves to talk and walk. . . .
We’re critical thinkers. We like to argue
a lot. We’re not satisfied with one set of
data.”
Ground truths
Whiteman and colleagues have spent years conducting field work in other natural depressions across North America and Europe, hoping that sheltered and simplified geography can shed light on basic aspects of the boundary layer. The problem is that most basins aren’t very symmetric. Valleys or gullies along their rims allow surface air to enter and disrupt the inversions.
Climate change stands to affect many native
lands disproportionately. A number of tribes
live in regions especially sensitive to changes
in temperature and precipitation, such as the deserts
of the U.S. Southwest, the semiarid High Plains,
and the boreal regimes in the Arctic and sub-Arctic.
Conference-goers cited the Arctic Council and its
Arctic Climate Impact Assessment project as examples
of a largely successful process that incorporates
indigenous observations as well as scientific content.
Shannon McNeeley. Shannon
McNeeley, a graduate student at the University
of Alaska Fairbanks and long-term NCAR visitor,
described her extensive interdisciplinary
field work in Alaska over the last five years.
She cited a number of strengths in the merging
of indigenous and scientific knowledge. “It
can help challenge our assumptions or lead
us to ask different questions . . . and it can
help identify nuances masked by conventional data
analysis,” said
McNeeley. “Elders who’ve been living
on the land for half a century or more have
a really deep, sophisticated understanding
and wisdom about their environment.”
In her
own work, McNeeley finds that both food and
energy security are both at risk for many
Alaska Natives. Although the biggest temperature
changes have appeared in winter and spring, her
interviews with native residents showed that the
smaller changes detected in early autumn have had
major impacts on the critical yearly moose hunt. “The
Koyukon [Athabascan] elders talk about how September
weather is now what August conditions used
to be, which is warmer and wetter.” McNeeley
confirmed these trends in precipitation and temperature
data from weather stations in the region. The
shift in seasonal conditions, combined with
other socioeconomic and biological variables, jeopardizes
the seasonal river-based hunt as well as
caring for the meat, McNeeley learned.
Adapting
to changes like these—such as shifting
the moose hunt later into autumn—isn’t
as simple as it might seem for Alaska Natives
who face a patchwork of legal jurisdictions
and other constraints in space and time. Also,
as pointed out by Merv Tano, a Denver lawyer and
longtime advocate for tribal rights, subsistence-based
lifestyles can become virtually unsustainable when
population growth and climate change clash. “We
just don’t
have enough land. We’ve just got too many
people,” said
Tano, who serves as president of the International
Institute for Indigenous Resource Management.
However,
several speakers emphasized that tribes can
shift their ways of life in sync with climate
as needed, as long they have the proper tools for
doing so. “Elders
tell me we’ve always
undergone changes in the land and the Earth.
We understand that. We’ve dealt with that
as tribal people,” said
Rattling Leaf, whose college is based on
the Rosebud Sioux Reservation. Today, the
Sioux and their neighbors face a new challenge:
severe depletion of the Ogallala aquifer
beneath the High Plains after decades of commercial
ranching and farming outside native lands. The
loss of reliable access to water will make it harder
for those tribes to adjust to an increased risk
of drought in a warming world, said Rattling Leaf.
Next steps in community
building
Raj Pandya. UCAR’s Pandya hopes the community of UCAR members
and affiliates can find new ways to involve tribal
colleges. “We have 71 member institutions who
all benefit from UCAR resources,” notes Pandya, “but
surprisingly few of these are minority-serving institutions.” He’s
overseeing the new UCAR Community Building Program,
which aims to bring more institutions that serve underrepresented
populations into the fold. Along with tribal colleges,
these could include historically black colleges and
universities, Hispanic-serving institutions, and the
two-year colleges that serve many first-generation
students.
One potential follow-up to Planning for Seven Generations
would be a sequel held at a tribal college—“in
your place, not our place,” as NCAR’s
Elisabeth Holland put it. Pandya also envisions the
possibility of co-developing curricula in indigenous
environmental science, much like a program now in
place at Northwest Indian College. There’s also
the possibility of NCAR scientists visiting tribal
colleges on an individual basis, where they would
collaborate on basic research driven by tribal needs
and tribal questions.
“Climate change is a hard problem,” Pandya
says. “We need all the bright people and all
the different perspectives we can get.”
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As
participants noted, researchers who want
to draw on indigenous observations
of climate and help tribes cope with climate
change must work with sensitivity, given a
centuries-long backdrop of exploitation by
U.S. agencies and scientists. “I
realized that I was being given a special
privilege,” said
McNeeley of her work with Alaska Natives.
She has given back in ways that included
hiring tribal students and donating materials
to tribal archives.
Craig Fleener. “There’s a tendency to keep [indigenous]
knowledge close to our chests, mostly due to historical
experience,” noted Craig Fleener, a wildlife
biologist with the Council of Athabascan
Tribal Governments in Fort Yukon, Alaska. He added
that much indigenous knowledge ends up getting
patented by people they share it with, often without
acknowledgment or reciprocity.
Changes on campus
Tribal colleges are a powerful nexus for the emerging
relations between indigenous peoples and
climate scientists. Based at Haskell and led by
Wildcat, the American Indian and Alaska Native
Climate Change Working Group involves four other
tribal schools—Sinte
Gleska, Diné College, Northwest Indian College,
and Salish Kootenai Tribal College—as well
as the Center for Remote Sensing of Ice Sheets
at the University of Kansas.
Wildcat and Rattling
Leaf are also among the organizers of an
annual Tribal College Forum held since 2001
and oriented around Earth science. Climate change
was the theme in 2007 and will also be at the center
of this year’s forum, to
be held at Haskell on 12–14 August.
Global
warming can face stiff competition for attention
among students and tribal leaders who deal
with multiple everyday stresses. Several speakers
referred to “tribal college reality” in
describing the struggles many students and
faculty face, a theme other speakers echoed. “Some
people may get frustrated that our tribal
governments don’t seem to always be right
up there on the frontlines of climate change,” said
Wildcat. “But
let’s be realistic. We’ve still got
very human problems in many of our communities
with our families, with our elders, with
our children.”♦
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