Tribes and Indigenous groups from across the country met in Anchorage last week for a national conference on climate change.
The National Tribal Climate Conference takes place every two years. This year’s theme was “Shared Responsibility for Indigenous Climate Resilience.”
Throughout the conference, there were serious conversations about floods, fires, erosion and the deteriorating health of rivers and oceans, as well as shared stories about the work tribes are doing to assess and adapt to climate change.
Young leaders were featured at the close of the gathering on Thursday to talk about some of their work and why they’ve dedicated themselves to protecting tribal lands and waters.
For leaders like Kianna Pete, a Navajo neuroscience student, there is a sense of urgency about the rapid changes which have coincided with a warming climate.
“My home is T’iis Nideeshghiiz,” Pete said.
T’iis Nideeshghiiz is the Navajo name for Newcomb, New Mexico. It means cottonwood trees, which Pete says, are disappearing.
“Our ancestors named the land for a reason. But there are no cotton trees there,” Pete said. “So, what does that mean for the place name, if they’re no longer reflecting the land?”
Throughout the Southwest, rivers on traditional lands are dying. Lakin Epaloose is an artist and educator, who has worked for the National Park Service at the Grand Canyon.
"There used to be a river that flowed through Zuni for thousands of years,” he said, “but right now it’s dried up with in the last 50 years.”
Epaloose says his people once gardened with water from that river and followed it to the Grand Canyon to gather medicinal plants. He says he took a sample of water from a glacier he visited in Alaska to bring home, to remind him that all waters are connected.
Maya Nunez from the Yaqui Nation in Arizona says she relies on traditional knowledge to track the many changes we see today. She gave milkweed as an example, a plant her people regard as a member of their non-human family.
“If milkweed, our relative, were to go extinct, so would the monarch butterfly’s population decline,” Nunez said. “So would our foods, such as fruits and vegetables, not being pollinated. So, part of my culture, my identity and tradition is lost and will become extinct.”
Mocha Reynolds, a Lake Superior Ojibwe, says Indigenous people need to return to their traditional role as stewards of the land.
“We need be out there cultivating healthy forests, healthy rivers, healthy oceans, healthy lives,” Reynolds said. “It’s so vital that we leave the colonial ways behind and return to the old ways.”
For many of the young leaders, this means returning to a way of thinking about the environment in which the plants and animals are considered relatives to be cared for like family. The best way to do that, they say, is to connect to the environment through Indigenous languages and culture, the key to tapping into traditional systems of caring for the land.
The next and most important step, the group said, is to share their knowledge far and wide.
