Tribes try to gauge a ‘potential culture killer’
Posted on March 20th, 2008By Lauren Morello
Climatewire: Scientists trying to understand climate change analyze gases trapped in ancient ice, measure air and water temperatures using a complex web of Earth-orbiting satellites, and construct detailed computer models to predict how the planet will respond to greenhouse gas emissions.
But an emerging group of Native American leaders and scientists believe those efforts have unintentionally ignored crucial human knowledge gathered by indigenous people who have spent generations living off the land, paying close attention to the natural rhythms of animals, plants and seasons.
“We have great climate observations from the last 50 years or so, especially from the satellite era,” said Rajul Pandya, director of the Community Building Program at the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo.
“We don’t have good climate records going back further than that. I think in the indigenous community, a lot of that knowledge is there,” Pandya said.
To that end, UCAR is sponsoring a conference, which begins today, that is designed to bring together Native American leaders and climate scientists.
What Native Americans have to offer is “very deep spatial knowledge, a sense of place,” said Daniel Wildcat, who helped organize the conference in Boulder. Wildcat is a Yuchi member of the Creek Nation and a professor of American Indian studies at Haskell Indian Nations University in Lawrence, Kan.
“One of the things that’s been missing [in the climate debate] is an acknowledgment that native people often have this intergenerational knowledge of what’s happened in a particular environment,” he said. “We’ve had such incredible technological leaps with satellites and remote sensing … but I think we often forget that the people on the ground, so to speak, have a real-time sort of data about what is happening right now.”
‘We’ve lived lightly on the land’
Creating closer ties with scientists can help tribal communities that often lack infrastructure and economic resources to deal with climate change, said James Rattling Leaf, special adviser for science and technology at Sinte Gleska University, a tribal college in Mission, S.D.
“Elders tell me we’ve always undergone changes in the land and the Earth,” he said. “We understand that. We’ve dealt with that as tribal people. We’ve lived lightly on the land. But we can’t do that today, because of our fixed land base.”
Rattling Leaf pointed to the difficulties faced by South Dakota’s Rosebud Sioux tribe. The tribe’s reservation in south-central South Dakota draws water from the Ogallala aquifer, which by some estimates could dry up in less than 25 years. With climate change predicted to increase droughts in the West, that leaves the tribe — whose reservation comprises the fifth-poorest county in the United States — in a precarious position.
“We also get drinking water from the Missouri River,” added Rattling Leaf. “That’s endangered, heavily used and polluted. … What do we do?”
And in the Arctic, rising temperatures are threatening the traditional subsistence lifestyles of indigenous Inuit and Inupiat peoples, Wildcat said. Warming is limiting the thickness, extent and duration of sea ice, making it harder for hunters to safely venture out onto the ice to capture ring seal, walrus and polar bears.
In the American Southwest, Wildcat pointed to the migration of sand dunes and its effect on Native Americans there, including the Navajo Nation.
“The way the reservation system was set up in the United States, the places where native people live today are going to make them more likely to feel the effects of climate change more quickly than people living in urban areas,” Wildcat said.
A recent report by Evergreen State College’s Northwest Indian Applied Research Institute put it more simply.
“Using traditional ecological knowledge, [Native Americans] are describing today the same drastic shifts in the environment that Western scientists had predicted would occur in the future,” the report reads. “Climate change is a potential culture-killer.”
Comparing tribal lore with satellite data
The conference this week in Boulder is the latest of several recent efforts to link the indigenous and scientific communities, organizers said.
In December 2006, the National Wildlife Federation and the Cocopah Indian Nation sponsored a similar meeting in Somerton, Ariz., that brought together representatives of more than 50 Native American tribes with prominent scientists, including Robert Corell, who directed the U.S. Global Change Research Program from 1987 to 2000, and Bradley Udall, director of the Western Water Assessment at the University of Colorado.
Meanwhile, Native American leaders are reaching out to federal science agencies.
Wildcat and his colleagues at tribal colleges have created the American Indian and Alaska Native Climate Change Working Group to help tribes access environmental data that may help them adapt to climate change and to encourage Native American students to train as scientists.
NASA and the American Indian Higher Education Consortium are cosponsoring summer internships for Native American and Alaska Native students that are designed to draw native students into the sciences and harness scientific tools to address key environmental issues affecting reservation lands.
One student from last year’s group, for example, used satellite data to examine how climate change will affect flood patterns in southeastern Oklahoma, with a focus on lands owned by the Choctaw Nation.
In South Dakota, Sinte Gleska University and the Rosebud Sioux Tribe have signed a memorandum of understanding with the U.S. Geological Survey. Under the agreement, USGS will work with the tribe and school to increase student internship opportunities, exchange scientific data and develop new research projects that draw together agency scientists and Sinte Gleska students and faculty.
One ongoing project is designed to compare oral ecological history from Rosebud Sioux elders with scientific observations of reservation lands, Rattling Leaf said.
“For the first time in that agency’s history, they really wanted the university to bring a traditional ecological knowledge component to their science,” he said.