Leaning into Indigenous knowledge on climate change

Indigenous Communities and Climate Change: Insights from Traditional Knowledge

It used to be that when the warm nights came each summer, Frank Ettawageshik would spend most of his time outdoors, often sleeping outside, right on the ground. He balks at the thought of that today without the proper precautions. “I was 35 or so before I ever saw a tick,” says the 74-year-old executive director of the United Tribes of Michigan, a Native American advocacy group. In northern Michigan today, he says, “there’s ticks all over the place.”

Anishinaabe Culture and Climate Change

Ettawageshik is part of the Anishinaabe culture, whose members are from the Great Lakes. His own Tribal Nation is the Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians, who have lived in the northwestern shores of Michigan’s lower peninsula for centuries. Besides the spread of ticks, a phenomenon exacerbated by rising temperatures, they’ve witnessed the struggling populations of whitefish in nearby Lake Michigan and the gradual changes in harvests from the sugar maple tree, whose name in Odawa is “niinatig” — our tree. Research suggesting that warmer temperatures might force sugar maples out of Michigan add to Ettawageshik’s concerns. “Our tree is going to be moving away from us,” he says.

Ettawageshik’s tribe has observed many changes to their ancestral lands over hundreds of years, but Ettawageshik says human-caused climate change is different. “It’s happening at a pace that we don’t normally see.”

Indigenous Knowledge and Climate Science

“Climate science,” for many people, brings to mind satellite observations, temperature records or the analysis of ice cores. But there’s plenty more data besides that. Indigenous communities that have long lived close to the land — and have traditionally depended on deep knowledge of their environments to survive — often hold their own records and recollections. These can include extraordinary details about alterations in weather patterns, changes in vegetation or unfamiliar behavior of animals that have emerged under their watch.

Today, anthropologists and climate researchers in Western institutions are increasingly turning to Indigenous people to ask what they have observed about the world around them. In the process, these scientists are learning that Indigenous communities have been cataloging, in their own way, data about change at a hyper-local level — insights that Westernized climate science might miss — and also how that change is affecting people.

Sea Levels in the Southern Hemisphere

Off the north coast of Australia lie the Tiwi Islands, where Jarillo has been asking Indigenous people about the environmental changes they are seeing. In a paper published in March 2023, he and colleagues present comments from participants alongside drone-captured imagery of coastlines that show the coastal erosion that worries many members of the community. Erosion is a natural process, but in this case it is probably exacerbated by rising sea levels caused by anthropogenic climate change, says Jarillo.

To geomorphologists, that development would be far from surprising. So why make the effort to ask Indigenous people about it? The difference is that you find granular data that a satellite image could never provide — such as photos of the beach, shown to Jarillo and colleagues, that were taken around the 1950s and 1960s by islanders. “There was a fish trap that was permanently on the beach,” Jarillo says, referring to a traditional structure for catching fish. “There’s no longer space.”

The Tiwi community has been around for long enough to notice lots of changes, and they spend a lot of time in direct contact with the environment, adds Jarillo: “They know where there is erosion, they know if there’s a creek that is drying up.”

Data and a Way of Life

Listening carefully can reveal the true depth of the challenges faced by Indigenous communities, too — so by recording their observations of climate change, there is an opportunity to work on climate justice. “I see my culture starting to disappear,” is how one Indigenous participant in a 2022 study described the severity of change. The paper resulted from a two-day workshop attended by elders, knowledge holders and young adults (ages 19 to 30) from 12 Anishinaabe communities around the Great Lakes region.

One of those communities, the Magnetawan First Nation, had the initial idea for an information-gathering session. “They just said, ‘Hey, this is something we’re concerned about. Can you organize something?’” says lead author Allyson Menzies, a wildlife ecologist at the University of Guelph. As Menzies and her coauthors reported, the 37 participants discussed a range of effects they had noticed, such as how strawberries were appearing later in the year — July rather than June — and how fish spawning, which used to last a month, now continues for only about two and a half weeks because of rising river water temperatures.

The participants also said that passing on traditional harvesting and hunting techniques was becoming difficult since these depend on the climate behaving in a way that it no longer does. This concept of evaporating culture is familiar to many Indigenous people. Inuit communities on Baffin Island, Canada, for instance, frequently report that, as temperatures soar, they are finding it harder to predict the weather, navigate the ice and pass on hunting skills to younger members.

In that sense, we might miss something important if we treat research involving Indigenous communities as merely an exercise in filling in cells on a giant spreadsheet, says Ben Orlove, an anthropologist at Columbia University who coauthored an article about climate anthropology in the 2020 Annual Review of Anthropology. “I think the Indigenous people are saying the whole problem with climate change is not the data gaps,” he says. “It’s the limits in your framework.” Speaking broadly, he says there’s a tension between the Western view of the natural world as a resource to be exploited and the Indigenous view of a world where humans and nature are part of one single whole.

Ettawageshik of the Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians agrees: Traditional knowledge is not just an encyclopedic list of facts. What matters, he says, is the Odawas’ ongoing relationship with beings — plants, animals and natural places.

“We’re but one spot in that web of life,” he says. “We knew that in that web of life we could not survive without the other beings and, those other beings, they agreed to take care of us. And we agreed to take care of them.”

SDGs, Targets, and Indicators

1. SDG 13: Climate Action

   • Target 13.1: Strengthen resilience and adaptive capacity to climate-related hazards and natural disasters
   • Target 13.2: Integrate climate change measures into national policies, strategies, and planning
   • Target 13.3: Improve education, awareness-raising, and human and institutional capacity on climate change mitigation, adaptation, impact reduction, and early warning
   • Target 13.A: Implement the commitment undertaken by developed-country parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change to a goal of mobilizing jointly $100 billion annually by 2020 from all sources to address the needs of developing countries in the context of meaningful mitigation actions and transparency on implementation and fully operationalize the Green Climate Fund through its capitalization as soon as possible
   • Target 13.B: Promote mechanisms for raising capacity for effective climate change-related planning and management in least developed countries and small island developing states, including focusing on women, youth, and local and marginalized communities

   The issues highlighted in the article, such as rising temperatures, changes in vegetation and animal behavior, erosion, and loss of traditional harvesting techniques, are directly connected to climate change. SDG 13 addresses climate action and aims to combat climate change and its impacts. The targets under SDG 13 mentioned in the article include strengthening resilience to climate-related hazards, integrating climate change measures into policies and planning, improving education and awareness on climate change, mobilizing financial resources for developing countries, and promoting capacity building in vulnerable regions.

2. SDG 15: Life on Land

   • Target 15.1: Ensure the conservation, restoration, and sustainable use of terrestrial and inland freshwater ecosystems and their services
   • Target 15.2: Promote the sustainable management of all types of forests, halt deforestation, restore degraded forests, and substantially increase afforestation and reforestation globally
   • Target 15.5: Take urgent and significant action to reduce the degradation of natural habitats, halt the loss of biodiversity, and protect and prevent the extinction of threatened species
   • Target 15.9: By 2020, integrate ecosystem and biodiversity values into national and local planning, development processes, poverty reduction strategies, and accounts

   The article discusses the impact of climate change on ecosystems and biodiversity, including struggling populations of whitefish in Lake Michigan and changes in harvests from sugar maple trees. SDG 15 focuses on protecting, restoring, and promoting sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems, forests, and biodiversity. The targets mentioned in the article include conserving ecosystems and freshwater ecosystems, sustainable forest management, halting biodiversity loss, and integrating ecosystem values into planning and development processes.

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Source: knowablemagazine.org

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