Climate Change Puts Tribal Way of Life at Risk

(Nov. 21) -- Streams that support cold-water fish are getting warmer. Traditional native plants are becoming harder to find. And some animal migratory patterns have been disrupted.

Native American tribes own and manage 5 percent of the land in the U.S. -- lands that are rich with renewable resources. But Native Americans are disproportionately affected by climate change. And droughts, temperature changes and altered animal behavior are just some of the ways climate change is being acutely felt on reservations in the West, putting tribal environments, identity and cultural traditions at risk, experts say.

"The elders are commenting on how much warmer it's getting, and how that warming is impacting the snow and the mountains," said Germaine White, a member and information and education specialist for the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes in northwestern Montana. "They pray about that. They are concerned. There needs to be snow so that the plants and animal communities thrive."

Many in the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes reside on the Flathead Indian Reservation, 1.3 million acres at the base of the Northern Rockies. Temperatures are rising in cold-water streams, creating perilous survival conditions for native fish such as trout. White said the land has become drier, more prone to wildfires and hospitable to several non-native plant species, triggering a decline in traditional ones.

Members of the Tulalip Tribes, which own 22,000 acres in Washington, are facing similar problems.

The 4,000-member indigenous group is experiencing a winter season that now ends two months earlier than usual. The six weeks that it normally took for the snow to melt into waterways happens in two weeks. The rapid snowmelt has a knock-on effect. More water flows through the streams, scouring sediment and altering the habitats that salmon use to develop. That creates a schism between water flow and the salmon biology, and threatens the core of tribal identity, said Preston Hardison, a policy analyst for the Natural Resources Office of the Tulalip Tribes.

"For the survival of their culture, they need these ecosystems to be as secure from climate change as they can," he said.

But the fear among experts isn't just for the future of the tribes. Lonnie Thompson, a leading climatologist, glaciologist and professor of geological sciences at Ohio State University, said the climate change impacts that Native Americans are experiencing on tribal lands is a harbinger of sorts of what the rest of the world will experience in later years because of climate change.

"I think what you see, especially in the changes that are occurring around glaciers, that these are just the canaries in the coal mine of things to come," said Thompson, who has spent more than 30 years studying Peru's Quelccaya glacier, the largest tropical ice cap in the world.

Learning to be More Efficient

Alexis Bonogofsky, senior tribal lands coordinator for the National Wildlife Federation, works with tribes throughout Montana to build small-scale renewable energy projects, including a weatherization project for the Northern Cheyenne. The nonprofit is helping the tribe retrofit tribal buildings to be more energy efficient. They're working to implement a green technology training program at the community college that will teach students how to construct energy-efficient homes using sustainable products and fix renewable energy projects.

"Our long-term vision," Bonogofsky said, "is that there will be a workforce on Northern Cheyenne tribal systems who can not only repair small-scale renewable energy technology, but are able to build new houses that are straw bale and energy efficient."

Other Western tribes are battling climate change's effects by creating small-scale renewable-energy projects to help reduce carbon emissions and reliance on fossil fuels.

On the Hopi reservation in Arizona, tribal leaders are developing a wind turbine farm that will supply power to 14,000 homes. Roger Tungovia, the project manager of the Hopi Renewable Energy Office, said the tribe was spurred to consider alternative energy projects after residents of the tribal lands began experiencing irregular weather conditions, such as drought, increased flooding during summer months and major snowstorms in the winter.

The Tulalip are planning for climate-change adaptation. That includes assessing how sea grass and kelp can help keep water, salmon and sediment from being washed out into the ocean from streams. They are also looking at how nursery habitats near the coast can take carbon dioxide out of the environment.

Tribal officials hope to use that information to establish wetlands that will help slow the water's movement in the spring.

The projects not only work to stave off the impact of climate change, but also to bring jobs to areas that may be economically depressed.

Pat Spears, a member of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe and president of Intertribal Council on Utility Policy, supports building a wind farm on his South Dakota reservation, where the wind blows up to 18 miles per hour.

"We don't want wall-to-wall turbines," he said. "We want to restore our economy."

Other Problems, Too

Climate change isn't the only problem affecting the environment on reservations. Development and work to acquire natural resources such as coal can also disrupt the land's natural processes.

Gail Small, a former elected member of the tribal council for the Northern Cheyenne Tribe in southeastern Montana, said work to extract natural resources, coupled with climate change, altered traditional routes animals used to traverse across the reservation. "The elk are confused," Small said. "Their migratory patterns are all disrupted."

Thirty years ago, the Tribal Council on the Flathead Indian Reservation dedicated nearly 25 percent of their land as open space -- the first tribal wilderness in the nation, White said. That move has helped keep swathes of mountain range, where snowpack melts into waterways, largely undisturbed.

"We have been keen on ensuring that there are entire watersheds that have cold, clean, connected complex water," White said. "They are components of a healthy streams for native fish restoration."

The Tribal Council also moved to a 10-hour, four-day workweek, to save energy and minimize the number of days people drove to and from work, White said.

Hardison said the nation in general, and tribes in particular, have a small window of time to act on climate change before the changes trigger ecological collapse. Once that threshold is reached, it will be almost impossible to reverse the effects.

"If the cultures are going to survive, we have to stabilize over the next 20, 30 years," Hardison said. "It's a culture killer, from an Indian point of view."