By Kara Briggs
American Indian News Service

The Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian hosted “Mother Earth: Confronting the Challenge of Climate Change” in late June. This year’s symposium considered indigenous answers to the world’s environmental issues.

Photo by Robert GoughAmong the examples of Native answers to climate change are wind turbines on the Rosebud Sioux Tribe’s reservation in South Dakota. The turbines produce electricity, replacing sources with heavier environmental impacts such as hydropower and coal-produced power.

The museum, which has a mission to promote knowledge about Native American achievement, held its first climate-change symposium in 2007 conjointly with Live Earth, a global series of concerts held to bring awareness to climate change. Former Vice President Al Gore organized the concert and broadcast internationally that day from the museum’s Mother Earth event.

Mother Earth 2009 emphasized Native responses to climate change—with a focus on environmental efforts by indigenous communities. The event comes two weeks after the Obama administration released a landmark report, “Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States” and unveiled the website globalchange.gov.

“It was politically uncertain where things would roll in terms of the general American acknowledgement of climate change three years ago,” said Tim Johnson, Mohawk, associate director for museum programs. “With the advocacy of tribal leaders and the change in administration, there has been a shift in understanding since then.”

Photo by Robert GoughA new form of power production provides a backdrop to traditional cultural activities such as powwows on the Rosebud Sioux Tribe’s reservation.

Three participants in the symposium joined American Indian News Service Editor Kara Briggs in conversation about the issues. They are: Patricia Cochran, Inupiat, chairwoman of the Inuit Circumpolar Council and former executive director of the Alaska Native Science Commission; attorney Robert Gough, who serves as secretary of the Intertribal Council on Utility Policy, headquartered on the Rosebud Sioux Reservation in South Dakota; and Johnson, of the museum.

Q. What has been the objective of the museum’s Mother Earth programs?

Johnson: The first year, it was really a global awareness effort that Gore started, and the Native perspective on climate change. Last year, we delved into scientific consensus into causes and the cultural perspective. This year, to look at solutions, we’re asking speakers to talk about what Native communities are doing.

Cochran: Our indigenous people have been here for centuries. The reason why we have been able to live in the most extreme environments is because we are adaptable. That kind of knowledge and wisdom is exactly what this world needs.

Gough: The traditional Lakota calendar called winter count, of which there are about a dozen in the Smithsonian’s collection, go back as long as 200 years. About the time they were collected in the 1880s, the government started keeping weather statistics. The winter counts, on buffalo robes and later in ledger books, looked at climate extremes. One year the snow was above the top of the tipi poles; another year they ate frozen fish because the fish were frozen in the winter.

Q. In your view, what is the most important work you are now engaged in regarding climate change?

Cochran: Every day there is something else that is occurring. Our elders talk about all the changes they are seeing. Interior elders say the song of the robin has changed. I tried, as director of the Alaska Native Science Commission, to engage scientists to try to figure out what those observations in local communities mean. There are all the usual issues like lack of funding, and the relationship between Native people and researchers has not always been a good one. But it’s important to gather information. If the commission can document 2,000 people telling us something, then it’s not an anecdote anymore.

Johnson: Even though Native communities are not idyllic utopias, there is a great deal of cultural recovery. How do you construct a culture that makes it more prestigious to drive a car that consumes very little energy, rather than a big SUV? Traditional leadership among the Haudenosaunee expected you would live softly upon the earth.

Gough: In the past, there is not a Native community on the continent that didn’t build energy efficient homes that kept them fairly comfortable. You have 14,000 years of green building and you have 400 years of disaster relief. The buffalo is gone. There is tar paper in place of the natural product. Dams and cheaply built HUD houses. It didn’t matter that they weren’t efficient, you could heat them with cheap energy. Now the era of cheap energy is over, what can you do? Tribes have an easier time getting back to that thinking about that kind of adaptation than communities that have never had to think about it.

Q. What indigenous knowledge do you see employed to make a change in this arena?

Cochran: Wind generation in Kotzebue [a city in the northwest Arctic area of Alaska] produces about 40 percent of their electricity. It’s only one of a number of sustainable energy projects in Native communities. People tend to think of traditional knowledge as a relic, and they don’t really understand that traditional knowledge is dynamic; it is all about knowledge gained and used from one generation to the next. We use knowledge not only from the past but also the present to improve upon what we know. The knowledge I learned from my mother and grandmother isn’t what I taught my children.

Gough: Initially, tribes in the Great Plains organized around making sure they could get some benefit from the Missouri River and the dams on it. They secured water rights and an allocation of hydropower, which they could purchase. Later we realized how much electricity you could produce from wind, and how much you could save through conservation. We want every Indian nation to be energy self-sufficient.