In recent years, there’s been a growing appreciation for Indigenous land stewardship and traditional knowledge. But what gets overlooked is that successfully managing those lands means that Indigenous people have already survived severe climate events and extreme weather.
Now, Indigenous communities are leading the way in climate adaptations — from living alongside rapidly melting ice to confronting rising seas and creating community support networks.
Indigenous knowledge does not mean going back to “traditional” methods; it means evolving, a characteristic that has always been a part of Indigenous life. There’s no easy fix for the planet. But Indigenous people have simple solutions rooted in the depth of their knowledge.
Recently we launched Changing With Our Climate, a limited-run series exploring Indigenous solutions to extreme weather rooted in history — and the future. This summer and fall, we’ll be publishing five features that center an Indigenous community confronting extreme weather on the front lines.
This series has not set out to mythologize Indigenous communities with bespoke, unapproachable, or mystic traditional practices and solutions — but instead underscores humility as a throughline. Indigenous people realize we cannot bend the world to our human will. We’re far better and more resilient when we tune in and lean into changes when possible.
By showing the connections between storms, climate disasters, and issues of tribal sovereignty, Changing With Our Climate will explore what it really means when we say that climate change is an existential threat — and how we can work together to find a way out.
Colonial solutions to climate change aren’t working
What Indigenous knowledge could mean in the fight to curb global warming.
The tiny potato at the heart of one tribe’s fight against climate change
Wetlands absorb carbon from the atmosphere. The Coeur d’Alene’s restoration would do more than just that.
This coastal tribe has a radical vision for fighting sea-level rise in the Hamptons
Next to some of the priciest real estate in the world, the Shinnecock Nation refuses to merely retreat from its vulnerable shoreline.
We’re in a deadly cycle of mega fires. The way out is to burn more.
How one Karuk fire crew leader is decolonizing our relationship to fire.
What 6 degrees of warming means for a community built on ice
Alaska is warming far faster than most of the world. For Indigenous people on the front lines, adaptation can be surprisingly simple.
Our most meaningful solutions to the climate crisis are hidden in plain sight
There’s no easy fix for the planet. But Indigenous people have simple solutions rooted in the depth of their knowledge.
