Native Americans Move to Forefront on Climate
Commentary by John C. Topping, Jr.
President, Climate Institute
Perhaps one of the most significant developments in the climate arena in recent months has been the emergence of the Native American community as a real force in the climate protection effort. In one sense this should not be surprising; tribal lands are disproportionately situated in water- parched areas that are likely to be among the most severely affected by climate change. This is borne out in the Report of the US National Assessment on Climate Variability that was published about six years ago.
Alaskan and Arctic Peoples Already Experiencing Widespread Disruption
More than the scientific projections of possible future impacts it is likely that increased interest in climate change has been driven by facts on the ground- signs of profound disruptions in the way of life of Alaskan Natives and Arctic peoples including the Inuit.
Perhaps nothing reached the general public as well as the three-part series for the New Yorker by Elizabeth Kolbert that in part describes the plight of an Inupiat village five miles off the Alaska Coast that will soon be forced to relocate to the mainland because declining sea ice is making the island more vulnerable to storm surge. A more recent article by William Yardley in The New York Times chronicles a similar quandary faced by the Alaskan Native village of Newtok. Melting permafrost and declining sea ice are allowing fall storms to pound away at the shoreline. The erosion has already turned Newtok into an island, and due to permafrost thaw it is sinking and becoming barely habitable. Responding to this threat to their way of life and that of other indigenous peoples in the Arctic, the Inuit Circumpolar Conference has mounted an Arctic Voice campaign that has sent Inuit and other Arctic Peoples on a speaking tour, especially in Canada and the United States.
Will Steger, a noted Arctic adventurer, recently set out with several Inuit hunters on a 1200 mile trek to document changes in the Arctic affecting the Inuit. He is posting images on his website, gathering film footage for a documentary and stirring up media interest in the impact of climate change on indigenous people of the Arctic. Some of the hunters Steger and his team have met with report sightings of creatures such as robins, finches and dolphins for which there are no words in their language; more ominously they relate stories of hunters who have perished by falling through thinning ice. Academic researchers are also exploring effects of climate change in Alaska, with Carleton College having documented changes in the Pribilof Islandsl, the Native American Rights Fund cataloguing changes throughout Alaska, 
and the National Indian Law Library
providing a detailed list of resources on Climate Change and its Effects on Native Peoples in Alaska. Closely linked to the affected Alaskan Native Communities, the Alaska Conservation Foundation, the state's most influential environmental group, has joined in the Virtual March to Stop Global Warming.
Climate Protection Activities in Native American Communities Outside Alaska
In the past year there has been a remarkable growth of interest in climate protection among Native Americans in the contiguous 48 states. In part this has been facilitated by actions of environmental groups such as the National Wildlife Federation that organized a Tribal Lands Climate Conference in December 2006 with the Copopah Indian Tribe drawing leaders from more than 50 tribes to the Cocopah homeland on the Lower Colorado River, to discuss challenges climate change posed to Native American Communities. Most of the impetus on climate change, however, has come from scientists and activists within the Native American Community. Several months before the Tribal Lands Conference a group of scientists and activists, many with links to the tribal colleges, formed an American Indian Alaskan Native Climate Change Working Group.
Dr. Daniel Wildcat
The catalyst in this effort has been Dr. Daniel Wildcat, who heads the Environmental Research Studies Center at Haskell Indian Nations University in Lawrence, Kansas. A member of the Muskogee tribe, Dan Wildcat is a remarkably effective speaker and group leader. Positioned in Lawrence, Kansas, Haskell enjoys a virtually unique position among the roughly three dozen tribal colleges. Its student body of just over 800 students comes from about 130 tribes; most tribal colleges draw from a single tribe or a few geographically close tribes. Haskell is also situated in the same community as the University of Kansas. Dr. Wildcat has skillfully built links with the Center for Remote Sensing of Ice Sheets (CReSIS) at the University of Kansas.
The Live Earth Concert organized by Al Gore provided Dan Wildcat a chance on July 7, 2007 to reach an audience of hundreds of millions around the world. The Washington concert was organized next to the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian and speakers including Dan Wildcat, Dr. Nancy Maynard, a respected program leader and scientist who heads NASA's Tribal Colleges Program, and Dr Anthony Socci of the American Meteorological Society spoke on implications of climate change for the Native American Community and a number of Native American musical groups performed . In the two months before the Live Earth Concert, two events in quite different places showed the growing breadth of efforts to move indigenous peoples' concerns and concerns of vulnerable island states to the forefront of climate discussions. From May 27-30, 2007 about forty stakeholders from the Caribbean, Alaska, other locations in the Arctic, Greenland, Fiji, French Polynesia, and other small island states gathered in Belize to discuss innovative adaptation strategies and means of delivering a message to more populous nations on the urgency of early action to limit greenhouse emissions.Two weeks later, in mid -June 2007, Native American leaders from six tribes gathered at Mt. Moosilauke, New Hampshire, to speak out forcefully on the need for action to combat climate change.
Emerging Tribal College Climate Initiative
Perhaps the most promising of all these developments is a very interesting move by the American Indian Alaskan Native Climate Change Working Group to make the tribal colleges the mainstay in an effort to empower individual tribes to be proactive in responding to climate change. There are now about 32 Tribal Colleges, mostly in the Midwest and Southwest, recognized under the White House Initiative on Tribal Colleges and Universities. Administered and largely funded by the Department of Education, this Initiative has sought to make tribal colleges an effective force to encourage education and economic development in Native American communities including many reservations. The Tribal Colleges have collaborated informally through the American Indian Higher Education Consortium (AIHEC). Set up in 1972 by six Tribal College Presidents, this group has grown to become an effective vehicle to leverage federal agency support, obtain favorable legislative action and stimulate private sector support of these colleges that now serve over 30,000 students. Many of these schools have evolved from an initial start as vocational schools to become fully accredited four-year colleges. Some like Haskell Indian Nations University in Kansas, Salish Kootenai College in Montana, and Northwest Indian College in Washington State have developed pioneering work on climate or energy issues.
I had the pleasure of participating in the second meeting of the American Indian Alaskan Native Climate Change Working Group held at Haskell Indian Nations University July 22-24, 2007. Hosting and chairing this meeting — as he had the kickoff of the group June 19-22, 2006, also at Haskell — was Dan Wildcat. Working in a collegial style that I learned is characteristic of many Native American gatherings (regrettably the same is rarely seen in much of current US political discourse), he enabled the group to move toward a remarkably action-oriented outcome.
Particularly striking were presentations by several Haskell students and one University of Kansas graduate student (PowerPoint, 6 MB) who had served as NASA interns this summer under the tutelage of Dr. Nancy Maynard. These Native American students, mostly non-scientists, had mastered advanced GIS techniques using NASA LANDSAT data to study topics as varied as potential for surface water contamination in Southwestern Oklahoma due to climate change and extreme weather events, ways in which climate change was already affecting the herding patterns of Sami reindeer herders in the Norwegian Arctic, and (by a science graduate student) correlation of aerosol optical depth with air quality monitoring data in the Four Corners Region of the US Southwest. In early July when I had witnessed a Preliminary Presentation during a visit to NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center with three Climate Institute honor student summer interns (Hallie Damon, Dartmouth 2008, Benjamin Beckerman, Dartmouth 2010, and Rebecca McCullough Stanford, 2008), all of us were struck by the superb quality of the work. By the meeting at Haskell it was clear that students from Tribal Colleges when given access to strong mentors and technical resources could more than hold their own in the most competitive environments.
Several themes seemed to emerge from the discussions. Among them:
1. There is much folk wisdom in Native American culture that may be useful in climate response, e.g. Meso-American knowledge of use of passive solar and relation of controlled burning to biodiversity preservation; the trick is to use modern science without abandoning traditional knowledge
2. Stimulation of interest of Native American youth in science and the environment can be heightened by showing how scientific methods could give them leverage to protect a revered but threatened cultural heritage, e.g. using satellite imagery to protect traditional habitat
3. Climate mitigation measures, e.g. generation of wind resources from reservation land, should be used for more than export to the power grid; they should also seek to stimulate a job base and industrial enterprise on tribal land, enabling young people to make a decent living without abandoning tribal roots.
One participant noted that 60 out of 60 Navajo tribal elders, when asked about observations of climate change since their youth, indicated that there was now less snow in the winter. A first project that the Working Group agreed to undertake was to organize a chronicling by tribal college students of impressions of elders of climate trends within tribal areas since their youth and also of traditional methods used to cope with weather related and environmental stress. Haskell Environmental Research Studies will coordinate this effort, working with interested tribal colleges whose students may interview elders in their tribal areas. The Climate Institute agreed to gather background material on how such chronicling of recollections by elders may be of value in research and policy formulation. Participants were especially interested in the work of Sasha Earnheart-Gold who on a Dartmouth Senior Fellowship interviewed numerous elders of the sea level-rise threatened island of Tuvalu and of the Inuit community. The interviews of Inuit Elders provided crucial evidence in a petition by the Inuit Nation before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights seeking to move the United States to act to limit its greenhouse emissions. In the interest of disclosure I served as a non-faculty advisor on this effort.
Partnering with Other Universities and Institutions
A much more ambitious objective the group agreed on was strengthening the ability of Tribal Colleges to become a focal point for climate protection planning for the respective tribes they serve. NASA has on quite modest resources already developed an innovative effort to train Native American undergraduate and graduate student interns in use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and other techniques to use NASA data and to link them with operational NASA Program centers. Nancy Maynard, a top earth systems scientist who served as the principal liaison to Native American Communities during the US National Climate Change Assessment and fulfilled a similar role with indigenous communities during the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, recently assumed the lead in NASA's Tribal Colleges Program where she has brought her climate know how to fashion a high leverage program on badly crimped resources.
Efforts are underway to generate additional resources to enhance the role of Tribal Colleges in Climate Response. The Center for Remote Sensing of Ice Sheets at the University of Kansas has been in the forefront in efforts to secure federal funding support for a consortium-like effort. Meanwhile the Climate Institute has taken the lead in efforts to link other colleges and universities that have both strong science programs and demonstrated commitment to educational advancement of Native Americans to partner in a climate protection effort with Tribal Colleges. This effort to date has focused on three institutions: Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, Stanford University in California and American University in Washington, DC
Dartmouth College. This New Hampshire college, my alma mater, was established in 1769 by a Congregational minister, Eleazar Wheelock, and its principal early funding was raised by Samson Occam, a direct descendant of the great Mohegan Chief Uncas and ultimately, after studying under Wheelock, an ordained Presbyterian minister. Dartmouth was a direct outgrowth of Wheelock's Indian Charity School founded nearly three decades earlier. Dartmouth's early mission was to focus significantly on training of American Indians who like Occam might become missionaries. Although there were a number of American Indian alumni who achieved distinction in Dartmouth's early years, Wheelock, after securing the funds raised by Occam, turned his attention largely to educating Caucasian New England youth. For many years the principal vestige of Dartmouth's Native American heritage was the Indian symbol at athletic events, generally a student dressed up in war paint. About a generation ago, in a move that sharply divided the school's alumni, the Indian symbol was phased out as a demeaning stereotype. Ironically this whole controversy may have induced Dartmouth to move toward a serious engagement with the Native American Community for the first time since its early years. Dartmouth now has by far the largest proportion of Native American students of any Ivy League school; in the fall of 2006, there were 153 Native Americans among the 4085 undergraduates at Dartmouth.
Already a number of Alumni, including members of my Class of 1964, faculty members, and students seem interested in participating in the Tribal Colleges Climate Protection effort. Efforts are now underway to arrange a joint visit to Dartmouth in the fall by Nancy Maynard and Dan Wildcat to solidify plans. Chosen by Booz Allen Hamilton in December 2004 as one of the world's ten most enduring institutions — the only other educational institution recognized was Oxford University — Dartmouth has been a driving force in innovation in many fields: computer science, neuroscience, language teaching, and analysis of medical care delivery, to name a few. This initiative seeks to match this spirit of innovation with the out-of-the-box ideas emanating from some of the leading Tribal Colleges.
Stanford University. The growth of the Silicon Valley has been driven to a significant degree by Stanford Alumni: people like William Hewlett and David Packard, co-founders of Hewlett Packard; David Filo and Jerry Yang, co-founders of Yahoo; and Sergei Brin and Larry Page, who teamed up to launch Google. Among its many other distinctions Stanford stands out as a hub of cutting edge work on climate science and energy research. Its Global Climate & Energy Project (GCEP), funded with $150 million pledged by major US and international firms, seeks to promote cutting edge work in greenhouse benign energy. Stephen Schneider, Professor of Biological Sciences, is one of the world's most highly regarded climate scientists, editor of the Journal, Climatic Change, and a member of the Climate Institute Board since 1988. Stanford Alumni have been prominent in climate protection worldwide; among them Denis Hayes, President of the Bullitt Foundation, Chair of the Earth Day Network, and a winner of the Climate Institute Award in April 2000, and Margie Simon de Ortiz, Director General of CICEANA and a spearhead of Climate Institute efforts in Mexico.
Like Dartmouth, Stanford was once wracked by controversy over use of an Indian mascot. Although Stanford didn't open its doors until 1891, it could claim some Indian lineage; it was built on land once inhabited by the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe. Although Stanford's Native American roots are of more recent vintage than Dartmouth's, its Native American Cultural Center has developed a remarkably innovative program that involves many of the more than 250 Native American undergraduates and graduate students studying at Stanford. Stanford's American Indian Organization organizes a Powwow that draws Native Americans from many tribes to the Stanford Campus each Mother's Day weekend. Its 36th Powwow was held May 11-13, 2007. Efforts are underway to arrange visits this fall to Stanford by Nancy Maynard and Dan Wildcat to discuss opportunities for collaboration in the Tribal Colleges Climate Protection effort. Dartmouth and Stanford have recently initiated a Student Exchange Program that will permit Native American and other undergraduates interested in Native American Studies to receive course credit in exchanges on each other's campus. It seems possible these growing Dartmouth-Stanford links may also facilitate efforts to engage both schools in enhancing a Tribal College Climate Protection Initiative.
American University. For more than a generation American University's (AU) Washington Semester Program has drawn hundreds of students each year to Washington to intern in area offices and also take courses for credit at American University. Since 1994 AU has run a program of Washington Internships for Native Students (WINS) that has drawn more than 600 Native American students from colleges around the country. During their time at AU WINS students not only participate in internships in Government, the Nonprofit Sector, Corporations, or Trade Associations, they also take courses on such topics as American Indian Law and Water Resource Issues. American University has some significant intellectual resources to bring to bear: a strong law school that has pioneered in International Environmental Law and the largest school of international affairs in the United States. Its School of International Service headed by my Dartmouth Classmate, Lou Goodman, stands out both for the breadth of its program, and also in leading all US international affairs schools in the proportion of its graduates that work in the nonprofit sector. Learning of the nascent Tribal Colleges effort during a recent Bastille Day Party at the Climate Institute, Dean Goodman arranged for us to meet with his colleagues who run the Washington Semester Program and the WINS program. On August 7, 2007 four of my colleagues, Nancy Maynard, NASA's Tribal Colleges Program Manager, and I enjoyed the hospitality of Violeta Ettle, AU's Associate Provost; Amy Morrill-Bijeau, Associate Dean who Directs the Washington Semester Program; Jack Soto, who runs the WINS Program; and several WINS Program participants. It seemed clear during our wide ranging luncheon discussion that there were several possible synergies with NASA and the Climate Institute's efforts; these could include helping build discussion of climate change implications into courses that AU offers to WINS participants. Drawing on the extensive WINS Alumni Network, AU might be able to facilitate involvement of Tribal Colleges not now participating in the Climate Change Working Group.
At this point this is all a work in progress. The ultimate objective is to enable as many Tribal Colleges as desire to do so to become effective focal points in advising tribal councils on climate change strategies that will increase each tribe's resilience in responding to climate change.
NOTE: For those interested in helping on this initiative with general questions please contact Magali Devic magali_devic@hotmail.com. Those who would like to help in efforts at Dartmouth might contact Hallie Damon hallie.t.damon@dartmouth.edu or Benjamin Beckerman benjamin.beckerman@dartmouth.edu; at Stanford, Rebecca McCullough bmccull@stanford.edu; and at American University, Nina Rinnerberger, nina.rinnerberger@gmail.com. An AU Alumna and Graduate Student at its School of International Service, Nina serves as Director of Operations and Strategic Planning at the Climate Institute.
RESOURCES
Climate Change and Pacific Rim Indigenous Nations
Native Voices, Dartmouth Alumni Magazine May/June 2007 (PDF)
National Congress of American Indians Climate Change Resolution June 21, 2006
Environmental Justice and Climate Change Initiative-Statement on Alaska January 28, 2002