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Posts Tagged ‘indigenous’

Tribal Radio Needed CPB

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , on October 19, 2025| 4 Comments »

Any one change has a cascading effect, and for tribes’ radio stations, the recent change to Corporation for Public Broadcasting has posed an existential threat. More than music is involved here. It’s about keeping a culture alive.

Neel Dhanesha reports at Neiman Lab, “In the most remote parts of Alaska, staying in touch can involve a bit more effort than sending a text. Cell service is spotty, highways are nonexistent, and the postal service remains a vital lifeline, delivering supplies and mail by plane. But for anyone who wants to broadcast a different kind of message — a reminder to pick up milk, for example, or birthday wishes — there’s always the Muktuk Telegram.

“Named for a traditional food of whale skin and blubber, the Muktuk Telegram (also called the Mukluk Telegraph, after a phrase referring to how gossip spreads in Alaska) is sort of like an amplified shout: Someone calls into a radio station with a message, and it gets broadcast on their airwaves so that anyone in range with a radio tuned to the right frequency will hear it. Usually, the radio station broadcasting the Telegram is one of the fifteen tribal radio stations in Alaska. But now, after Congress took away $9.4 billion in previously allocated public media funding and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) subsequently announced it will shut down, the future of those stations, the Telegram, and tribal public media across the country is up in the air.

“ ‘Stations are trying to figure it out,’ said Jaclyn Sallee, president and CEO of KNBA, a tribal radio station in Anchorage, and Koahnic Broadcast Corporation, which produces shows that are distributed to tribal radio stations across the country. …

“Indigenous radio and television stations are unique in the landscape of American media. While many are part of the NPR and PBS networks, they are mostly staffed by Indigenous reporters and producers and primarily serve audiences in tribal nations around the U.S., many of which lack broadband or cell service. According to Native Public Media, an NPR-like network for tribal stations, there are 57 tribal radio and 3 tribal television stations in 20 states in its network across the country, and most if not all of them received CPB funding before the rescissions package passed.

“ ‘When a Tribal station goes dark, the silence is more than technical,’ said Loris Taylor, president and CEO of Native Public Media, in an emailed statement to Nieman Lab. ‘These stations are not just media outlets, they are cultural infrastructure. … Without these stations, many Tribal citizens, especially elders, low-income families, and those without broadband, would lose essential access to news and public discourse.’

Among the essential services at risk are emergency alerts, which are particularly crucial in areas with gaps in cellular coverage.

“At particular risk is the Missing Endangered Persons Alert, a new type of alert similar to an AMBER alert that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) adopted in August 2024 and that is set for national launch in September. According to the FCC’s website, ‘The MEP code could be particularly beneficial to Tribal communities, where American Indians and Alaska Natives are at a disproportionate risk of violence, murder, or vanishing.’ …

“Kathryn Squyres reported in Current, a spokesperson from Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.) office explained that the Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) will distribute $9.4 million of previously appropriated funding to 35 tribal radio stations in 11 states, which matches the amount those stations received from the CPB in fiscal year 2025. But it’s unclear what will happen after this year’s grants are dispersed, or to the 22 radio stations and nine states left out of that deal. …

“In an emailed statement, a spokesperson from the Department of the Interior wrote that ‘a transfer of previously appropriated federal funds allows Interior to support tribal communications infrastructure through targeted grants. Indian Affairs will administer these funds under established authorities. At this time, Indian Affairs anticipates awarding the first set of contracts by the end of Fiscal Year 2025 or early Fiscal Year 2026.’ It’s not clear where that funding is coming from, or whether other programs at the Bureau of Indian Affairs will be affected by the funding being reappropriated.

“It wouldn’t be the first time stations have been funded through the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Before the CPB was created in 1967, says Mark Trahant, who spearheaded the revival of ICT (formerly Indian Country Today), tribal stations received funding through the BIA for almost 40 years. Trahant, a member of the Shoshone-Bannock tribe of Idaho, said the funding Rounds claims to have secured is probably ‘a handshake. And I don’t think it’ll be anywhere near what’s being funded [through CPB] now.’ …

“If the DOI funding gets delayed for any reason [stations] may have to shut down. For now, said Sue Matters, station manager at KWSO, a tribal station on the Warm Springs Indian Reservation in Oregon, ‘everyone’s scrambling.’

“If stations disappear, Trahant said, he’s worried about what might fill the gap. …

“Trahant said. ‘To me, this is a question of who owns the airwaves. The great thing about CPB was that it set as a national standard that the public owns the airwaves, and they have an investment in that. I think that’s what’s really been missing from this debate.’ ”

More at Nieman Lab, here.

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The Dangers of ‘Ghost Nets’

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , on August 30, 2025| 2 Comments »

Photo: Danielle Khan Da Silva.
Divers risk their lives to protect whales from “ghost nets” abandoned by fishermen.

Today’s article presents one of those impossible challenges pitting the environment against the need to make a living. In this case, it involves the ocean, specifically marine animals.

Danielle Khan da Silva has the story at the Guardian.

“After a day of scuba diving, Luis Antonio ‘Toño’ Lloreda was exhausted. Then a friend brought urgent news. ‘Toño, man, there’s a whale caught in a net out there.’ Lloreda, 43, had freed other, smaller wildlife from fishing nets but this would be his first marine animal of such size.

“The four- to five-meters-long juvenile humpback, accompanied by its mother, had a net studded with hooks wrapped around its fin and mouth. One wrong move could have been fatal for Lloreda or the whale.

‘To connect with the whale, I used what we call intuitive interspecies communication,’ says Lloreda, explaining that this involves non-verbal, energetic communication.

“ ‘I asked the mother for permission – energetically,’ he says. ‘At first, she didn’t want our help. But when I showed her we meant no harm, she let us in.

“ ‘She positioned herself below us. Then I asked the calf. When the calf became very still, I reached into her mouth and removed the net.’ The mother and calf swam for 50 meters before pausing to rest.

“Lloreda is one of nine Guardianes del Mar (Guardians of the Sea), a grassroots African-Colombian collective from six coastal communities around Colombia’s Gulf of Tribugá, a biodiversity hotspot on the Pacific coast that spans 600,000 hectares of ocean, forest and mangroves. The region, where dense Chocó rainforest meets the ocean, is a Unesco biosphere reserve and is designated a ‘hope spot‘ by the nonprofit organization Mission Blue for its ecological significance.

“Scuba diving is crucial for identifying and removing ghost fishing gear – lost or abandoned commercial nets made mostly of near-indestructible plastics – but it is prohibitively expensive. With sponsorship from Ecomares and Conservation International, Lloreda and his colleagues have trained not only in diving, but in removing fishing gear from coral with quick, precise and safe techniques.

“Many guardians double as coral gardeners and reef surveyors, collecting data for both their communities and scientific partners. Three, including Lloreda, are trained to free marine animals.

“According to WWF, 50,000 tons of fishing gear are lost or abandoned in the oceans globally each year. These ‘ghost nets’ drift across borders, ensnaring coral, turtles, sharks – and whales. In the Gulf of Tribugá alone, Guardianes del Mar estimates that 3-4 humpback whales become entangled each year. …

“Guardianes del Mar is working to certify more local divers so they can have a greater impact. But it faces mounting logistical and financial hurdles.

” ‘We used to send the nets to Buenaventura for recycling, but fuel costs are too high,’ says Benjamin Gonzales, 53, one of the senior guardians. There are no roads – the communities are connected mainly by boat – so any rubbish or recycling must be transported out by boat or plane.

“Today, the nets are repurposed into bracelets and sold in Germany and locally in Nuquí, the main coastal municipality. Lead weights are melted down into new dive weights for the local shop, run by Guardianes del Mar advocate Liliana Arango.

“The spirit of mutual care between people and nature runs deep in Tribugá, where the population numbers about 7,000. African-Colombian communities here are descended from formerly enslaved people who escaped Spanish rule and crossed the jungle to reach the coast. They were welcomed by the Indigenous Emberá, and today co-govern the region through a state-recognized model of local autonomy. …

“Says Camilo Morante, 25, the youngest guardian and the group’s legal representative … ‘Everyone in this community fishes, so we can’t tell anyone to stop using nets. … The most important thing is that we raise consciousness locally so that we understand the consequences of our actions.’ “

More at the Guardian, here.

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What the Drone Found

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , on July 29, 2025| 2 Comments »

Photo: Jesse Casana.
Jonathan Alperstein, a researcher, excavates land on an unexpectedly large ancient agricultural site in Michigan.

The other day, my neighbor surprised me with a bunch of aerial photos of my New Shoreham place that were taken by her nephew’s drone. As drones are used more and more in warfare, I sure like thinking about the harmless and often useful things drones do.

In today’s example, a mystery revealed by drone led to a long-term collaboration between Menominee tribal members and non-Indigenous archaeologists in Michigan.

Nell Greenfieldboyce reports at National Public Radio (NPR), “Archeologists studying a forested area in northern Michigan say they’ve uncovered what is likely the largest intact remains of an ancient Native American agricultural site in the eastern half of the United States.

“The researchers used a drone equipped with a laser instrument to fly over more than 300 acres, taking advantage of a brief period of time after the winter snow had melted away but before the trees had put out their leaves.

“This allowed the drone to precisely map subtle features on the surface of the exposed ground, revealing parallel rows of earthen mounds. This is what’s left of raised gardening beds that were used to grow crops like corn, beans, and squash by the ancestors of the Menominee Indian Tribe of Wisconsin, in the centuries before European colonizers arrived.

“The mounds appeared to continue on beyond the surveyed area, the researchers say, showing agriculture at a surprisingly vast scale in a place that wasn’t a major population center.

” ‘We haven’t even been able to locate any significant settlement sites in this region. There’s a couple of tiny little villages,’ says Jesse Casana, a professor of anthropology at Dartmouth College and one of the authors of a new report in Science. ‘So it’s really shocking in this case to see this level of investment in an agricultural system that would require really enormous amounts of human labor to make happen.’

“It’s especially odd given the relatively poor growing conditions that far north, especially during a period of colder temperatures known as the Little Ice Age, as well as the presence of wild rice right nearby, says Madeleine McLeester, a Dartmouth anthropologist who led the research team. …

” ‘This astonishing paper shows how much we’ve underestimated the geographic range, productivity, and sustainability of intensive Indigenous agriculture across North America,’ says Gayle Fritz, an anthropologist with Washington University in St. Louis.

” ‘The study is outstanding in many ways, one being the long-term collaboration between Menominee tribal members and non-Indigenous archaeologists,’ she says — with the other being the combination of new technologies plus ‘old-fashioned, ground-based excavation and survey.’

“While some people may envision historical Native Americans as mostly hunter-gatherers or nomads, ‘that is very incorrect,’ says Casana. ‘By the time colonists arrived, what they were encountering were a lot of pretty sedentary communities all over North America who were practicing various forms of farming,’ he says. …

“The site mapped in this new study is part of Anaem Omot, which means the ‘Dog’s Belly’ in Menominee. It’s an area along the Menominee River on the border between Michigan and Wisconsin, and is of great cultural and historical significance to the Menominee tribe.

“The region contains burial mounds and dance rings. It’s also known to have agricultural ridges, ranging from 4 to 12 inches in height, because previous work back in the 1990’s had mapped some of them.

” ‘These features are really difficult to see on the ground, even when you’re walking around, and they’re difficult to map,’ says McLeester.

“That difficulty, plus concerns about proposed mining activities in the area, is why the research team — which included the tribe’s historic preservation director, David Grignon — wanted to see if new technology could reveal more acres covered with the earthen agricultural rows.

“McLeester says they thought they’d find some more rows, but also expected that others would have eroded away since the last mapping effort. …

“But the drone surveys revealed that the field system was ten times bigger than what had been previously seen. ‘Just the scale, I would say, was unexpected,’ she says. …

“Says Casana, ‘One of the interesting things about this study is that it kind of shows us a preserved window of what was probably a much more extensive agricultural landscape.’ …

“Susan Kooiman of Southern Illinois University, an expert on the precontact Indigenous peoples of Eastern North America, says … ‘To find intact, ancient indigenous agricultural fields in any state, at any level, is very rare. …

” ‘The amount of work, and just how far these fields extend, is beyond anything that I think people suspected was going on this far north in eastern North America,’ she says. … ‘The question now is, what are they doing with all this stuff they were growing?’ “

More at NPR, here. (NPR is struggling since the massive federal cut. Help them out here if you can. No amount too small.)

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Why She Saves Seeds

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , on June 7, 2025| 2 Comments »

Photo: Dani Anguiano.
Haleigh Holgate, seed collection manager at Heritage Growers, inspects a seed in the San Luis national wildlife refuge complex on March 2025. Only the correct species will do.

I have blogged about seed banks in various countries (search on “seed bank”), and particularly about the global one that will keep seeds safe forever — if it stays frozen.

Today we learn what’s going on in California, where Heritage Growers is focused on local flora.

Dani Anguiano reported at the Guardian, “Deep in California’s agricultural heartland, Haleigh Holgate marched through the expansive wildflower-dotted plains of the San Luis national wildlife refuge complex in search of something precious.

“She surveyed the native grasses and flowering plants that painted the Central valley landscape in almost blinding swaths of yellow. Her objective on that sweltering spring day was to gather materials pivotal to California’s ambitious environmental agenda – seeds. …

“As a seed collection manager with the non-profit Heritage Growers native seed supplier, Holgate is tasked with traveling to the state’s wildlands to collect native seeds crucial for habitat restoration projects.

“The need has become particularly acute as California aims to conserve 30% of its land by 2030, with the governor pledging to restore ‘degraded landscapes’ and expand ‘nature-based solutions’ to fight the climate crisis. …

“But the rising demand for seeds far outpaces the available supply. California faces an ‘urgent and growing need’ to coordinate efforts to increase the availability of native seeds, according to a 2023 report from the California Native Plant Society. There simply isn’t enough wildland seed available to restore the land at the rate the state has set out to, Holgate said.

“Bridging the gap starts with people like Holgate, who spends five days a week, eight months of the year, traveling with colleagues to remote spots across the state collecting seeds – an endeavor that could shape California’s landscape for years.

“That fact is not lost on the 26-year-old. It’s something she tries to remind her team during long, grueling, hot days in the oilfields of Kern county or the San Joaquin valley. …

“Seeds play a vital role in landscape recovery. When fires move through forests, decimating native species and leaving the earth a charred sea of grey ash, or when farmlands come out of production, land managers use native seeds to help return the land to something closer to its original form. They have been an essential part of restoring the Klamath River after the largest dam removal project in US history, covering the banks of the ailing river in milkweeds that attract bees and other pollinators, and Lemmon’s needlegrass, which produces seeds that feed birds and small mammals.

“California has emphasized the importance of increasing native seed production to protect the state’s biodiversity. … Three-quarters of native vegetation in the state has been altered in the last 200 years, including more than 90% of California wetlands, much of them here in the Central valley.

“For the state to implement its plans, it needs a massive quantity of native seeds. … Enter Heritage Growers, the northern California-based non-profit founded by experts with the non-profit River Partners, which works to restore river corridors in the state and create wildlife habitat.

“The organization takes seed that Holgate and others collect and amplifies them at its Colusa farm, a 2,088-acre (845-hectare) property located an hour from the state capital. (The ethical harvesting rules Heritage Growers adhere to mean that they can take no more than 20% of seeds available the day of collection.) …

“Currently, the farm is producing more than 30,000 lbs of seeds each year and has more than 200 native plant varieties.

“The goal, general manager Pat Reynolds said, is to produce source-identified native seed and get as much of it out in the environment as possible to restore habitat at scale. …

“The benefit of restoring California’s wildlands extends far beyond the environment, said Austin Stevenot, a member of the Northern Sierra Mewuk Tribe and the director of tribal engagement for River Partners.

“ ‘It’s more than just work on the landscape, because you’re restoring places where people have been removed and by inviting those people back in these places we can have cultural restoration,’ Stevenot said. ‘Our languages, our cultures, are all tied to the landscape. … It’s giving the space back to people to freely do what we would like for the landscape and for our culture,’ he said. …

“The mission is worthwhile, Holgate said. The seeds she collects are expensive, but if they can be amplified and expanded, native seeds will become more abundant and restoration projects can happen more quickly.

“ ‘We can restore California faster,’ she said. … ‘I know that when I’m dreaming about a certain species, I should go check that population and see what’s happening. And normally there’s something going on where it’s like grasshoppers came in and ate all the seed, or the seed is ripe and ready, and I gotta call in a crew,’ she said. ‘I’ve really put my whole heart into this job.’ “

More at the Guardian, here. No firewall at this outstanding news site, but please support it.

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Shinnecock Kelp Farming

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , on April 5, 2025| 2 Comments »

Photo: Katie Orlinsky.
“On Long Island [in New York state] a group of Shinnecock women are nursing a bay back to health and, in the process, reclaiming traditions,” writes the magazine Nature.

A couple nonprofits and a few indigenous women are putting into practice one of my favorite principles: “Two and two and 50 make a million.” They are saving their small piece of the ocean from pollution and helping to bring back a better world.

Claudia Geib writes at Nature, “Danielle Hopson Begun stands waist-deep in the waveless expanse of Long Island’s Shinnecock Bay. She reaches into the water and lifts out a heavy rope, which drips with the amber and butterscotch-colored fronds of a marine plant called sugar kelp. It’s early June, and over the past eight months this kelp, anchored here, has grown from millimeter-long seedlings into foot-long golden ribbons, absorbing nitrogen and carbon from the water in the process.

“Tended by Hopson Begun and four other women from the Shinnecock Indian Nation, these lines are part of the first Indigenous-owned kelp farm on the U.S. East Coast. The kelp is harvested each year and sold locally as a natural fertilizer. But for these women, who have formed a nonprofit organization called Shinnecock Kelp Farmers, it has become something more than a crop: It is one piece of a multifront effort to reassert ancestral ties to the lands and waters their community has stewarded for thousands of years.

“Today, though, Shinnecock Bay is drastically different from the waters their ancestors once harvested wild kelp from. It’s more polluted, and the waters have grown warmer and more acidic. And almost every year since starting the farm in 2020, Hopson Begun and her partners have found their lines coated in an alga that suffocates and kills baby kelp. It significantly reduced part of their harvests — until now.

“To combat the algae, the kelp farmers have turned to cutting-edge science and technological solutions — supported by a grant from The Nature Conservancy and industry expertise from aquaculture nonprofit GreenWave — to supplement their long connection to the bay.

“ ‘There is this traditional knowledge that we have — of how the seaweed grows in the bay, and how to nurture it and prepare it for the work that it has to do,’ says Tela Troge, one of the group’s founders. If the Shinnecock Kelp Farmers can successfully grow kelp in the bay — weaving this ancestral understanding with modern science — the plant stands to help restore an ancient link to a cultural practice, while perhaps helping stem the rising tide of pollution that has invaded these waters since the arrival of colonialism.

“Among the challenges of farming kelp is simply finding the time. The kelp farmers and their friends and families — mothers, lawyers, counselors, activists — live and work in the communities of the greater Long Island and New York City area. Today about half of the nearly 1,600 enrolled members of the Shinnecock Indian Nation live on a 900-acre property on the eastern edge of Shinnecock Bay — a property surrounded by wealthy Hamptons enclaves and just a barrier island away from the Atlantic Ocean.

“Life here has always been intertwined with water. For at least 10,000 years, the ‘People of the Stony Shore’ gathered fish, mussels, scallops and clams, and cultivated oyster gardens along a vast stretch of land and waters on and around what is now called Long Island. Skilled seafarers, they relied on the Shinnecock and Peconic Bays — both local inlets — as well as the open sea. They hunted whales and exchanged white and purple wampumpeag beads they carved from the shells of hard clams, or quahog. These beads, known as wampum, remain an important touchstone for the Shinnecock, who continue to carve them as jewelry and cultural symbols.

“When Europeans arrived in the Northeast in the 1600s, they brought diseases that decimated the Shinnecock and their neighbors, razed forests to sow farms and claimed burial grounds to build towns. Over time the Shinnecock Indian Nation lost access to most of their historic hunting and fishing grounds, retaining a territory of about 1,000 acres, including the 900-acre reservation. With the spread of new people, the waters the Shinnecock relied on changed, too.

“Shinnecock Bay, in particular, suffered. The bay spans 9,000 acres, separated from the Atlantic Ocean to the south by a narrow barrier island. Warm and shallow, with an average depth of only about 6 feet, the bay’s connection to the sea has shifted over the centuries as storms alternately carved and filled in cuts through the island. A powerful 1938 hurricane created Shinnecock Inlet, a permanent opening to the Atlantic. Yet, still largely landlocked, the bay’s waters concentrated high levels of nitrogen, which seeped through the ground from cesspools and septic systems as homes and towns sprung up along its shores.

“By the 1980s, annual nitrogen-fed algal blooms turned the water ‘brown like a cup of coffee,’ says Stony Brook University researcher Ellen Pikitch, one of the co-founders of the university’s Shinnecock Bay Restoration Program. These ‘brown tides’ clouded the water, blocking sunlight from reaching eelgrass, killing fish and destroying shellfish habitat. …

“By the mid-2000s the marine life that the Shinnecock people had once relied on was nearly gone. Oyster reefs vanished. Between the 1970s and 2011, the commercial fishery for quahogs, the clams used for Shinnecock wampum and food, collapsed by more than 99%.

“At the same time, members of the Shinnecock Indian Nation had been fighting to assert their ancestral land and water claims. In 2019, an ocean-farming nonprofit called GreenWave reached out to members of the Nation. Inspired by a PBS documentary about the Shinnecock people’s long battle against Southampton’s development, one of the group’s staffers wanted to know if members of the Nation would consider working with GreenWave on a kelp farm.

“The proposal captured the interest of the future Shinnecock Kelp Farmers for multiple reasons. They knew that, historically, the Shinnecock harvested seaweed for home insulation, food and medicine, and that kelp could absorb nitrogen and carbon into its tissues. When harvested and dried for garden fertilizer and used in place of traditional fertilizers, kelp offered a way to pull excess nutrients from the bay. …

“The Sisters of St. Joseph, a Catholic religious order, joined the collaboration by providing water access from their community center along Shinnecock Bay. In 2020, five Shinnecock women — Danielle Hopson Begun, Donna Collins-Smith, Rebecca Genia, Tela Troge and her mother, Darlene Troge — took up waders and began the work of nursing kelp to life.”

There’s a lot more at Nature, here. No paywall. Great photos.

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Celebrating a Freed River

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , on March 10, 2025| 6 Comments »

Photo: San Francisco Chronicle/Hearst Newspapers/Getty Images.
Leaf, Lisa and Chaas Hillman look on as construction crews allow the Klamath River to run freely for the first time in nearly a century, near Hornbrook, California, in August. 

Everything done to Nature for human convenience has a downside. We have dammed up many rivers over the years for water reservoirs and electricity, flooding whole ecosystems. In the last couple of decades, though, we’ve been trying our best to restore what was lost, often with the guidance of indigenous tribes that always knew better.

Gabrielle Canon has one story at the Guardian.

“Explosions roared through the canyons lining the Klamath River [in 2024], signaling a new chapter for the region that hugs the Oregon-California border. In October, the removal of four hydroelectric dams built on the river was completed – the largest project of its kind in US history.

“The blast of the final dam was just the beginning. The work to restore the river, which winds 263 miles (423km) from the volcanic Cascade mountain range in Oregon to the Pacific coast in northern California, is now under way. …

” ‘It has been more successful than we ever imagined,’ said Ren Brownell, the spokesperson for the Klamath River Renewal Corporation, a nonprofit created to oversee and implement the removal. …

“The Klamath River was once an ecological powerhouse – the third-largest salmon-producing river in the American west. Its basin covered more than 9.4m acres (3.8m hectares) and its network of wetlands was the largest in the region. The ecosystem was home to millions of migrating birds. Tribes, including the Hoopa, Karuk, Klamath, Modoc and Yurok, thrived in this bountiful and beautiful watershed for thousands of years, with the river providing both sustenance and ritual.

“Over the last hundred years, these landscapes have been drastically altered.

“After the first dam began operating in 1918 – one of four that would eventually be forged in the lower Klamath to provide hydroelectric power to communities nearby – the course of the river was changed. The dams obstructed the migration of salmon and other native species, which help carry nutrients into the systems from the ocean, to cascading effects.

“They also held on to huge stores of sediment that would otherwise have flowed downriver, and created shallow reservoirs that quickly heated when the weather warmed. Increased water temperatures in the river allowed toxic algal blooms to thrive.

“In recent decades, the climate crisis has turned up the dial, deepening droughts and fueling a rise in catastrophic fire as the region grows ever hotter. The impacts only increased as more water was diverted to support the farming and ranching in the region, and more habitat was altered by mining and logging.

“Twenty-eight types of salmon and steelhead trout, seen as indicator species that represent the health of the ecosystems they live in, have been listed as threatened or endangered.

“As the Klamath ecosystem deteriorated, there was growing recognition that removing the dams would be a crucial first step in helping the region recover and build resilience in a warming world.

“But, faced with a strong resistance to change in local communities tucked around the reservoirs and a long history of difficult battles over water in the parched landscapes in the west, dam removal seemed all but impossible. The land for the dams was taken from tribes during the throes of colonization and development and more recently supported energy corporations that had shareholders to answer to.

“Then, in 2002, disaster struck. Algae flourished in the shallow warming waters that year, exacerbated by the dams and decisions from the US Bureau of Reclamation to divert vital flows to farms, leaving little for fish. The event killed 70,000 salmon and thousands of other species, resulting in one of the worst die-offs ever to occur in the US.

“The layers of fish floating belly-up sent an important signal of the horrors that could continue into the future if the dams remained. Forming a coalition, tribes up and down the Klamath launched a fierce campaign to educate the public, inform the shareholders of the companies that owned and operated the dams, and petition their boards. They protested and attended public hearings, and engaged with state and federal officials.

“It took decades of advocacy to convince PacifiCorp, a subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway Energy, to let go of the aging infrastructure straddling the Oregon-California border. But in the mid-aughts, assured by shifts in public opinion and incentivized by the steep costs to relicense the dams, the company agreed it was time to see them go.

“In November 2020, nearly 20 years after the die-off, an agreement was forged between a long list of stakeholders that included tribal and state governments and federal agencies. The Klamath River Renewal Corporation was created to oversee and implement the removal.

“The organization had to help bring residents near the reservoirs onboard, navigate dozens of species-management plans, and model how outdoor-recreation enthusiasts could continue to enjoy the river. Ranchers and fishers, environmentalists and farmers, and locals and visitors all had connections to the basin, and were eager to weigh in. …

“Brownell, who grew up along the riverbanks, was standing in the canyon as the blast of the first dam released flows and the river that had been held over the last hundred years found its way back to itself. …

“There were moments of trauma along the way. Over the 100 years the dams were standing, they had held back 15m cubic yards of sediment. When the dams were removed, the heavy dead organic matter had to run downriver, soaking up oxygen in the water. Extensive modeling had predicted a severe impact on aquatic life, but no one knew how bad it would get or how long it would take for the river to regain its health. Some models predicted the suffocating conditions could linger for up to a month.

“ ‘I was braced and prepared but it was still tremendously hard,’ said Brownell, recalling how the water, rid of oxygen, looked like oil as it cascaded through its banks. ‘You can easily compare a river’s health to an individual’s health,’ she said. ‘Often when someone is sick, they are going to get worse before they get better. … The whole time everyone was so excited because it felt like the start of something – I just felt sick,’ she said.

“Leaf Hillman, a Karuk tribal ceremonial leader who has dedicated decades to seeing this project come to fruition, helped keep hopes high with assurances that these were signs of healing.

“ ‘For me it was beautiful,’ he said, recalling how he felt even when the rushing waters became clouded by silt. ‘I could envision what it was going to look like – a restored river.’

“In the end, the river lacked oxygen for only two 24-hour periods, a far shorter time than scientists had feared.”

At the Guardian, here, you can read what happened next. No paywall.

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A Thriving Indigenous Language

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , on December 31, 2024| Leave a Comment »

Photo: Michael Fox/The World.
Rita Álvarez has been selling handicrafts and homemade jewelry on the streets of Asunción, Paraguay, for more than 40 years. She said that most of her customers in the city speak a combination of Guaraní with Spanish.

Most of our stories on indigenous languages are about struggles in the face of looming extinction.

It’s different for an indigenous language called Guaraní in Paraguay. Michael Fox reports on the phenomenon at Public Radio International’s The World.

“Tomas Zayas, who lives in the Paraguayan countryside, spoke only the Indigenous Guaraní language until he was 22 years old. 

“Later, he started to speak Spanish to be better prepared as a community leader. But Guaraní has remained his main language.

“ ‘For me, Guaraní is identity,’ said Zayas, a longtime campesino leader with the Alto Parana Small Farmers Association. ‘It’s happiness. It’s beauty. Because a joke in Spanish isn’t funny at all.’ 

“The Guaraní language, along with its many dialects, comes from the Indigenous Guaraní people who have lived in this region since long before the Spanish conquest. 

“Today, nearly 300,000 Indigenous Guaraní still live in Paraguay, Brazil, Bolivia and Argentina. In some of these countries, their language has influenced Portuguese and Spanish. 

“But in Paraguay, Guaraní is spoken as an official language alongside Spanish. Most Paraguayans speak Guaraní or a mixture of Spanish and Guaraní as their first language, whether they are of Indigenous descent or not. 

“Although there are several theories about how Paraguayans have been able to preserve their Indigenous language, one that stands out focuses on the Triple Alliance War of the 1860s.

“Most of Paraguay’s male population was killed after Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay invaded the country. ‘As a question of survival, the women who were left would only speak Guaraní,’ Zayas said. ‘They passed it on to their children.’ …

“Under the dictatorship of Alfredo Stroessner, which lasted from the 1950s until the late 1980s, Guaraní was banned in Paraguay. It has also been stigmatized as a language of the poor.

“But many Paraguayans say that Guaraní is a language of metaphor and beauty.

“Rita Álvarez has been selling handicrafts and homemade jewelry on the streets of Asunción, Paraguay’s capital, for more than 40 years. ‘For me, it’s the sweetest language,’ she said. ‘Because you can say with one word in Guaraní what you would need 10 to say in Spanish.’

“She said that most of her customers in the city speak a combination of Guaraní with Spanish, or jopara, which means ‘mixture’ in Guaraní. …

“Blanca Estela González is a retired elementary schoolteacher who now teaches Guaraní at IDIPAR Language School in Asunción.

“Gonzalez said that foreigners often pick up Guaraní rather quickly, because, unlike Spanish, there are only three types of verb conjugations: past, present and future. And Gonzalez said the language has received a boost in recent decades.

“ ‘Now, it’s an official language,’ she said. ‘And half of the lessons at the public schools are taught in Guaraní.’ ” More at The World, here.

Happy New Year to all blog friends, whatever language you speak. Any plans for celebrating?

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Bolivia’s Indigenous Women Heal a Lake

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , on October 14, 2024| 7 Comments »

Photo: Claudia Morales.
The Guardian reports from Bolivia: “The founders of Team Uru Uru found that totora reeds – which have long been used by their Indigenous community to build houses, boats and even floating islands – can absorb heavy metals.”

“One and two and 50 make a million.”

I still believe in that line from the Pete Seeger folk song about righting wrongs. Today I want to point out that, when it comes to protecting the environment, it’s often indigenous people who see what’s going wrong and decide to do something about it.

Sarah Johnson writes at the Guardian, “Looking out over Lake Uru Uru in the Bolivian highlands, it is hard to imagine that it once supported thousands of people, and was a sanctuary for wildlife, including 76 species of birds.

“Plastic waste now stretches as far as the eye can see, the water is tinged black or brown, and the stench is overwhelming.

“But in among the filth that chokes the water are submerged rafts that hold thousands of native reeds called totora – a bulrush that can grow to 6 metres [~20 feet] and was used to make Lake Titicaca’s famous floating islands. This aquatic plant, Schoenoplectus californicus, has been shown to be very effective at absorbing heavy metals and contaminants.

“Made of recycled plastic collected from the lake, the rafts were placed there by the Uru Uru Team, a group of about 50 Indigenous people.

“For years, lakeside communities have faced pollution from the mining industry, and from the waste of the nearby city of Oruro. The pollution also threatens flora and fauna in the lake, an internationally recognized wetland under the Ramsar convention.

“ ‘It’s very difficult to live and work in these conditions,’ says Dayana Blanco, 25, an Aymara woman who is co-founder of the Uru Uru Team and a Fulbright fellow studying peace-building at the University of Massachusetts in the US.

“ ‘The smell here is very strong and affects our health. When the sun rises and sets, it is intolerable. I had stomach ache from it once. Who knows what illnesses we could get in the future?’

“People living around the lake … used it for drinking water, fished in it, irrigated their crops with it and watered their cattle, says Blanco. This is no longer possible and many of the community have been forced to migrate.

“The lake used to be home to about 120,000 flamingos but only half that number remain. Years of damage to the lake’s fragile ecosystem has pushed wildlife into a small area of unspoiled habitat.

“Changing temperatures and rain patterns have seen Lake Uru Uru’s shoreline recede dramatically over recent years and, as Oruro city has grown, people have built houses in what were protected areas. Bolivia’s other highland lakes, all protected under Ramsar, face similar threats. …

‘Indigenous people know that if a lake dies, it’s as if the soul of a people dies,’ says Tatiana Blanco, 30, Dayana’s sister and in the Uru Uru Team.

“ ‘With colonialism and globalization, new generations have lost their way,’ she says. ‘They’ve forgotten where they’ve come from and that we are not superior to animals, plants, mountains, lakes and rivers. It is because of this lack of respect and care for nature and mother Earth that there’s an imbalance.’

“Fed up with the ever-increasing pollution, the sisters and other young women formed the Uru Uru Team in 2019.

“The first step was to clean the water. Their forebears used totora and so they decided to do the same. As well as being used to build floating platforms and houses, totora is important for treating sewage and mining wastewater as it traps minerals in its roots, leaves and stems.

“They transplanted about 600 young totora from a place where they grow in abundance and placed them on top of rafts made out of plastic bottles and a grid of sticks.

“ ‘We didn’t think the totora would grow, because the pollution is so strong. The water has a lot of heavy minerals,’ says Dayana. ‘But we’ve seen the plants remediating nature little by little and having an effect.’

“The team commissioned laboratory tests from Juan Misael Saracho University in Tarija, which found that areas in the lake with totora had reduced pollution by 30%. Flamingos and other birds have begun to return.

“The Uru Uru Team has planted about 3,000 totora plants so far. … The team’s aim is to plant 4,000 totora a year and completely clean up the lake to bring back the birds and allow the community to grow vegetables again.

“A 2023 Future Rising fellow, she is writing a graphic novel that tells the Uru Uru Team’s story from the perspective of a lake flamingo. The group has a Facebook page and international organizations, such as the United Nations children’s agency, Unicef, have provided technical support.

“Last year, the Uru Uru Team won the UN Development Programme’s 14th Equator prize, which celebrates initiatives by Indigenous peoples and other communities in adapting to and mitigating the climate crisis.”

Read more at the Guardian, here. No paywall but donations encouraged.

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Indigenous Teens’ Summer

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , on September 24, 2024| 1 Comment »

Photo: Alex V. Cipolle.
University of Minnesota architecture professor Jessica Garcia Fritz teaches Indigenous Design Camp campers cardboard scoring techniques on day one.

It seems like every year, the first question on the first day of school is, “What did you do over the summer?” This past summer, if you were an indigenous teen in the Twin Cities of Minnesota, you might have had some new experiences to report.

In July, Alex V. Cipolle at Minnesota Public Radio wrote about an unusual class at the Dunwoody College of Technology.

“A group of teens cuts cardboard with X-ACTO Knives. They will soon shape this cardboard into architectural models of their bedrooms. …

“ ‘It’s my first time doing something in architectural-related study,’ says Dominic Stewart of Burnsville.

“ ‘I’m excited to get that hands-on experience,’ says Carsyn Johnson of Elk River.

“They are here for the weeklong Indigenous Design Camp, the first camp of its kind in the U.S. The goal is to teach Indigenous teens about career options in architecture and design, a field where Native Americans are underrepresented.

“Two of the founders of the new camp — architects and friends Mike Laverdure and Sam Olbekson — estimate that there are only about 30 Indigenous architects total in the U.S.

“Laverdure is an enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa and a partner at DSGW Architects as well as the president of First American Design Studio. Olbekson is a citizen of the White Earth Nation and founded the firm Full Circle Indigenous Planning and Design. They are the only two practicing Native architects in Minnesota. 

“ ‘The need for creating a space for kids to become designers, Indigenous designers, is great,’ says Laverdure, who has wanted to start this camp for years. ‘Representation matters for these kids to see us as architects and designers. A lot of us who grew up in reservations or urban Indigenous communities only see a few career types.’ …

“The campers are Indigenous teens ages 14-18 from the metro area. They will be constructing architectural models all week. Campers will also tour the University of Minnesota School of Architecture and local architecture firms.

“They will also visit the American Indian Cultural Corridor on Franklin Avenue, where both Laverdure and Olbekson have designed buildings, as well as another Olbekson project, the recently completed expansion of the Red Lake Nation College downtown.

“Olbekson says, ‘to actually go and see [the buildings] and see the impact that they’re having on the community, not only as individual buildings, but how they’re forming an identity for the American Indian Cultural Corridor and how these projects are supporting education, economic development, community building, cultural development, and youth and elder spaces, I think is going to be a great way for them to understand the impact of what design, urban design, interiors, landscape, can have on creating a healthy, Indigenous urban community.’

“The camp began [with] a welcome from Laverdure, Olbekson and University of Minnesota assistant architecture professor Jessica Garcia Fritz, a citizen of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe. Fritz also helped start the camp.

“ ‘If you think about your home reservations, or your urban communities, you think about all the buildings that are there,’ Laverdure told the class, ‘Ninety-nine percent of all the buildings built that Indigenous people sit in are not designed by indigenous designers. … When you have Indigenous designers be a part of that process, what happens is that those buildings have a special kind of connection to the communities and that makes those buildings extra special.’

“Next came a presentation on Indigenous architecture, past and present, by Tammy Eagle Bull, who did a video call from her home in Arizona. Eagle Bull is a member of the Oglala Lakota Nation of Pine Ridge, South Dakota. In 1994, she became the first Native woman in the U.S. to become a licensed architect. …

“For the remainder of the first day of camp, Jessica Garcia Fritz guided campers in a design exercise to create their sleep space or bedroom.

“First, they taped 10 by 10-foot squares on the classroom floor to help them visualize the scale. Then they sketched blueprints of their bedrooms. Finally, they cut and scored cardboard to build shoebox-size models. …

“ ‘One of the things Tammy Eagle Bull had said this morning was, “I wish that a camp like this had existed when I was young.” I think that’s the sentiment among many of us,’ Garcia Fritz says. …

“Garcia Fritz, Laverdure and Olbekson hope this camp is the first of many. One of the goals is to expand the camp to greater Minnesota.

“ ‘Right now, it’s in the Twin Cities, but there are so many Indigenous communities regionally, up north and even in other states that could really benefit from this,’ Olbekson says. 

“ ‘Long term, we want to create a space where five to 10 years from now, we’ve got 10, 15, 20, Native designers that are out there and being a force for change,’ Laverdure says.”

More at MPR News, here.

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The Diné and the Churro Sheep

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , on September 13, 2024| 3 Comments »

Photo: Jean Ogden via Wikimedia.
Navajo Churro sheep.

There’s a story at National Public Radio about the special relationship between a kind of sheep and the Navajo people, or Diné. Ayesha Rascoe hosts the NPR program, which you can listen here, if you prefer.

“Ayesha Rascoe: For centuries, the lives of Navajo people have been intertwined with livestock — specifically, one particular breed of sheep they’ve relied on for meat and wool. The tribe is well known for weaving the wool of Churro sheep into colorful clothing and tapestries. Those weavings can fetch thousands of dollars from collectors, but they have far more than monetary value. Raising Churro sheep and weaving their wool is an important way Navajo people pass cultural knowledge from generation to generation. KSJD’s Chris Clements visited a Navajo Churro sheep celebration.

“Chris Clements: Inside a crowded farmhouse on the edge of the Navajo Nation, weavers are demonstrating how to spin, dye and treat wool from Churro sheep, which they consider sacred.

“Roy Kady: Hello. My name is Roy Kady. I am from Goat Springs, Ariz.

“Clements: Kady, who’s in his 60s, is standing outside, wearing an ornate turquoise necklace, earrings, bracelets, and a white hat. He’s considered a master weaver, part of centuries of Navajo citizens who’ve carried on traditional beliefs that date back to the 1500s when Churro sheep arrived with early Spanish colonists.

“Kady: I’m filling these big shoes that my mother wore as an agropastoralist.

“Clements: Tyrrell Tapaha is Kady’s student and his grandson, who’s here at the event. …

“Tyrrell Tapaha: There’s always been weaving in my life, whether it be his work, my grandma’s work, or my great-grandma’s work. ..

“Kady: Tyrrell [says] I want to weave a human form. Do you have any ideas how I could do that? And so I just share with him. …

“Clements: Tapaha has been learning the tricks of the trade since he was very young. When he was only 8, Kady had him teach a class on the art of finger weaving at a nearby chapterhouse. … Tapaha knows that Kady’s teachings will live on with him.

“Tapaha: At least it’ll last my lifetime, you know? And I kind of hear that in how Roy talks about his contribution to the space is like him being an older person now and kind of seeing that handed off.

“Clements: After the morning’s presentations, it’s time for lunch. The weavers roast mutton, a Churro sheep they slaughtered earlier in the day. Participants of the sheep celebration gather around the grill, watching the fire hiss and sputter as the mutton cooks. It’s common for every part of the animal to be used. Nothing, not even its hooves goes to waste.

“In 1863, the U.S. military forced Navajo people to leave their ancestral homelands and relocate to an internment camp. It’s known as the Long Walk. … It almost led to the extinction of the Churro sheep.

“Navajo people were allowed to return home four years later. Some tribal members who’d managed to escape the Long Walk, kept some Churro alive. And today, thousands of Churro sheep live on or near the Navajo Nation.”

Read more about the sheep and the passing along of Diné culture at NPR, here.

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Newport’s ‘Elephant’ Migration

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , on September 6, 2024| 2 Comments »

Photo: Corey Favino/Elephant Family USA/Newport Restoration Foundation.
The Great Elephant Migration installation outside Rough Point mansion in Newport, Rhode Island. The elephants are made by indigenous people from an invasive plant.

Here’s a new way to reach audiences with a message about the importance of conservation: a giant “elephant” exhibit in a beautiful seaside setting that tourists visit anyway.

At Forbes magazine, Chadd Scott begins the story by talking about India.

“India has experienced a remarkable population explosion over the past 40 years. Several actually. One is well known. India’s human population has more than doubled since 1980. … Lesser known, and even more extraordinary in light of the country’s surging human population, has been a doubling of its elephant population over that same period, from a bottom-out of around 15,000 individuals to nearly 30,000 today. Populations of Asiatic lions, tigers, and the greater one-horned rhinoceros are also increasing across the country.

“India offers a remarkable example for how humans and wildlife, even the largest of wildlife, can coexist in an ever-developing world. Sharing that message with the world is the mission of the Great Elephant Migration which debuted 100 life-sized Asian elephants in Newport, RI on July 1.

“The elephants — each based on a real, wild elephant from the Nilgiri Hills known by name and personality living alongside people in their coffee and tea plantations — were made by members of the Coexistence Collective, a group of 200 Indigenous artisans from the Nilgiri Biosphere Reserve. 

“The herd was produced from the Lantana camara, a toxic, invasive plant overtaking the Indian forest, pushing elephants and other wildlife out and into closer proximity to humans, with greater potential for conflict. …

“ ‘It’s a conservation miracle; it’s contrary to what’s happening everywhere else in the world and it’s definitely owed to an incredibly beautiful perspective on nature and our place within nature,’ Ruth Ganesh, trustee, Elephant Family USA, co-organizer of the Newport presentation along with Art&Newport, and co-founder of the Coexistence Collective, said at The Great Elephant Migration’s opening at Rough Point. ‘That’s what we hope the herd will spread, this beautiful perspective of coexistence and seeing other species as our biological kin.’

“The elephants, and the Indians, prove conservation is as much a mindset as a management plan.

“ ‘That culture of being able to live with animals is the most important thing, more than any of the natural variables about habitat and prey, and all of that,’ Asian elephant expert and co-founder of the Real Elephant Collective in India, Tarsh Thekaekara, told Forbes.com. The Great Elephant Migration exhibition and tour is the brainchild of he and Ganesh. His research in India has focused on human-elephant coexistence. ‘Animals will survive in human dominated landscapes if people tolerate them. That is the bottom line.’ …

” ‘The people who made the elephants [practice] kind of a fusion of Hinduism and animism,’ Ganesh told Forbes.com. Animism attributes a soul and living spirit to animals, rivers, mountains, plants, and other objects often considered inanimate. ‘There’s a spiritual tapestry that underpins the answer to the question why is India succeeding in this way despite so many challenges? It’s the spirituality. It’s this perspective.’ …

“Research published this year by scientists at Colorado State University indicates that elephants have names for each other. …

“Research from 2022 demonstrates the numerous ways elephants grieve their dead and participate in post-death rituals like burial, same as humans. They communicate. Feel pain. Play. Look out for each other. …

“Seeing animals as beautiful people, seeing mountains as deities and rivers as our veins, that it’s a beautiful perspective,’ Ganesh added. …

“ ‘Not just India, in lots of traditional cultures there wasn’t a decimation of wildlife. If you look at conservation in most of the First World, it happened because there was a systematic decimation of all the wildlife,’ Thekaekara explains. ‘When settlers arrived on the North American continent, they wiped out most animals. So, then you had nothing, and you had to conserve.’ …

” ‘Set aside land for nature because you assume people cannot coexist with nature — that model of conservation was inherently separationist.’ …

“Indigenous people the world over have lived more or less harmoniously with wildlife for millennia. That has not been the case with Europeans and their descendants. …

“ ‘If people stopped killing, [animals are] going to come back,’ Thekaekara said. … ‘In coffee and tea plantations, the core of the local economy isn’t upset by the elephants. They don’t eat the coffee or tea, so people’s livelihoods are not affected. It’s only a minor adjustment to your lifestyle to be able to coexist.’ ”

More at Forbes, here. No paywall for your first articles.

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Skatepark for the Navajo Nation

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , on September 1, 2024| Leave a Comment »

Photo: Navajo-Hopi News.
Two Gray Hills Skatepark in Newcomb, New Mexico.

The forced assimilation of indigenous children into colonist culture damaged the children, the relatives of the children, and the grown children’s descendants. In today’s story, we learn how one descendant was surprised to discover she was Navajo and looked for a way to help her long-lost community.

Roman Stubbs writes at the Washington Post, “The wind rolled off the Chuska Mountains and along the desert floor, whipping red dust and tumbleweed across the pavement of Two Grey Hills Skatepark. It was a pale Sunday morning in May, and Amy Denet Deal stood on a ledge, tying a crimson bandanna around her silver braids and smiling as she watched the children swerve down ramps in the middle of the storm.

“ ‘Amy!’ ” a young boy yelled, excited to greet the woman who helped bring the skatepark to this remote northwest corner of the Navajo Nation.

“ ‘Hi, honey. How you doing?’ she replied. ‘You’ve grown a foot since I last saw you!’

“Denet Deal, 59, considered herself younger than the boy in Diné (Navajo) years. She had reconnected with the tribe only five years earlier after a lifetime of displacement, giving up most of her belongings and a ­lofty salary as a corporate sports fashion executive in Los Angeles to move to New Mexico.

“The pandemic opened her eyes to the inequities children on the reservation face, including high rates of diabetes, mental health issues and suicide. Navajo Nation is roughly the size of West Virginia — 16 million acres stretching across Arizona, New Mexico and Utah — yet there are few opportunities for kids to play sports, with many remote areas lacking outdoor recreation and athletic facilities.

“She searched for solutions to give back and finally landed on one: Why not a skatepark?

“It took years of fundraising, with plenty of setbacks, but more than a year after it opened, she could still point to the benefits the park was bringing to her community. The kids from a nearby housing project came for free clinics held every weekend. Parents and grandparents parked their trucks near the concrete to watch, sharing food with one another in their camping chairs as the breeze stung their faces.

‘If I talk to any skateboarder, the first thing they’ll always tell me is, “Skateboarding saved my life,” ‘ Denet Deal said. …

“And so here she was again, making the four-hour drive from Sante Fe to her ancestral homeland, because visits were also helping her with the trauma of her past.

“ ‘The plus side of this is I come from displacement and a strange start in the world,’ Denet Deal said. ‘It’s really helping me heal through that work.’

“Denet Deal didn’t visit the Navajo Nation until she was in her late 30s. Her mother, Joanne, had been forced into a boarding school in Farmington, N.M., in the early 1950s. Joanne’s family had no horse or car to visit her for years. ‘She suffered all kinds of abuse and forced assimilation,’ Denet Deal said.

“Through the government’s Indian Relocation Act, Joanne left the reservation with a one-way bus ticket to Cleveland in her late teens. She got pregnant with Amy. Like thousands of other Native children in the 1960s, Amy was placed into adoption and taken in by a Catholic charity. …

“ ‘I was put up for adoption without anybody contacting my birth family, no connection to the tribe,’ Denet Deal said. ‘I grew up completely displaced from my community. I was the only Brown person in rural Indiana.’ …

“She found something to hold on to when she learned how to use a sewing machine as a child. She started making all of her own clothes and threw herself into fashion. Denet Deal developed into a rising star in the active sportswear space in the early 1990s; at 26, she was creating apparel at Reebok and by 30 she took over as design director at Puma. …

“For years, she searched for her mother. She hired a private investigator and scoured the internet. She numbed the emptiness with alcohol and work.

“In 1998, she had a breakthrough. Denet Deal convinced the Indiana Department of Health to release her record of adoption and was given Joanne’s address and phone number. She wrote Joanne a letter and received a letter back. Denet Deal visited her mother for the first time in Ohio, and together they eventually traveled to the Navajo Nation to meet other family.

“ ‘It wasn’t warm and fuzzy,’ she said. … ‘It brought back a lot of things for my mom that were hard.’ …

“Some locals rejected her because she didn’t grow up in the Navajo Nation. She was still getting to know many of her family members, and her presence could trigger reminders of a painful history for them. …

“The pandemic offered Denet Deal a chance to give back what she learned in another life. She used her past skills as a wealth generator for major corporations to help raise more than $1 million in medical supplies, food and support for a domestic violence shelter. But she wanted to do more, having seen up close the problems for children on the reservation.

“ ‘I just thought a skatepark was a really great thing to have for them.’ “

At the Post, here, you can read about the people who helped make it happen.

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37,000 Invasive Species

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on July 31, 2024| 8 Comments »

Photo: MassAudubon.
The invasive multiflora rose forms dense thickets in fields and field edges, crowding out other species.

The problem with invasive species that aren’t native to a region is that they crowd out the local species, and that has a snowball effect. We colonists crowded out indigenous people, which among other things, undermined wisdom about protecting nature. In the plant world, local pollinators don’t get what they need to pollinate. The list goes on.

Frank Carini reports at ecoRINews on how invaders hurt both the environment and the economy: “Invasive Asian shore crabs are outcompeting young lobsters. Invasive snake worms and hammerhead worms are burying themselves deeper into southern New England, where the former consumes the top layer of soil and dead leaves where the seeds of plants germinate, and the latter is toxic and transmits harmful parasites to humans and animals.

“Invasive multiflora rose and oriental bittersweet have long been embedded in the region, crowding out native vegetation and strangling trees. …

“Last summer, the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) for the United Nations issued a global assessment providing clear evidence of this growing threat.

“In a paper recently published in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution, the authors of last year’s assessment — 88 experts representing 101 organizations from 47 countries — outline the main findings from that report and echo the need for urgent action.

“Laura Meyerson, a University of Rhode Island professor of invasion science and habitat restoration ecology and editor-in-chief of the journal Biological Invasions, is a contributing lead author on the IPBES assessment and a lead author on the recent paper. …

“She said, ‘Our research produced overwhelming and unequivocal evidence that the negative impacts of biological invasions far outweigh any benefits and that those who depend most on nature suffer the worst consequences.’

“The researchers documented some 37,000 invasive species that had been introduced by people to areas around the world. Of those, about 3,500 species were considered harmful invaders that negatively affect nature and people’s quality of life. 

“The number of invasive species — major drivers of global biodiversity loss, according to Meyerson — are expected to continue to grow. Some 200 new species are expected to be added annually by human activities in regions that have not recorded such invaders before, according to the June 3 paper. And established invasives will continue to expand their ranges, spreading into new countries and choking out native species.

“The paper also noted that simple extrapolations from current impacts from invasive species are likely to underestimate the level of future impacts, and drivers of biodiversity loss, such as the climate crisis, are acting in concert and those interactions are increasing biological invasions. …

“ ‘It’s critically important that we all do our part to reverse current trends,’ Meyerson said. ‘The public can make sure that the plants they are buying for their gardens are native species. Pet owners should not release animals, like rabbits or Burmese pythons, that are no longer wanted into the wild.’

“For example, red-eared sliders — native to the Southeast, the south-central United States, and northern Mexico — are the most popular pet turtle in the United States and available at pet shops around the world. But this turtle species lives for about 30 years, so they are often released where they don’t belong after pet owners tire of them. As a result, they are considered one of the world’s 100 most invasive species.

“Meyerson is also the senior author on a global study that explored the extent of biological invasions on lands owned or managed by Indigenous people. The study was published in Nature Sustainability in late May.

“The spread of animal and plant species into new regions by humans is increasing rapidly worldwide, with thousands of species now present in regions outside their native range. The research team, which included scientists from Australia, Austria, Germany, Hungary, and the United States, investigated the spread of invasive species to lands managed by Indigenous people and found significantly fewer invaders in those areas compared with other natural areas.

“ ‘This was a really important finding because even after controlling for the remoteness and accessibility of Indigenous peoples’ lands and how land is used, in general, the numbers of invasive species are lower, as is biodiversity loss,’ Meyerson said. …

“Researchers analyzed millions of available data points from around the globe on the distribution of non-native plant and animal species. On average, there were 30% fewer non-native species on Indigenous lands. The study suggested the enormous difference is primarily due to sustainable land use, a higher proportion of forests, and lower accessibility to humans.

“Indigenous people represent ethnic groups that settled in regions long before the arrival of Europeans, such as Native Americans, the Aborigines of Australia, and the Sami in Scandinavia. About 28% of the land surface around the globe is inhabited by Indigenous people. Most of these areas are in remote regions and many have enormous importance for conservation of biodiversity such as the Amazon basin and wilderness areas in the Arctic.”

More at ecoRI News, here. No firewall. Donations solicited.

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Nine Ways Tribes Protect Nature

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , on July 1, 2024| 5 Comments »

Photo: Curtis Quam via Civil Eats.
According to Civil Eats, “In the face of climate change and persistent droughts, a growing number of people from Zuni Pueblo in New Mexico and elsewhere are adopting the traditional farming practice.”

Some days, reading the news, I just feel fed up with what capitalism has done to the human race — not to mention the planet. I don’t know how to get out of my own role in this mess, but if nothing else, I can at least learn a little about indigenous ways that are different.

Samuel Gilbert describes nine practices at the Washington Post: Zuni waffle gardens, “good fire,” ancient Irrigation, the original carbon capture, dryland farming, restoring salmon runs, resilient seeds, Swinomish clam gardens, and climate-smart design.

“Since the first Earth Day in 1970,” Gilbert writes, “the world has experienced profound ecological changes. Wildlife populations have decreased by 69 percent, the result of habitat loss caused by rapid industrialization and changing temperatures. 2023 was the hottest year on record. …

“Jim Enote, 66, has been planting a traditional Zuni waffle garden (or hek’ko:we in the Zuni language) since before he could walk.

“ ‘My grandma said I started planting when I was an infant tied to a cradleboard,’ said Enote, who grew up on the water-scarce Zuni Pueblo on the southeastern edge of the Colorado plateau. ‘She put seeds in my baby hands, and I dropped seeds into a hole.’

“Enote has continued this ancient garden design, creating rows of sunken squares surrounded by adobe walls that catch and hold water like pools of syrup in a massive earthen waffle. The sustainable design protects crops from wind, reduces erosion and conserves water. …

“Before European settlers traveled to the American West, Indigenous people managed the landscape of northern California with ‘cultural burns’ to improve soil quality, spur the growth of particular plants, and create a ‘healthy and resilient landscape,’ according to the National Park Service.

“ ‘The Karuk have developed a relationship with fire over the millennia to maintain and steward a balanced ecosystem,’ said Bill Tripp, director of natural resources and environmental policy for the Karuk Tribe. ‘A good portion of the resources that we depend on, in the natural environment, are dependent on fire.’

“But in the mid-19th century, Indigenous burning was outlawed. Not only did that cause the Karuk to lose a vital part of their culture, but also, it invited potentially worse wildfires. The burns had reduced the amount of fuel accidental fires feed on. …

“Prescribed burning has returned as state and federal agencies recognize the importance of fire in managing forests. In 2022, California passed legislation affirming the right to cultural fire and is considering another bill (backed by the Karuk Tribe) to reduce the barriers to cultural burns on tribal lands. …

“In New Mexico, there are 700 functioning acequias, centuries-old community irrigation systems that have helped the parched state build water resilience. These acequias — a design from North African, Spanish and Indigenous traditions — were established during the 1600s. … Unlike large-scale irrigation systems, water seepage from unlined acequias helps replenish the water table and reduce aridification by adding water to the landscape. The earthen ditches mimic seasonal streams and expand riparian habitats for numerous native species.

“ ‘It’s a very good and sustainable system to take water from one source and put it into the community,’ said Jorge Garcia, executive director of the Center for Social Sustainable Systems and secretary of the South Valley Regional Association of Acequias. … ‘We need to maintain those knowledge systems, especially if we continue through dry years.’ …

“U.S. forests are carbon sinks, sequestering up to 10 percent of nationwide CO2 emissions. Indigenous forestry can play a critical role in reducing global warming by restoring biodiversity and health to these ecosystems, including the management of culturally significant plants, animals and fungi that contribute to healthier soil.

“ ‘We know that most of the carbon in the forest is stored in the soil, and healthy soil depends on diversity,’ said Stephanie Gutierrez, a member of the San Carlos Apache Tribe and the forests and community program director for Ecotrust. …

“Yet tribal forestry remains severely underfunded and underutilized on public lands. Indigenous Hawaiians are reintroducing ancient food forests once destroyed by overgrazing, logging and commercial agriculture. These biodiverse edible forests increase food security and build nutrient-dense soils that sequester carbon. …

“The Hopi nation in Arizona receives an average of 10 inches of rain per year — a third of what crop scientists say is necessary to grow corn successfully. Yet Hopi farmers have been cultivating corn and other traditional crops without irrigation for millennia, relying on traditional ecological knowledge rooted in life in the high desert.

“ ‘I like to call traditional ecological knowledge the things my grandfather taught me,’ said Michael Kotutwa Johnson, a Hopi dryland farmer and academic. Hopi farming practices include passive rainwater harvesting, myriad techniques to retain soil moisture, and a reliance on traditional seed varieties superbly adapted to the desert.

“ ‘The fact we are able to raise crops such as maize with only 6 to 10 inches of precipitation as opposed to the standard 33 inches of precipitation is outstanding,’ Johnson said.”

Learn about the other techniques at the Post, here.

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Indigenous Veterans

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on May 27, 2024| 2 Comments »

Photo: Anna Mulrine Grobe/The Christian Science Monitor.
US veteran Bernadine Tyler stands at a memorial to Navajo code talkers on the Navajo Nation, in Window Rock, Arizona.

On this Memorial Day, let’s take a look at the indigenous people who have served in our military.

Anna Mulrine Grobe  writes at the Christian Science Monitor, “In her work with U.S. military veterans here on the Navajo Nation, Bernadine Tyler routinely logs 1,200 miles a month driving across an area the size of West Virginia, over high windswept plains dotted with rust-red mesas.

“Roughly one-third of homes here on America’s largest reservation don’t have electricity or running water, so Ms. Tyler, herself a member of the Navajo Nation and an Army veteran, brings services directly to her fellow vets, most of whom are over the age of 65. 

“She points out the occasional gas station and folks walking on the dusty shoulders of pot-holed roads. There’s a bus, ‘but it’s very unreliable and only runs one route,’ says Ms. Tyler, program lead for the Diné Naazbaa Partnership (DNP), which serves the Navajo Nation and receives funding from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. …

“For vets without transport or refrigerators, she carries bags of ice to fill the convenience store coolers that many use to chill their food and medications. She enlists volunteers, including her sons, to help haul water and chop wood for warmth in the winter. 

“The particular challenges of accessing this care came to light during the COVID-19 pandemic, when Native American veterans living in small multigenerational homes without running water on closed tribal lands died at significantly higher rates than other former service members. The VA subsequently pledged to better serve America’s Native American community. 

“In 2020, the VA created the first advisory committee for Native American veterans. It held its first meeting in 2022 and began issuing its recommendations last year. Though they aren’t binding, the suggestions of some committees have an acceptance rate of 90%, according to the agency. …

“With this year’s 2024 defense spending bill, lawmakers also granted the Native American Indian Veterans a congressional charter, making it the first-ever group dedicated to the interests of Indigenous people in the U.S. to get the status. It is a development that took the NAIV nearly 20 years of lobbying to achieve. With the charter, NAIV can testify before Congress and, ideally, more easily help the VA process benefits claims. 

“The hope is that these developments will not only improve care, but also foment faith that, even after decades of neglect, change is possible – particularly among the 57% of Native American veterans who say their top reason for joining the military was a desire to serve their country. 

“Native American veterans are among America’s most patriotic, says Adam Pritchard, a researcher at Syracuse University’s Institute for Veterans and Military Families. ‘It’s a very important step in the right direction to acknowledge their history of the service and their ongoing needs.’ 

“ ‘Our history has much mistrust,’ Ms. Tyler says. Good-faith efforts to fix a long-broken system and build it up, she adds, can help heal old wounds, too. 

“In 1943, Thomas Begay joined the U.S. Marines. He was 16 or 17 years old – he’s not sure which. … He wanted to be an aerial gunner, Mr. Begay told the recruiter. [The recruiter sent him] to become a code talker. While he and his fellow troops practiced the top-secret tribal language with a twist, their basic training was more ad hoc than the Marine norm. 

“ ‘They got us a rubber boat, and they just dumped us way out in the ocean and said … “Learn how to get to shore,” ‘ he recalled in a 2013 discussion cataloged by the National Archives.

“Months later, after landing at Iwo Jima in February 1945, Mr. Begay and his fellow code talkers were hailed as instrumental in taking the island – and later with helping to win the war. Their code was never broken. …

“Today, Mr. Begay is living in a house where bad plumbing has damaged the floors and ceiling. ‘It’s not safe for him,’ says Karen Shirley, community coordinator for DNP, which is helping him apply for VA grants to fix up his home, or get Mr. Begay a new one. 

“ ‘How can we not support this great warrior who helped save this country, and just get him the housing he needs?’ Ms. Tyler says.”

More at the Monitor, here. No paywall. Subscriptions are reasonable.

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