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MR. TIM JOHNSON: Hello, everyone. 00:00:02 How about this weather? I think we
couldn't avoid this good weather with our Mohawk elder, Tom Porter, this morning casting
out love and greetings and thankfulness in all directions. It was a great program this
morning, and welcome to this program, and welcome to our festival, the Living Earth
Festival. As you know from having simply walked to
this location, that there are all kinds of things going on around the building on every,
single floor, all sorts of activities happening today and through tomorrow. So after this
program we invite you to look around some more and enjoy our other programs.
The Museum has been active for several years now, going back to 2007
when we established the Mother Earth event that was done in concert with Al Gore's Live
Earth global concerts, and since that time, we've made sure that we've done an annual
program like this that really focuses on issues of
sustainability as well as thankfulness with respect to what the earth provides for our
ability to live her. The protection and sustainability of our environment
is undoubtedly the most critical challenge of our time. There are no easy answers, and
viable solutions require collaboration, multiple bodies of knowledge and a diversity
of approaches and technologies. We developed for the Living Earth Festival this year three
thematic areas, and again, the programing that's happening here this weekend reflects
these three themes. The first has to do with knowledge and technologies, successful approaches
to managing and protecting the environment, depend on the best knowledge
and science available. Within this complex mosaic lies a unique body of knowledge developed
by Native Peoples through lifetimes of keen observation and engagement of the world
around them. As we heard from Tom Porter's great talk this morning how much of that knowledge
is embedded directly in the language and in the culture.
Second thematic area deals with celebration and ceremony. The earth's viability depends
on the complex relationship of all living things. This relationship is to be acknowledged
and respected and celebrated. So we have a number of events happening where you'll see
tradition bearers demonstrating how this relationship is honored through song, dance and ritual.
The third of our thematic areas for the Living Earth Festival has to deal with bounty and
artistry. A living earth provides many gifts that sustain us
physically and feed our creativity. This area highlights the bounty that the earth provides
to peoples, from ritual to technology, and whereby the earth's bounty is rendered
to meet human needs. Now, over the years, the past several years,
we've focused this particular symposium on different themes, and this year's theme has
to do with living waters. So the title of today's symposium is Living Earth/Living Waters.
I want to congratulate Elizabeth Kennedy Gish [phonetic] for leading the development of
this symposium and being out in front on the waters issue. When she was developing this
months ago and bringing this concept in front of us, of course we always knew the issues
were urgent and required a lot of consideration, but then of course the event in the gulf happened,
and it became ever more apparent that it's a good time to focus on
what's going on with the earth's waters. So at our Living Earth/Living Waters symposium
today, Native and non-Native scientists, leaders and innovators will offer rich and
thought-provoking presentations featuring the latest research on the biosphere with
an emphasis on earth's waters. So I think you're going to find today's presentations
to be very exciting, very informative. And again, what we've tried to do here at the
National Museum of the American Indian is always provide the best balance
of science with cultural knowledge that's possessed by Native Peoples. So now let me
introduce the distinguished host and moderator of today's program, Assistant Director for
Research here at the National Museum of the American Indian, Dr. Jose Barreiro.
[Applause] DR. JOSE BARREIRO: Thank you, Tim. And thank
you for mentioning Tom Porter. It's always a good day when you can hear those words in
the morning. It prepares you spiritually for the rest of your journey. Please, if you
have a cellphone, turn it off or it will be confiscated, or at least we'll look at you.
Before we start, as is customary for our folks, we're instructed to offer an introductory
thanksgiving. This morning we will have a Blessing Song from Betsabe Torres, Comcaac.
Betsabe comes from a traditional family in her community, in Punta Chueca on
the Gulf of California and Mexico. She and her family have been leaders in the preservation
of - - traditions, of language, story, song and dance, and have taken those traditions
to other indigenous and Mexican communities. This is her first visit to the United States,
where she's proud to accept the responsibility of sharing the beauty of the
culture they have been taught and live every day. Thank you very much. Betsabe, please.
MS. BETSABE TORRES: [Singing in Comcaac]. Thank you.
[Applause] DR. BARREIRO: Well, again, welcome to the
National Museum of the American Indian. For the fourth year at this now annual event--I
think I will repeat myself a little bit from last year because some questions are universal
and continue. The question remains, how are we as human beings
to live on this living earth, this wonderful, life-giving entity, capable of the sacred
ability to renew itself? Many of our cultures call her Mother Earth, [Speaking Native language].
So it's not just of the mind. It's a relationship also of the heart. Will we love our mother?
The late and beloved Reuben Snake of the Ho Chunk Nation, leader and wise elder
used to say, if humanity does not change direction, we are going to end up exactly where we are
headed. He meant the abyss, a horrible, deep and unforgiving abyss, over the cliff. This
understanding of the threats that we face does not require 500 more books and volumes
to be proven. We all feel it. Probably not even one more volume of proof, but it will
require now--now that the imbalance is afoot upon the living earth, it will require huge
amounts of research, active consciousness, exacting and comprehensive attention, and
a leadership of extraordinary concentration to actually change direction.
Reuben Snake was not alone. Many Native leaders have spoken about the impact of human activity
on the earth's nuturing capacity, its living condition, which is its cyclical renewability.
This has been a cause for alarm for several generations. Even the
prophetic tradition, which often reflects the most intense perceptions of peoples points
directly at this problem. I and others here can vouch for that expression.
Native Elders, Hopi, the Shoshone, Muskogee, Lakota, Cupeno, Maya, Nawa, Ketchua [phonetic],
Imara [phonetic], Makirtadi [phonetic], Wiyot, Mapuchee [phonetic], and those are just among
the one's I've heard personally, have consistently pointed out the many ways nature is changing
and how these changes are affecting their communities and families.
We're not here to say that American Indigenous peoples are the world's greatest environmentalists
or ecologists. Whatever those labels or disciplines really mean or define. But we can assert this.
Throughout the Western Hemisphere, the Americas, Indian Peoples have survived on this earth
by virtue of keen primary observation and interaction with the natural
world. Knowledge of place, history and place, appreciation of place wraps up one of the
genial characteristics of the great many, perhaps all of the life philosophies, the
ways of life of American Indigenous American Indian Peoples.
These programs, year by year, and I hope some day soon, somewhere everyday, are framed to
deliver to knowledge on the state of the natural world. As always, we bring together Western
scientific methodology with Native empirical knowledge, itself a
science. We encourage this [Speaking Native language],
in the Ketchua concept, this coming together. We believe that seeing the world from divergent
perspectives can lead to convergence and a better sense of truth or reality.
So today, something important. Today, Living Earth/Living Waters,
water for life, water is life. My wife, Gotgi Cook [phonetic], who is [Speaking Native language],
our beloved midwife at the Mohawk Nation, speaks of woman as the first
environment. She links woman to the earth, and most importantly, to the waters of the
earth. For the baby, she likes to point out, is water. [Speaking Native language] are Lakota
brothers and sisters. This is perhaps their central philosophy and spiritual expression.
It means, we are all related. Well, nothing makes us relatives and
makes us share in its gifts more than water. Water runs through our brains, which are made
up three-quarters of water, 75%. Water carries the brain's electrochemical transmissions
throughout our body. Lost 20% of your water, you die. We all share water.
A little bit about something I've been finding out about recently.
I've been in the high mountain country recently. Our museum is a hemispheric institution in
intent and practice. Among other places, we have strong connections in the Andes.
Last April, we attended a conference on climate change and the rights of Mother Earth. It
was convened by Bolivian president, Evo Morales, the only indigenous head of state in the western
hemisphere. Some people are very critical of Evo Morales.
We don't always walk in sync with Presidente Morales, but on the alarming impacts of human
activity on Mother Earth, we are in complete agreement.
Their biggest issue is the melting of the Andean glaciers. The glaciers in that region
are like natural dams. They store water and release it cyclically. The world's glaciers,
of which there are many thousands, have been retreating drastically. Look it up. It started
in earnest in the 1980s, and now you can see it in the Andes
very clearly. It is also true, of course, in the Rockies,
in the Arctic, in the Alps and Himalayas. In the Andes,
glaciers have lost 20% of their volume in the past 40 years, and it's accelerating.
Major regions and cities in Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Chile and areas of Venezuela, Argentina,
Columbia, a population of some 77 million people are at serious risk over the next 25
years. Quickening melt of drinking and irrigation water is already forcing
major migration away from cities such as Lapas. Andean glaciers are tropical, closer to the
sun and melting fast. Chicotaya [phonetic] in Bolivia, Ante Sana [phonetic] in Ecuador,
Holicalis [phonetic] and Ausangate in central Peru have been closely studied. Again, they
are quickly disappearing. Ausangate in central Peru in
particular is a very sacred mountain. It holds the glacier of Senecala [phonetic] in mid-June,
in the beginning of the winter in the Southern Hemisphere. Since anyone
can remember, the huge ceremony of Qoyllur Riti has taken place.
This is a very Indian ceremony, ancient, shrouded now in a Christian veil as well. As many as
10,000 people attend, mostly Indian communities in the region. The central part of the ceremony
is that pilgrims get to take home a bit of ice, which becomes medicinal water
for their year. This is no longer allowed. They can't take
the ice. All can tell the ice is going, so they leave it alone. The elder, white-haired
mountain, as they say, is progressively dressing in black, signifying that it is in mourning.
So today, from the face of the Apus, the spirit lords of the mountains to the generous ocean.
Like the waters of the womb, the mother of all waters is the ocean.
Like the waters of the womb, it brings forth life. It, too, is mother. Today, we have two
views of the ocean, one from space and one from sea
level. Also, we have reports of new research projects by faculty and students from Haskell
Indian Nations University, where Professor Dan Wildcat has led a tremendous effort to
train students in the art of paying attention to these important issues.
Our first speaker is Dr. Nancy Maynard. Dr. Maynard is Senior Research Scientists
in the Cryospheric Sciences Branch at NASA's Gaddard Space Flight Center. She is manager
of NASA's tribal college and university project. A marine biologist with a wide breadth of
scientific experience, including science policy in the White House, management of large intra-
disciplinary science programs, oceanographic research at sea, and the application of satellites
to societal issues. She has worked extensively to bring indigenous
traditional knowledge together with scientific data and information to address climate and
environmental issues for decision-making. In 1998, as part of NASA's Mission to Planet
Earth, Dr. Maynard recognized the unique contribution Native peoples could make to understanding
the effects of natural and human-induced changes on the environment and
climate. The workshop she organized to bring together elders and other tribal leaders with
academic, private and government climate scientists focused attention on the importance of understanding
the impacts of climate change on Native lands and communities, and led to the inclusion
of a chapter on Native people and homelands in the 2001 US National
Assessment of Climate Change Impacts. Dr. Maynard's current research interest is in
the use of remote sensing to observe changes (environment, climate, land
use/cover) in the Arctic, and their impacts especially on indigenous populations in the
region. Dr. Maynard, please join us. [Applause]
DR. NANCY MAYNARD: NASA people have trouble speaking without Powerpoints. One sec. Okay.
Hang on. I need the glasses. Okay, and can you bring down the
lights just a little bit on the stage? I'm not sure. Anyway, good afternoon, and thank
you very much. I'm very appreciative of the opportunity to speak and participate in the
discussions here today. As an oceanographer, the whole opportunity to take a look at the
oceans as an issue and how we blend science and indigenous knowledge to deal with
creating a sustainable environment for the future is very, very near and dear to my heart.
I'd like to put this earth planet that we're on, this water planet, if
you will, in a special perspective. It was said the interrelatedness of all of us on
this planet, and I think if you look at this pale blue dot up here, which is the earth
as it shows up from one of NASA's spacecraft, Cassini, which was up about 800 million miles
away near Saturn, the rings of Saturn, this is what Earth looks like. It is clear that
we're all on one very small planet, sharing space
and resources. So we obviously must, must work together.
What I was asked to do today was to look at how--what kind of--from a global perspective,
what kind of issues are we facing, and what can we do about it. So I'll quickly walk through
a few facts about the oceans and how it provides a precious
commodity to all of us, our oceans, and then a number of issues that we're facing, and
then some answers and approaches for solutions to those issues.
We have many spacecraft that orbit the earth on a regular basis and provide us with wonderful
observations, and I'm going to try to sprinkle those through each of these issues so you
can see how we're collecting information and data that we can then share and are sharing
with our indigenous colleagues to put together a more complete picture.
And try to address these issues. Just a few facts. I could go on all day, but
I won't. I think it is Wikipedia defines it as the body of saline water that occupies
the depressions of the earth's surface. Not real scientific, but that's basically what
it is. Most of the water on Earth, more than 97% of the water on this earth is in the Ocean.
Less than 3% is in the ice, ground water and all the fresh lakes and rivers. The average
temperature of the planet if you averaged everything together, is about 39 degrees
Fahrenheit, and it's about 4 billion years old. I won't go into too many details, but
I think this graphic is important. The large, blue circle up in the right-hand corner is
all the blue is the salt water part of the entire amount of water that we have in this
planet. That little red thing is all the fresh water that exists on the planet out of that
volume. If you then go to that next one down in that fresh water, almost 69% is held in
glaciers. A very tiny amount in permafrost and some in groundwater. That tiny little
brown or orange slice, 0.4%, is all the water that we have on this planet that we can use
to keep alive for drinking and maintaining our lives.
Mostly freshwater lakes, and 1.6% of that tiny little bit is rivers, and the rest
is wetlands or atmosphere or soil moisture. So you can see how really important it is
that we protect this resource. Then I'm going to give one more set of bullets because
all of these things play into the issues and problems that we have that we need to find
solutions for. First and foremost, about climate change, let there be no doubt, there is no
question that the earth is warming. There are thousands of scientists on the globe
in the scientific community who have done all different kinds of research,
pooled them, and there's lots of discussion about the amount, speed and so forth, but
there is no question the community agrees on all that.
The 2000s have been the warmest decade ever in recorded history. Snow cover and ice extent
have decreased significantly. The global average sea level has been rising, and the
ocean is warming. In the arctic, it's accelerating significantly. Two times the rest of the planet.
Things don't happen on a uniform basis around the planet on any scale,
and in this case, it turns out that the warming is taking place at least twice as fast in
the arctic. Okay. Then why should we address these issues
in the context of indigenous people? Well, indigenous people, by lots of folks, have
been likened to the miner's canary, and one of our wonderful speakers, who
unfortunately is not here time sheet afternoon, Billy Frank, has had an answer to that one.
His comment is the only problem with being called a canary of climate change is in that
canary scenario, the canary dies before anybody does anything, and that doesn't seem to be
a great solution for indigenous people. Native peoples in this country, about
1% of our population living all across the United States, at least 565 tribes and governments,
and the US has a legal responsibility to consult with American Indian tribes
with questions of policy directly affecting resources, and that's environment, its climate,
it's all kinds of things. Another point to be made is native populations
around the world are vulnerable to climate and environmental change because often they
live close to the environment, whether it's close to rivers or gulfs
or edge of waters, and it's a very vulnerable state.
All right. Let me speak to the bounty of the oceans and the biodiversity that exists there.
The things that are wonderful about the ocean. And some of our relatives. These are microscopic
plants, and these are the base of what they call the food chain, and it's the next
large are fish, invertebrates and on up the food chain eat these guys. These are photosynthesize.
Take in CO2 and release oxygen. They're beautiful creatures, I could show
slides all day, but they're absolutely spectacular. Those are all microscopic, the ones I showed.
This is NASA's view of primary productivity, is what we called it, and in the green--I'm
sorry, I don't have a pointer, but in the green areas, let's say, across the equator
and in the southern ocean as well as up in the northern oceans, you see a
lot of green. That means there's a lot of life going on there. Where those little organisms
are, algae, is where the food chain is multiplied, and so you get lots of production. That's
where your fisheries are high. Another lovable type of critter, a lot bigger.
You don't have to have a microscope to see this gang, and another one of our relatives.
Perhaps one of mine or all of ours. But so the bottom line is there are many, many wonderful
parts that are provided to us by the oceans. Now I'd like to talk about a number
of issues that occur, and a little bit about not only how they effect us, but about our
participation in making these things happen. Waves and tsunamis, just as sort of a general
category, here's the navy trying to do business in sort of standard, really, awful weather,
and they're taking on water and food. But many fishermen and all kinds of
folks have to deal with activities in the ocean under circumstances like that.
If you look at a technology agency like NASA or some of the universities, you can combine
for a tsunami, which has started down here in the lower right-hand corner, and I believe
that's Western Chile. And this is a tsunami. There was an
earthquake about 12 hours before the leading edge of that set of lines, and that's the
head of the tsunami. That's 17 hours later as it's headed up toward Japan, and it took
22-and- a-half hours to get there.
It would have looked probably something like this, but much, much worse. We don't have
the actual photography for that particular thing, but it was a very bad, bad tsunami.
Those are the kind of things where we need to do better in the science agencies and entities
to provide better early warning, better technologies and work with indigenous people
so that if there are villages, indigenous villages, we should be getting a better service
of our information and data out to them as a warning.
This is before the Indonesian tsunami in '04, I believe, and this is afterwards. There was
absolutely nothing left, and of course we saw
that on the news, and it was an absolute tragedy. This is looking on the ground. There's one
building left standing, and the sad part was most of the victims were women
because they were in the homes and no way to hear about it. We need to do in the science
world a much better job of working with populations that may not be exposed to the data every
day on a daily basis. And again, to say, okay, what does NASA do,
one of the kinds of things we do is look at wave height. That's--if you look on the lower
part, you see the red area. In southern ocean, you have incredibly big waves and winds, which
are causing the waves, and the greenish part is areas where it also is pretty high, and
the blue is not so bad. Just another example, as I said, I would promise
to weave in a little bit of NASA technologies to see how we get some of this information.
Okay. Storms and hurricanes, obvious. This is a graphic created by an artist. It's a
model of what the inside of a hurricane looks like. It's really powerful. There's a lot
of information in there, and a lot of fierce energy.
This is a NASA set of images of Hurricane George back in '98. As you can see, it was
very polite. It went along and didn't leave almost anybody out on the way up through the
Caribbean and then ended up slamming into the Gulf. Of course Katrina, and this is a
result of a Galveston hurricane back quite a ways. I think it was
'60s. Again, nothing but wood, and we absolutely must work more together and be better about
disseminating any information to people and doing forward-looking things to better--for
better sustainability for all of us. Contamination is a major issue. It's a particularly
acute for native people and particularly in the Arctic, but
in a lot of areas in this country, Native Americans and others, but a lot of the Native
American areas suffer from having been located downstream or downwind from landfills, from
mines, from lagoons for sewage, spill oil. That stuff runs into the water and really
messes up the water quality. Then you also have the long-range transport, and this is
particularly true in the Arctic where you have pesticides and fertilizers and all sorts
of things sprayed on crops in this lower part, and then the clouds--it's picked up as you
get evaporation and wind, picking up the dust. It gets moved sometimes thousands of miles
and then redeposited with all the contaminates on it. If you look down at the top of the
Arctic Ocean where those white arrows are, that's Greenland, and that long, thin island
there. You can see that the air currents, which
are in yellow, converge into the Arctic bringing with it whatever is picked up from all over
the place. The red are the ocean currents also converging up into the Arctic Ocean.
You've got rivers pouring down into that, and the net result is you've got pollutants
being rained down, or it's in the water column. It gets picked up by those very small, tiny
organisms that I first showed you, or young invertebrates or small fish, and it gets magnified
up the food chain. Each of these guys tries to get the biggest prey that they can
because it's the most efficient, passing it energy-wise, and you get the biggest--then
people, and in this case, many, many indigenous tribes go for the largest seal, largest bear,
bird, whatever they're hunting. A lot of contaminates are stored in the fat.
So it does not get excreted, so you get major contamination magnified in
the body tissue. Unfortunately, it's something we really need to pay attention to as a society.
This is just an example again using NASA technologies the kind of things you
can see. Those yellow, green and red--red is the heaviest--are big clouds of dust that
are actually visible from space, and they're blowing up off Africa, across the Atlantic
and deposited across. There's also now more and more frequently,
as you're getting more drying with the warming, you're getting a lot of the same phenomenon.
If you look up in China, the red thing there, you get absolutely massive storms, dust storms
at certain times of the year because there's more and more desertification, there's more
people build things or utilize trees and plants. So you can actually see these things from
space, and again, they do carry contaminates. And
again, the plastics. Plastics and junk we all know about. We've got to do a better job
of taking care of that problem. Then just one other one--I sound like
Dr. Doom here, and I don't mean to be, but I was asked to outline the issues. After I
got through with this, I thought, my gosh. But there's some good news at the end, I promise.
This is another way that NASA and other agencies that look at - - sensing. But this was after
Hurricane Floyd ran into North Carolina with a vengeance, and it
caused incredible runoff. This happens during any storm in a coastal region, but this happens
to be an area with a lot of pig farms and chicken farms and industry, and all that stuff,
including dead animals and fertilizers and antibiotics and everything else go rushing
down into the water, and all of this green stuff is unfortunately contaminants.
It goes into the ecosystem. Oil spills, right? Our favorite topic, recently,
unfortunately. We have rigs out there, and this is an interesting graphic somebody created.
What this is, this is the skyline of Houston. Somebody took one of the oil rigs. I don't
know what. This is an artist drew what it would look like if this rig, this little thing
at the top, all this stuff is what goes on below the ocean that you don't see. If you
extend that by, again, twice, that would be about the height of the drill rig that they've
presently been working with. So you can see the problem of trying to do anything with
any fragility at that kind of distance through the water, and mud and whatever else is down
there. And of course once they're on there, they get hammered by storms and all kinds
of things. This one actually didn't quite make it under
the bridge. Katrina put it there. It was actually in a shipyard somewhere
getting ready to be deployed and did not make it. I thought some of you might be interested
in this graphic of what happens to an oil spill. Here's the rig. You
got the spill. Some of it gets photo-oxydized. That means the sun creates some amount of
disappearance. You've got some very thin films on the water. You got tar balls. You probably
heard a lot about that on the news. Some of it becomes particulates and get sedimented
out, particularly if there's sediment in the water, and then you
have emulsions, and particularly if you have dispersions, which this spill had an unusual
amount of dispersions. So that one's a question mark as to exactly the end outcome of that
dispersed oil. It will be interesting to watch. This was the Exxon Valdez up in Alaska, just
part of the cleanup. Incidentally, it took forever to clean this
up because it's in the Arctic and it's very cold and it decomposes quite slowly. To clean
it up in that situation did almost as much damage as the spill itself.
Okay. Global warming and sea level rise. Just a quickie. By 2100s, it is anticipated and
projected that sea level globally, and it won't be uniform all around, will be roughly
a meter. The areas in red are where it would be under water in a meter. This, of course,
is the whole New Orleans region. Fisheries. Just a quick one. This is something
people are doing. This is--someone tried to show one of the problems with this huge trawlers,
and this is an actual sort of graphic of how big it would be. You could fit apparently
12 747s into that net. That's how big these nets are. What seems like a great, efficient
way to do it, unfortunately they just cram a
lot of fish in the front end of it. A lot of them aren't used, and there's something
called by-catch. They throw everything away that's not the special thing they're fishing
for. Unfortunately there's a lot of waste that goes on. And worst of all, often they're
cut loose or they break or whatever. They just get rid of them when they can't handle
them anymore. They're so long, they're so big you can actually see them from space.
You see this long, funny-shaped thing because it reflects sometimes when it's right at the
surface. They do lots of by-catch. That's a shark up there that's gotten caught
and died. Obviously this is a sea lion. It's not a good thing, and Billy Frank, who would've
been talking this afternoon, would talk about this, but there are major impacts on Native
fisheries in the Northwest due to the warming of waters that do come up the rivers.
They're so warm that the fish who follow the water temperatures go farther north or other
places. So here's a native population whose entire culture is around the fish and
certain species of fish. It's a very, very difficult outcome, and there's all sorts of
different problems with rights to fish and so on. This is a real serious issue that Billy
Frank would do a great job on explaining. One issue that's, I think, really important
is the Arctic and climate change. First of all, it's about 50%
ocean and 50% sea ice. There are lots of impacts, but there are major, major impacts on indigenous
people. Decreases in the sea ice, just a quick--this whitish area in the middle is sea ice, and
it normally expands in the winter when it's cold and then contracts into a smaller and
smaller area just up north of Greenland. It's gone from over 6
million square kilometers in 1980 down to right about now it's somewhere in this region
of just a little under four. That's a very big, big amount, and the problem is
you also get what they call positive feedback. This is dark, so it absorbs the sun rays,
whereas the white area bounces sun rays back, so it doesn't hold the heat.
They project that by 2040, there perhaps will be no sea ice on a permanent basis in the
Arctic at all. Of course there are all kinds of impacts. You can see there's a lot
of mushy ice early on. The dogs here are very reluctant to go out on that ice because they
know about thickness, and if it's wet, they should not be out there. The elders all across
the Arctic in the indigenous communities are talking also about because it's warmer, the
weather patterns have changed, whether it's wind, precipitation, a
type of snow. Now they can't really predict the situation that they may have to go out
in, and life, for subsistence, hunting, for example, is very difficult.
This is not a position I would want to be in, and of course the polar bears are being
impacted in a similar way because ultimately, slowly losing habitat. Just a quick picture
of permafrost, since it's unusual to find a good pictures, this is--permafrost is frozen
ground, and this is still frozen, but this area has slumped down. What that does is it
has been hard underneath here. This is in Siberia, and the whole building has just crumbled.
Of course ice roads are disappearing as well. This is a very actually a more common story
than you might thing. There are a number of villages in the Arctic that are in this situation,
but this particular one is called Shushmarev [phonetic], and it's a
village of indigenous people that have been there for thousands of years. It's on this
little point of Alaska, and that little point is kind of an island that runs along this
way. The problem has been because of the warming
trend and the lack of sea ice, the ice is no longer hard up against the edge of the
land. What happens is you get these fierce storms anyway in the winder with very strong
wave action, and now it's not protected by the ice, so it's been eroded. This house here
used to be just a regular house, and the shoreline used
to be out at least a mile, I believe, offshore there.
It's completely been eroded, and it's undercutting the houses in the village, and they're having
to move the village. It's not the only village, but this happens to be happening right now.
Talked about glaciers a minute ago. This is Iliasat [phonetic] Glacier on Greenland. We're
going to look at just a quick picture of this. This is what it was here in 1998. It has shrunk
up to now here in 2005, and it's moving up here. That's very fast.
And this is what happens when a glacier begins to lose the water. These are called moulin,
and what they are, are they're rives that are formed as you get melting of the ice,
and they run down underneath the glacier. There's lubrication under here, and that thing
can then slide, whereas before it was grounded on the earth.
Finally, I finished with the Dr. Doom stuff. There's lots of good reason to be hopeful.
First of all, doing partnerships, we're talking now, a lot of us who are either here or our
colleagues, combining scientific and technical knowledge together with the indigenous knowledge
that's been gathered by indigenous and traditional people,
Native people over the thousands of years to try to come up with best solutions. And
as part of that, we have some wonderful students because they're the future. They're
being handed the consequences of a lot of the actions that have taken place. What we're
trying to do is increase the use of indigenous knowledge and science to be better stewards.
One small example is a project in Norway called Ilat [phonetic], which has to do with reindeer
pastures, husbandry and changing climate. But its combination, and
it's led by indigenous people, and it's how to deal with the changes, the melting of snow
and melting of ice earlier in the spring. They're having to adapt by moving the herds
north faster and so forth, or they're fall through the ice. But they're combining with
a lot of science. One of our graduate students here in the audience has been already
part of that group, which is really interesting. I've been working on the NASA side, and she,
I believe, is going to be walking with the herd when they migrate north
for I don't know how many miles it is, but Paula, it's a long walk, which is great. It's
awesome. Then tribal college students, Native students,
absolutely key to the future. They're terrific. Some of the students are here giving posters.
I encourage everybody to go to the third floor, all the way to the end and around,
and there are some posters put up by our interns. And they've been at Haskell Indian Nations
University, or United Tribes Technical College doing these kind of collaborative projects
where they pick up both science and indigenous knowledge. Great students. Just terrific students.
And this is where the tribal colleges are, mostly in these regions. They're real jewels.
They're focusing on all kind of issues, but with a Native American, Native
studies context so that you have both the science or other studies combined with the
culture. Very, very important, so the culture's being maintained. Very important.
As I said, the internship program, this is something NASA does, but also Haskell Indian
Nations has done at KU, University of Kansas. Joan Nagel's [phonetic] in the audience
also, and she's been a fantastic mentor to a lot of these students as well.
And again, I say these are the future. These are the guys that are going to help figure
out how we best handle a lot of these changes. This is a couple of teams coming up from our
project that NASA sponsored from - - College, - - Bay Community
College, Blackfeet Community College, and Salish Kootenai College. And again, I encourage
you to come visit. The students are just fantastic, and I thank you.
[Applause] DR. BARREIRO: Thank you, Nancy. We need about
10,000 like you to really tackle this issue. It's hopeful on the college student level,
but it's pretty dire on the global level. Our next speaker is Alberta Mellado Moreno.
He is a tribal member of the Comcaac Nation in Sonora, Mexico, at the edge of the desert
where the Sierra Comcaac Mountains meet the Gulf of
California. As a child, he traveled and lived in many indigenous communities in Southern
Mexico while his father worked for the Mexican Government Agency at the National Institute
of Indigenous. At the age of 13, Mellado returned to his band, and attended high school and
college, becoming an aquaculture engineer. He
is also a fisherman and artist, but his most important efforts are for the conservation
of the people, culture and the natural world of the Comcaac territory.
00:52:09In 2006, Mellado founded the Comcaac Native Aquaculture, a small-scale tribal shellfish
aquaculture project that focuses on production and traditional harvesting for tribal consumption.
He is also the co-founder of the Comcaac Environmental Monitoring Team, a tribal organization planning
and executing bio-cultural conservation projects in
Hant Comcaac. Mellado sees himself as an "Ocean Revolutionary," part of a global network of
young leaders working to change our relationship with our planet and our oceans, and to heed
"the ancient wisdom and imagination represented by the lives and words of countless elders,
warriors and healers that is the fullest expression of our human
experience." He will speak today on Land of the Singing People: Shellfish Aquaculture,
Sustainability and the Preservation of Identity. Thank you.
[Applause] MR. ALBERTO MELLADO MORENO: Thank you, everyone.
It's my pleasure to be here. I'm very honored to attend the National Museum of the American
Indian. Thanks for the invitation. I'll talk about the Comcaac Native Aquaculture
Project, but first I would like to introduce you a little bit to the - - talk. It's an
effort that has been developed in the Comcaac Nation in the Sea of Cortez in the
Sonora State by the Comcaac Tribe. Many - - describes us as - - , which is a name that other tribes
gave us. I'll talk to you about our culture. You will
have a picture of who we are and what we do. I'll talk about the threats that we are facing,
how elders have--are in action with the - - to face those threats, and I'll talk about
the alternatives that came up of this effort. Specifically about the Native Aquaculture
Project and the Environmental Monitoring Team. How are we developing new tools and
a new heritage for them. In the end, I have an invitation for you.
First I'll talk about our culture. Imagine that you take a plane and go from Washington
to the Northwest Mexico to the Sea of Cortez. This is a satellite view of how my homeland
looks like. We own the biggest island in Mexico, and we have a portion of
mainland. This is how the landscape look like. It's all--there are Sierra, there are sea,
there are mangrove areas, sand. This is a traditional fishing camp. As you can see,
it's undeveloped, just few shelters, few boats, few people. Many author says is where the
desert meets the sea, as you can see. We still keep our culture very strong. We
keep our traditional dress and our traditional songs. Our language is an everyday-used language.
It's not only on ceremony sort of things. It's an everyday use, even
when we are surrounded by the Mexican Spanish language. We're still using ours every day.
We still have our face painting traditions since we are kids. We are taken to the sea
and our harvesting areas, and we learn not only how to obtain food, or we don't learn
just ecological processes and things. We learn the
culture. We learn a lot out there. Fishing is very important for us because it's
one of the main source of income and a food source. But also, every, single species that
lives in our territory is not a resource. It's something living that inspires the artists
to do their basket weaving patterns, carvings and all the arts that our tribe knows to
do. Even when all that sounds romantic and ideal, we are facing threats. We are facing
clandestine fishing, illegal clandestine fishing, harmful fishing practices like gill
net, and legal shrimp trawling and shrimp farming. Impact on endangered species, sacred
site destruction, tourists without ecological awareness, distorted regional economic relationships.
Meaning that we are in the lowest step of the chain of economy in our region. Everything
that's taken out of our land has less value in
economics. Then we also have lack of government in action and support.
All of these threats that the environment is facing affects directly on the culture
because we have culturally significant species. We have sacred site destruction. We have legal
and unsustainable fishing in protected areas. We are facing the loss of customary knowledge
and practices, the loss of traditions, arts, crafts
and all those skills. We are facing political and economic discrimination.
Our cultural identity is very related to the land,
to the language and the place. But even when things are going wrong, somehow elders still
have the power, still have the energy to fight because they are fighters, and they are trained
to transfer that spirit to the youth. So they started back in 1996 collaborating
with outsiders, American universities and NGOs, doing
a series of training, mixing western science based on ecology, biology and all those sciences
and help us to understand the nature from the point of view. They mixed with the traditional
knowledge. They took the youth to learn the traditional knowledge about each species alongside
with the Western science monitoring techniques. The youth, of course, always is interested
in doing something good, something cool, something different. So we are interested in learning
modern western science monitoring techniques, but also develop our own and learn
about how our elders and how our cultural concepts old environment. As results, results
not meaning numbers, not meaning amounts, the results are living projects that are going
on, projects that have their own spirits like the [Speaking Native language], which is the
Sea Turtle Protection Group, Environmental Monitoring Team. Each one has
its own spirit. Elders have been very active on it, and they
are living in their natural cultural exchange, based on native science and indigenous knowledge.
We just had a recent--in 2008, we had a cultural exchange with the Aboriginal people from Australia,
and also the Torres Straight Islander. Last year
in 2009, we were honored to visit the Kulayala [phonetic] region in Panama with the Kula
[phonetic] indigenous people there, in their - - community. That was a huge cultural exchange
because we had the opportunity to do a ceremony that hasn't been done in our territory for
30 years, which is leather back ceremony. Then we took back that experience to our land
from that cultural exchange, and we made a ceremony in our land.
Well, the alternatives that we have now going on, it's all listed there. [Speaking Native
language] is a Sea Turtle Protection Group Environmental Monitoring
Team. We are doing traditional fisheries research. We are doing Native Aquaculture. We are trying
to work on authentic ecotourism. We are working with native food production with the rescue
of traditional food customs, monitoring of - - , language preservation and how to interact
with outside land profits.
I'll talk a little bit more about the scallops and oysters project, Native Aquaculture Project.
Those are pictures of the spaces that we have. The one up in the left is a native oysters.
[Speaking Native language] is the species, and the other two are - - shells native to
our area. Those are found naturally in the environment as natural beds. Our people go
and harvest them just walking without any developed technology, just with boats to go
out there where they are. They are in sand dunes. This is a family practice. This
is not just fishermen, men, adults doing it. You can find kids to elders doing this activity.
What we did is a series of training to those people that already knows the system of how
the scallops and oysters work to our knowledge. We got some training about the Western understanding
of mollusks and their reproduction cycles. We got the first
indigenous crew trained for doing Native Aquaculture in our country.
It's all very--it's complicated. I can't go through all details of the process
because it will take me forever, but I will show you some slide. These are eggs, and the
first stage is larvae stages of the mollusks that we work on. Here at the screen, you can
see the orange section are millions and millions of larvae of native scallops that we raise
in a hatchery, a Mexican government hatchery that we partnered with
to develop the project. This is how they look like when they are almost ready to get introduced
into the ecosystem to be repopulated there. This how they look like. We watch them every
day to check that they are clean, they are doing good. When they get to certain size,
they are planted into the bottom. The same for native oysters. You can see, they're
in small seeds. They are cultured. They are raised using a long-line system, and maintenance
activities are conducted to clean the system. This is what we have in the end of
a production season. This project allowed us to reintroduce those
species into our customary food customs, and also it's giving us a job opportunity, a science
development project, where we get training, but it's very integral project.
The Environmental Monitoring Team is another project that we are developing. It
gave us a chance to have some more organization, to integrate our ideas, participate since
the planning of every, single project that will be developed in our land, and of course
to - - to the cultural preservation. We have a series of teams that we are working on.
The first one is modern tools, which is the development of applications,
using the software Cyber Tracker, which is free, and you can program anything that you
can imagine, as long as you know what you want to do. And you can load it into a handheld
GPS to obtain the observations or visiting to the country.
We have mangroves and Environmental Monitoring. We are tracking the growth, survival, extensions
of the mangroves areas, and doing water quality monitoring. We are checking dissolved oxygen,
pH, temperature, keeping records to know this state of our
land. We are doing a small scale fisheries research management and migratory - - monitoring.
This is what I was talking about when I mentioned the Comcaac Environmental Monitoring Team.
They are kids along with elders that are doing the mangroves monitoring. They raise the mangroves.
They obtain the data with the handheld GPS using the Cyber Tracker.
They do all the biometrics themselves, and then they go and reforest the mangroves areas.
Elders are always with us participating on the water quality monitoring,
too. And this is the small scale fishery research project that we have. The - - monitoring.
It's time to get to the invitation to you. I'd like to invite you all to join and support
our conservation efforts, to support the regional indigenous arts and crafts, eat sustainably-
harvested marine products, practice responsible tourism. Visit us if you have a chance. You
will get our contact information and you will know some more about it because all of this
effort we're doing now, it's for them. It's for the kids that are living there.
One last thing, that's our - - and our web site. You're welcome if you
have any questions later, we can talk some more. Thank you.
[Applause] DR. BARREIRO: Thank you, Alberto. That was
wonderful to see. Our next speaker--I hope you hang in a little longer.
This is still getting good--is a personal hero of mine, one of those scholar activists
out in the world who's really making a difference. It's Daniel Wildcat. He's a Yuchi member of
the Muscogee Nation of Oklahoma. His talk today is pretty ingenious, and he's calling
it Exercises in Indigenuity for a Living Planet.
Wildcat is a director of the Haskell Environmental Research Studies Center and a professor at
Haskell Indian Nations University in Lawrence, Kansas. He's an accomplished scholar who writes
on indigenous knowledge, technology, environment and education. He's also director of the Haskell
Environmental Research Studies Center, which he founded with colleagues
from the Center for Hazardous Substance Research at Kansas State University.
Wildcat helped design a four-part video series entitled All Things Are Connected:
The Circle of Life. That was in '97. This dealt with land, air, water, biological and
policy issues facing Native nations. He recently formed the American Indian and
Alaska Native Climate Change Working Group, a tribal-college-centered network of individuals
and organizations working on climate change issues. In 2008, he helped
organize the planning for Seven Generations Climate Change Conference, sponsored by the
National Center for Atmospheric Research, and he's the author, most recently, of Red
Alert! Saving the Planet with Indigenous Knowledge. And he has time also to come here and talk
to us today. Dan? [Applause]
DR. DANIEL WILDCAT: [Speaking Native language], Jose, and it's a nice introduction. [Speaking
Native language]. It is an honor to be
here, and I want to give a special thanks to those who have gone before me and really
acknowledged the museum. I think when the 7-7-7 event happened, having a little glimpse
into the back scenes of what it took to make that event happen here, you remember we did
have a Republican in the White House at the time, and I'm not so sure there was complete
excitement at having Al Gore out here in front of the museum talking about climate change,
but Tim Johnson and Jose really did some marvelous and some important and positive politics to
make sure that happened. I was honored to be asked to be a part of that.
So Kevin and Tim and Jose, thank you very much. Liz, thank you for all
your help in putting this together. And Nancy Maynard, who presented earlier, is just again,
she's one of my heros. Nancy's the embodiment of what I think is going on in some of
our leading scientific organizations and federal agencies in terms of recognizing that indigenous
people do have knowledge, do possess wisdom, and the planet, and all of our relatives on
this Mother Earth need this wisdom desperately enacted today. We've reached a time and place
on the planet to where I guess if we're just going to keep trying
the same thing over and over, and expect to get a different result, that's at least one
definition for insanity, and it seems like we might be approaching that now. Maybe it's
time to try something different, and I think what we need to try different is look at indigenous
knowledge. For that, I'm very thankful to be a part of a program here with some of our
relatives from south of this political boundary and border, and the marvelous work that was
just described with the indigenous aquaculture. So let me first of all,
since it seems to be kind of the thing to do in presentations such as this, demonstrate
to my students that I really do know how to put together a Powerpoint. I think they're
taking bets about whether Dan can actually do successfully a Powerpoint. I don't have
a long, formal one, but I thought I could start with a few pictures, and that would
be a good introduction for me to talk about the primary
themes I want to talk about. I'm going to lose this screen here, I think,
and Liz asked me if I new how to do this. I said, I think I can. Whoa, not responding.
Now, we got it. Okay. Cancel? Oh. I'm getting too many instructions here. They're
going to win the bet. I get up here, and this is exactly
what happens. It doesn't seem to want to do anything. Okay. Liz, I'll let you.
There we go. Okay. The machine is paying me back for all of the
horrible things that I've been saying about modern technology.
LIZ: Maybe we can get a little AV help? Thank you.
DR. WILDCAT: Okay. Don't send. Don't send. Don't send what where? Who's this going
to is what I want to know. Who is
at the other end? [Unrelated conversation]
DR. WILDCAT: My students won the bet about if he gets up the and tries a Powerpoint,
this whole thing is going to go who knows which direction. We've been doing a great
program. First of all, this is really important to me, and I want to recognize my colleague
from the University of Kansas, Dr. Joan Nagel, because she's the one that convinced me that
we ought to go after a very large NSF grant to do something that they
don't typically do, and that is very well-funded undergraduate research projects. So we joined
in with the other research institutions in Kansas and put together an epscore [phonetic]
proposal that had a large piece in here for Tribal College Students to come to Haskell
Nations University and do climate change research. So Joan's sitting down here in front by Nancy.
I'd like to ask Joan and all the Tribal College students to stand up. Please be recognized
for the work you guys have done. This is incredible. From all over the
United States. So get upstairs to the third floor and look
at what they're doing. We talk about don't just put a bunch of words on slides, so I
didn't. Copper River in Alaska. I wanted to start with this image because I did some work
here about ten years ago for USGS when we were working on a
project called learning the language of Mother Earth.
I think this is something that people too often forget, and that is that Mother Earth
does have a language. The problem that we have in the world we live
in today, so many of us spend so much time in environments such as this, we don't hear
what she has to tell us very often. We've made ourselves very well insulated, haven't
we? And we've insulated ourselves into ignorance. We have an insulated ignorance about the language
of this Mother Earth. So I wanted to start with some images of a place
that I visited and was very important in terms of making me think outside my own sort of
comfort zone about what I knew. So this is Child's Glacier [phonetic]. We're
going to go from a very big picture to a more up close and personal picture. Child's Glacier.
We've been talking about the diminution of glaciers on the planet.
It is happening. I must admit, I was shocked at the figure that you showed, Nancy, since
by my estimation, roughly based on that, we're talking 1980 going from something like
seven--so many millions or hundreds of millions of kilometers down to three-point--it looked
like eight or something like that. I mean, we're talking almost a reduction by half.
This is one of the glaciers that will be affected, Child's glacier.
Then you get a little closer view. This is humongous. This is about one fourth
of the face of that large glacier that I just showed in that last picture, and then a little
more up close and personal. Then you see the calving of Child's Glacier down there in the
corner. And I wanted to start with this image because
I think so much of what we talk about when we talk about water
is really framed by images like these. A Pacific sunset. We think about beauty, and there is
beauty in that. I was just thinking about that in terms of how in our consciousness
important water is, and yet in many respects, how I think even the way we think about water
may be part of the problem that we face today. So this is the way people like to think about
water. Where I live, this is how I think about water.
Who can tell me what that is? That is the Ogallala [phonetic] Aquifer in action. The
largest continental underground ocean in North America. Given--it depends on who you're talking
to. The more modest estimates might be that we've got two decades left of this kind of
irrigation system that can be supported by the aquifer. The more dire estimates suggests
that in some parts--because the aquifer's not a contiguous--it's not the same depth
everywhere underground, but depending on where you live, in the mid- to southern great plains,
it may be that you will not see those crop circles within a decade. We're using it up.
We don't think of that water. We need to. We need to think of that very, very seriously.
And then I was thinking because one of my students here, Abigail Jones, is doing a fantastic
project, and I think she's going to go down and visit the Seminal [phonetic] in Florida,
about the everglades, and she'll show you an image of this, but
these are people who have forecast some of the fairly--not the real radical ones, either,
but some of the more modest forecasts. That's not just going to be a wetlands biome they're
going to be in. Much of their land will be underwater, and a people, a way of life, a
culture will be threatened. And the rest of this, I was real
proud about getting all those pictures in there and everything. The rest of this is
pretty pro forma, but I'm not going to read it, and I'm not going to go through all the
slides. But what I'd like you to do is to maybe think about what do I mean when I talk
about exercises in indigenuity. Who knows what indigenuity is? I didn't say ingenuity.
I said indigenuity. I had a student, Curtis Cacaba [phonetic], about five years, taking
a course I teach called Foundations of Indigenous Philosophy, and we kept
talking about, how do we disabuse people of the fact, as Abby was saying on the way over
here today--do you think anyone will ask us if we still live in teepees? I said, I hope
not, but how do we disabuse people of the fact that, you know, if you want to know something
about indigenous people or understand something about their knowledge, that
the way you do that is go read these archival books, the American Bureau of Ethnography,
Franz Boas' books, Frank Spec's Ethnographic Treatments of the Cherokee, of the
Passamaquoddy, of the White Mountain Apache. Well, the first thing you can do is take a
good look at the place you're sitting in the center of. If there's any hope for us, it's
in the attempt of people to--indigenous people to let you know that this is not a museum
about people who have vanished or disappeared. This is a museum
that celebrates indigenous people who are still here, who are alive, who possess their
language, their life ways, their ceremonies. They're very much in the middle of this very
modern world. So it occurred to me, based on what Curtis
Cacaba--he had said, you know, when we kept talking about what indigenous, and we're not
talking about traditions going back to the past. No,
we can't go back to the past. The world is changing. It's dynamic, this Mother Earth
is a living being. He wrote me this great paper, and he said, I think what we're talking
about is indigenous ingenuity. And then he collapsed it, put it together. Indigenuity.
That's what I'm going to really, really talk about, and here's the trick about exercising
indigenuity. What kind of technology, what kind of solution do you adopt? How do you
prepare yourself to be resilient in the face of what appears to be, unless there's
some incredibly dramatic change in human conduct and behavior in the institutions that we've
built, a very dramatic climate change, and then what that's going to ensue for the land,
the air, the water, the living beings that depend on that system, the life system.
Well, I think the way you prepare for it, it depends. It depends on where you live
on the planet. I think one of the problems we have is we have to disabuse ourselves of
the notion that there's a one-size-fits-all culture
or technology solution to the problems that we face on the planet. There isn't. It depends
on where you live. How you're going to experience climate change
will vary widely depending on where you live on the planet. So let me talk about what I'm
going to call the seven principles of--this is what I would
call exercising indigenuity. I think Tom Porter--is Tom still here? I think Tom had to leave.
I want to thank Tom for a beautiful opening this morning because here's the first principle.
Principle number one, to exercise indigenuity, you have to begin from a standpoint of understanding
that we are surrounded with gifts. Think of that. Think of
that notion of approaching our life, our place on the planet, as essentially a product of
gift-giving. Once you do that, it gives you a completely different framework to
start thinking about technology, to thinking about culture, to thinking about economics,
to thinking about science. When we think about those gifts and the way this blue-green planet,
this Mother Earth gave us, humankind these gifts and this life around us, it also points
out to the fact that part of that gift is--and again, there's no getting around
this. We don't want to argue. We're not going to argue about religion with anyone. That's
not the point, but we always begin with the notion of an acknowledgement of a spiritual
presence in life on this planet, this Mother Earth. That's going to be problematic for
people who think that we're talking about biochemical mechanics or something, and believe
to understand life, that we can do that purely by microscopic examination and dissection
because we would argue that, no, there is indeed a spiritual force and power and
presence in the life around us. We're just but one small part of that.
So that's the first principle. We begin with that principle. The second principle's always
something else that Tom spoke to, too. And that is that I've heard this said so many
different ways by so many elders, and you know, anyone who
tells you all Indians think alike, you can probably immediately leave when they get up
and start speaking because we're very diverse. We're very diverse peoples. We have very diverse
cultural life ways, and I'll talk about that in a second, too, because that explains part
of what we have to tackle if we're going to deal successfully with climate change and
its consequences. The notion that when we look at the world
around us, I know, in Yuchi traditions, we did this. We acknowledged this even in terms
of our language. We acknowledge it even as you
might imagine with my surname, with clan systems, clan totems. But we don't see the balance
of nature as consisting of resources, but we think of those as existing as relatives.
It makes a big difference if you treat the balance of nature on this planet as a resource,
whereas if you begin to think about it as a
01:31:50relative. Now, I know my colleague, Mary Cofrin [phonetic], doesn't like this,
but if you want to try a radical "paradigm shift," I suggest try that one on. Think how
our conduct and our behavior would change if we took seriously the notion that the balance
of life on this planet isn't resources, it's relatives.
And if you do that, it opens up these incredible avenues, for the third principle,
of this kind of view I'm talking about, this exercise, this ability to exercise indigenuity.
Everyone in this room can do so. I'm going to get to that in a minute. Why am I
saying that? You're saying, oh, I'm just some white person from Europe. How am I going to
exercise indigenuity? Just one aside here. As Thomas Vinacua [phonetic] used to say,
I'm sure--I bet Jose heard Thomas tell this story several times. He used to always look
around, and he'd say, well, I'm glad to be with
so many tribal people. Often it'd be a room, you'd look around and gee, there's only a
handful of Indians in here. Who is he talking about, tribal people? And then he'd always
go, yeah, you guys are all tribal members. Most of you don't remember that anymore. You've
lost that, but everyone in this room, your collective heritage, your ancestors
were members of tribal nations for much longer than you were citizens of modern nation states.
Everyone in this room, that's something that's been lost and maybe a consciousness,
but there's a good way to recollect that. So when we start thinking about the third
principle, here's what I want to suggest. We go from this gift. We go from this spiritual
dimension. We go from relatives to why. That requires of us that we conduct ourselves with
respect, that we respect the gifts we've been given.
We respect the relatives that we share this world with.
Now, I don't think this is a romantic view. Remember, this was my point. I don't think
there's anything romantic about that view at all. I call that indigenous realism. If
you want to know what I think a romantic view of life on planet Earth is, a romantic view
is somehow this view that humankind things they're in charge. That's
the romantic view. You want a romantic view of your place on the planet, just think you're
in charge. How fitting is it that when we got ready to come out here--this
is the problem with having me talk. I'm always going to tell stories, but I didn't think
about this till this morning, Elizabeth. So we were scheduled to fly out here this
morning, me and three of my interns. We were coming out. We were headed to the airport
on Thursday, and we were going to get on a plane at 3:30 p.m. We were going to be here
in two-and-a-half hours, and this has never really happened to me before, but we got 12
miles from the airport, and we get a phone call, and Elizabeth says, hey, I just got
an e-mail from the ticketing folks who worked on you guys. You guys' flight's been canceled.
We're having some really severe thunderstorms here
in D.C. So national. Then I found out my other students, that they had taken off about two
hours earlier. They weren't in D.C. They were diverted and sitting in Pittsburgh,
hoping to get to D.C. Now, some people might just get all thrown
in a great, big tizzy about that, but as I began to think about it, I began to think,
you know, Living Earth/Living Waters. Maybe this was a very appropriate time to remind
us that we're not in charge. And we got here the next morning, but we need to respect the
fact that this life system of the planet still does things,
often, that it doesn't ask for our permission, and it doesn't need it. I think humankind
would do well to engender some respect toward that.
Here's the fourth principle, if you get interested in what I mean by indigenuity. And that would
be, don't think by any chance that I'm not endorsing the application of rationality,
of reason, of the gifts that we've been given to use our mind. This is very important. It's
extremely important that we do so, that we use this reason that we have so that
as we begin looking at these relatives that we are creating these relationships of respect
with, that if we do this, an we keep examining ways as our institutions change, as human
kind's social arrangements and institutional arrangements on the planets change, that we
actively think about how we are going to be able to support life in a way that demonstrates
that respect, that acknowledges that gift. I think that this what--it's something that's
been called by Rick Williams, the Director of the American Indian College Fund, a natural
native intelligence. Well, natural, I think what he's really trying to get at, in the
sense that we take seriously the notion that what we
learn comes from being attentive to this language that Mother Earth can teach us, that our teachers
are outside these walls and not just in classrooms and lecterns such as
we have set up here and I'm using. Again, I don't think that's romanticism. I call that
indigenous realism. So if we start thinking about that, then we
can use reason. We can employ reason. I think we always remember that we do so with a reverence.
That would be, for me, you know, sort of as my mentor, Vine, used
to say, spirit and reason. The two aren't opposed. It's a question of how those two
interface. Spirit and reason. How do they come together? I think they come together
in a very neat way, and what I would suggest to you would be kind of the sixth principle
of exercising indigenuity. That would be that we begin to take seriously
the notion that sustainability, and most importantly, the applications of technology, we need a
new way, a new kind of function, what mathematicians would call an
operator. What gives technology its value? Well, I'm going to tell you right now, I think
it's--and I just met an economist before I got up to speak, and he might have a good
question or comment about this when I get done. I hope he does.
But I think the value of technology, we have to begin to take this, and we have
to create a function. The value is a function of what? And it occurred to me that from all
the many elders I've heard speak, technology is valuable so long as it strengthens community,
it strengthens communication and culture. I call it the three Cs. The common denominator,
as you look at whether or not it's strengthening community, because
I would include the ecological community, the life community, not just the human community.
The common denominator for those numerators, that three Cs, community,
communication and culture, would be environment. And that's a good way to think about sustainability.
Sustainability equals technology as a function of community. Communication, culture. Are
we enhancing those things? To the extent we can demonstrate there are
a lot of things we've adopted that are destructive to those, I think
that tells us maybe those aren't very valuable, or we ought to tweak those, some. They still
aren't quite ready for prime time. So if you begin to think about technology
that way, here's the beautiful part of indigenuity. It suggests that as we start looking at
how we are going to live, that we begin to get away from the notion that one size fits
all in terms of technology, applications and solutions. So as we've seen here
earlier in some of the beautiful presentations that were given, what we need to do is to
think about creating systems of life enhancement. Maybe this human notion of progress--no one--God,
what's more horrible than being against progress? Who wants to be accused of being against progress?
I don't want to be accused of being anti-progress, going
backward, being against something. No, I'm not against anything. I'm for something. What
we need to do is we need to create systems of life enhancement on the planet, of which
we begin to recognize that the way we do that is by humankind conducting their lives in
a way that shows respect to these relatives that we share the planet with. That means
that as we acknowledge that as we apply technology, we should not do it in a one-size-fits-all
manner. That as we start thinking of how we are going to live, that it matters where
we live. Yeah, I know what's happening to the coastlines, and I know what a lot of the
problem with it is. This is the picture, right? That's the picture we like. Why do those people
that have those homes on the California hills, that are up there when the rains come real
hard, they go sliding down the hills, why are they all so upset?
I don't know. I mean, if you're going to build homes up there, so you can look at this, and
Mother Nature's going to do what she does, and the rains are going to come, and your
homes are going to go sliding down the hills, guess what? I don't think that was a very
good place to build a home. I don't think as we're facing major issues of coastal erosion,
that everyone wants to live where they can see
this. I don't think that's a good idea. You know, I would argue that that's not a good
solution to housing issues, and we need to address those kind of zoning issues and everything
so we can have systems of life enhancement. So let me close with one little story so I
don't go on here too long. I do want to save time for Abby. And here's what I would like
to say the challenge to us is, and this is why my heros, too, are these young students
who are here today. Here's a challenge we have, and this is to all the
scientists in the house, okay? I guess including myself. I'm one of those people. We've got
to learn how to communicate in a very effective and indigenous way the issues we are facing
so that a reasonably intelligent person can understand it minus all the jargon, all the
scientific jargon. Sometimes scientists are their own worst enemies when
they're asked to get up and give a talk about their research or what they're doing. I think
the anecdote to this is the following. Alfonzo Ortis [phonetic] told a story at a
seminar I attended almost 25 years ago, and the story goes like this. The three Cs, community,
communication and culture. Life ways, systems of life enhancement. That's what we need to
aspire to so we can respect the water we depend on.
Alfonzo Ortis said, I came home from the University of Chicago, and the first thing
my grandmother asked me--he was Tewa Pueblo, and said, first thing she asked me, she said,
was tell me what you've learned, and he said, Grandma, I can't tell you what I've learned.
I've been at the University of Chicago studying anthropology with some of the most advanced
and world-recognized anthropologists in the world. I can't translate
that into Tewa. She says, grandson, tell me what you've learned, and he says, okay, I'll
try. And so he struggled mightily. His grandmother only spoke Tewa, and he put into
Tewa what he had learned. His grandmother said, grandson, that's good. Go back.
Second year he comes back. So now he's a second-year graduate student, University of Chicago. Comes
back. What does his grandma do? First thing she does, sat him down, said grandson, tell
me what you've learned. He said, grandma, I can't tell you
what I've learned. All these theories and things, there aren't words for that in Tewa.
I can't tell you in Tewa what I've learned. She said, grandson, if it's important, you
can do that. He said, I struggled mightily, and he said, I did it. And when I got done,
she said, that's good. Go back. Learn some more. The third year, he comes home at
Christmas time, and his grandmother sits him down and says, tell me what you've learned.
He said, Grandma, I cannot. She says, in Tewa, please, grandson, tell me what you've
learned. He said, grandma, I can't do it. The things, these concepts, these theories,
these ideas, I cannot put that into Tewa. His grandma was very disappointed, and his
grandma, he said, looked him squarely in the eyes and said, grandson, it's time for you
to come home. He said, what do you mean, come home? She
said, if you can't explain what you know to your Tewa relatives, that can't be good knowledge.
Now, there are a couple ways to read that. One way to read that would be well this is
just classic ethnocentrism. This is an ethnocentric bias. But another way to read it is what his
grandmother was saying is you are Tewa. You are part of a community. You are
part of a culture, and if you cannot communicate what you're learning to your human relatives,
to your closest relatives, what good is this knowledge?
I think we have a big challenge ahead of us, and I think we need to work on communication,
and I think we can do it. We're up to it, and I think we've got some young Native scholars
and future scientists and transmits and researchers that are going to help us get there. Thank
you very much. [Applause]
DR. BERREIRO: Thank you, Wildcat. He is kind of a wildcat. I want to introduce a young
person, now, Ma'Ko'Quah Abigail Jones, Prairie Band Potawatomi citizen, student at Haskell
Indian Nations University. Ma'Ko'Quah, a citizen, again, of the Prairie Band Potawatomi, is
currently majoring in Indigenous and American Indian Studies. While at Haskell, she has
been involved with the Haskell Environmental Research Studies Program in collaboration
with University of Kansas. She recently received top honors at the American Indian
Higher Education Consortium for her ongoing climate change research. Jones has presented
her research at several conferences, including the 21st National EPSCoR Conference in Washington,
D.C., and the Native Peoples/Native Homelands Climate Change Workshop II in Prior Lake,
Minnesota. Speaking of communications, she is currently the assistant
editor of the Indian Leader newspaper, America's oldest Native American student newspaper,
and also editor of the Indian Leader Journal, Haskell University's first student magazine
publication. We need communications. Abigail? [Applause]
MS. MA'KO'QUAH ABIGAIL JONES: Good afternoon, everybody. Let's see if I have
a little bit better luck with this than Dr. Wildcat. Aha. Good afternoon. My name is Ma'Ko'Quah
Abigail Jones, and like you said, I'm a citizen of the Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation.
I'd like to take the time today to offer prayers up for Billy Frank and his family. He was
unable to be here because of a tragedy in his family, so I'd like to send prayers out
to the Frank family. Also, I'd like to take the time to thank the
coordinators of the Haskell Environmental Research Studies
Program that I'm a part of, and that's Dr. Dan Wildcat. He's also my advisor, and Dr.
Joan Nagel from KU. She's very helpful in critically analyzing my stuff and keeping
me on focus. So thank you, guys, and thank you to the National Science Foundation, EPSCoR
program, which is the experimental program to stimulate competitive research. And also
for the American Indian Museum here for allowing
me to speak. Thank you so much. I appreciate it.
So my project today is called Oceanic Manifest Destiny, and the idea is
that Native Americans have already faced manifest destiny once in our history, and now we're
facing it again from the oceans. And I'm focusing on climate change, forced relocation and indigenous
peoples. Even though I'm a member of the--a citizen of the Potawatomi Prairie Band Nation,
my family lineage comes from the Mikasuki [phonetic] people
from Florida. So this is what drives my passion to help these people and to prepare them for
what's going to come. Some of the questions that I asked myself when I started this, and
what I wanted to really look into is as these sea levels are rising, where are these people
going to go? What's going to happen to them? What fate do they have laying before them?
Are American Indians facing relocation once again?
Is the same thing that's played out in the past going to be played out in the future
as well? When we look at forced relocation,
and we're looking at what's happening and everything, what is the true cost of that?
What's really at stake here? Is it dollars? Is it economy? Culture, people, lives, everything?
So climate change is happening. Science is showing that the earth's temperature is heating
up, and Dr. Maynard did a very good job of introducing my research today. But
I'm looking at a slightly different angle than that. So we're seeing the intergovernmental
panel on climate change has these great graphs showing the relationship between the temperature
of the earth and the sea levels rising, the temperature of the ocean. So what's happening,
in layman's terms, is these human activities are causing the earth's
temperature to rise. There's too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, creating molecules
to move back and forth. It's warm. It's creating higher temperatures.
That, in turn, is causing the ocean temperatures to rise. When the ocean temperatures rise,
the molecules in the ocean expand. When they expand, they take up more space on the earth.
So that's the main cause of sea level rise. In addition to that, there's also melting
ice glaciers that are turning into water, and all this is
contributing to the oceans that are rising and inundating land. In the South Pacific,
we have an introduction of the world's first eco refugees. That's what they're being called.
The tiny islands of Tuvalu are the first country to actually evacuate people from their nation,
from their homelands, to a new nation, New Zealand, because of sea
level rise. They've already lost one of their smallest islands there, and around their largest
atoll, or island, they've lost approximately one meter already. So that's a lot
of land to lose, and these lands are small in the first place, to begin with.
They had approximately 12,000 people. They've evacuated 3,000, which is almost a quarter
of their entire population. And where they're being moved to is from here, which is their
huts and a very traditional coastal lifestyle, where they live
traditionally, to here in South Auckland, which is very much urbanized society, which
is a far different society than what they're used to.
Here in the US, we are already seeing these types of relocations, too, starting to take
place. Dr. Maynard mentioned - - . There's also two other villages that are being
assessed at the moment for relocation. Kevalina [phonetic] and Nutak [phonetic]. They have
been assessed by the USGS and the Army Corps of Engineers. So Kivalina has
approximately 377 people, and it's going to cost $400 million to relocate that small village.
Same thing for Shishmarev [phonetic]. They have a population of about 562. This is according
to the US census data, and that's going to cost $180 million to move them. For Nutak,
it's the same thing. 341 people. It's going to cost $130 million.
However, when you look at this, this is just in dollar amounts what it's going to cost
to physically remove them. What about their culture? What are they losing? How do you
put a price on the culture that's lost in the process of this? They can't put a price
on that. That can't be bought back. You can't assess that type of information.
The process is scary when you think about the oceans rising, claiming lands, having
to move, people will probably die in the process. So when I started thinking about my own
lineage, and looking at Florida, which is one of the next states that is most vulnerable
to sea level rise, I put together a similar map like Dr. Maynard mentioned, but this one's
looking at--what you can't see there, in the red, that's reservation lands. That's not
big cities or anything. Those are reservation lands, and they're small to begin with. In
comparison to a much larger state, the indigenous peoples there have a much smaller land base.
So when that's lost, where will they go? Here's a list of all the people that live there.
The Mikasuki, the Brighton, Hollywood. These are all reservations that are located there.
I put an interactive map from one meter to six meters, what it's going
to look like. Here's one meter of land, how much is being
claimed already. Two meters. Three meters, you start to see a much bigger area being
claimed. Four meters, five meters, and at six meters of
land, you can see that 90% of those reservations are just gone. They're underwater. They're
no longer habitable. They can't be accessed. It's a scary future.
More importantly than just sea levels, there's also things going on ahead of time, precursors
to these sea levels coming. We're already seeing those. More hurricanes, extreme storm
surges, things like that. And what's happening is they're causing the land and infrastructure,
and it's already costing them billions to rebuild. This is billions of dollars that
tribes just don't have that kind of money. They don't have access to that money.
Then you look at the land, which is more important to indigenous people, more important than
economy and all that. Their land is the most important thing to them. What's
happening is it's being inundated. The salt water from the ocean that's flooding this
land is causing it to not grow crops like they used to, their traditional crops, things
like that. It's eroding the top soil and not allowing them to plant foods and things like
that. It's consuming their freshwater sources. As we know now, fresh water is hard to come
by. So it's already consuming their fresh water,
which we know is much more detrimental. Oh, and biodiversity, sorry. Biodiversity
is becoming less and less. The fish that come there, that they depend on, indigenous people
build their ceremonies, build their lifestyles around their land, the fish, the animals.
They all have a relationship with all of that. So when you
have fish that's no longer coming there or producing, then that's a huge loss to indigenous
people's culture. It impacts their traditions, traditions that they've perfected
over thousands of years of living there, and now they don't have access to that anymore.
So then their land also becomes uninhabitable. Then they have to move. That's the forcing
of the moving. I looked up some of the things that refugees
are going through. You don't think about in terms of--or people don't
think about--they think about moving people, but what do these people go through in the
process? There's psychological trauma. When they move, they're facing a lot of prejudice
and racism. There's a lot of paperwork and things to establish your identity in this
new culture, in this more dominant culture. You have to change jobs and employment,
and a lot of these people are still traditional families who live farming, fishing, and then
they have to move and get factory jobs or they have to get corporate jobs or even just
McDonald's jobs and things like that. A far cry from what they were used to.
There's little support there. Sometimes you split families, and there's culture shock.
There's a lot of culture shock. They have to learn a new language. They have to--they
don’t have access to the lands to practice their traditions anymore. It's not
the same land. Therefore, it's not the same traditions.
So there are a lot of problems that go into removing people from their homelands. There's
a psychological process that's really devastating. So when I thought about my research, I thought
about what about their children and their children's
children? What we talk about at Haskell is what about seven generations down the line?
What are they going to be experiencing? Are they going to still be living these
same things? We can see that in Native American history, a lot of the problems that are going
on now. So how are their decendents going to cope with being removed from their homeland?
So what needs to happen, and this is where my project comes in, is to have indigenous
led research, to have research being done by indigenous
people for their own indigenous people. The great thing about tribal college is they educate
indigenous people, and it's a very unique education. Like, Dr. Wildcat mentioned earlier,
it's a unique experience to be educated at a tribal college instead of a mainstream college.
You have access to a lot more education than you would have
from books or lectures or things. We can talk to elders. We're encouraged to go back and
talk to our elders and a lot of these things. But they produce indigenous
scientists. They graduate with science degrees, social science degrees. We're producing scholars.
So we have ability now to do indigenous research with our people, and not just rely on the
research that's being done from other mainstream universities about our people. That's where
I come in. I really want to help the Seminal tribe, work with them, and to use the scientific
data that's out there to relocated them south, something that's more culture-sensitive, something
that they can take charge and put more of an emphasis on protecting their culture as
they go through this relocation process, give them the resources that they're going to need
to thrive and not just survive. To use the research that is being
done on climate change, to give them access to that so that they can educate and empower
themselves to do this, and encourage an interdependent relationship with the government, no longer
a dependent domestic nation, but interdependent nations where we can move ourselves, and we
can have resources and things like that from the government, but not rely completely on
them for our protection, survivability and things like that.
So our lands are being destroyed, and indigenous peoples are the first people to
be greatly impacted by that. They really are, like the canary in the mine. So what we need
to do as indigenous people and in general, people, is to help protect these people's
lands, to allow for them to be protected, to have a new land base for them that they
can call their home, and not just move them into big cities and expect that they're going
to still survive and have access to their culture and all of that.
An important message that I would like to get across in my research and in speeches
and things like that is that these are different independent, unique cultures. We have the
Mikasuki culture, which is where my family's from. We have the Tuvaluan culture, like I
mentioned. We have the Seminal culture, you know, and with all the other interns that
I work with, we have Dene culture, we have Sisatinwapiktan [phonetic] culture. We
Chaktak [phonetic] culture. You know, we're not just Native Americans. There's different,
individual cultures that are at risk of being lost because of the loss of the land. Without
our land, these cultures cannot exist. They just don't. They can't just pick a new land
and just practice their traditions there. This is practical use of
this land that has developed over centuries. So hopefully we can take charge and not just
preserve these cultures, but to help protect them.
That's where everybody can come in and help protect these cultures. Instead of just preserving
a part of history, ensure that in the future, they will be able to thrive in general. Thank
you. [Applause]
DR. BERREIRO: Thank you. It's good to see young people involved. Dan, I
want to apologize to you, brother. I made a little funny joke off your name, and I shouldn't
do that in front your students, in front of anybody because I have immense respect for
this Dr. Wildcat. Now, I think we can take some questions and
answers from the audience, if people have a mind to, and perhaps we can bring these
chairs up.
So what did you learn today? DR. WILDCAT: Come to the microphone, and you
can use that, or you can bring the microphone to them. Wow,
all right. MALE VOICE: My question to you is have you--I
mean, I'm sure it has been researched, but have you, in your research, looked at the
first time the Indians were moved from their original homelands to where you are today?
And it seems like to me, that would say, here is what the new Indian nations will face when
they're forced to move from their homelands now, and
so that would give you a little bit of prediction, maybe, of what you're obviously going to face.
MS. JONES: Yeah, actually, that's what I'm in the process of doing research on, is looking
at not only just the relocation but the processes because each tribe was relocated differently.
I know in my tribe, the Prairie Band Potawatomi, it was contracted
out to businesses, where they in turn got payment when they relocated people. They actually
paid more for dead Indians than they did live ones that reached their destination.
So it was very much a contract, and I've done that research on my tribe. I'm also looking
at statistics of what living conditions are for tribal nations today and showing that,
as a template, if things don't change, then yes, we're actually going to see a lot of
the same things. A lot of other nations kind of use the United States' relocation
policy as a template on how to relocate people. They use a lot of the same tactics, a lot
of the same policies and things like that. So what we're seeing around the globe is some
of the very much similar living conditions for relocated peoples, just the same as Native
Americans. You have people in Africa, you have people in Bangladesh, other
indigenous peoples who are--their living conditions are very similar because of that. That's hopefully
what we can see as a failed policy thing, a failed process, and make changes
to that. But I think it's going to be up to each individual
nation to make their own policy about relocating their people instead of just having a flat
across the board thing. That's what I'm hoping to start taking an initiative for the Seminal
people to do that. MALE VOICE: I have a statement and a comment.
I want to state something that Abigail missed. The tribe she's actually studying is in the
same place that they traditionally lived, so they haven't actually moved. I thought
that was pretty important. I also wanted to ask you, what made you decide to study the
Tuvalu? MS. JONES: Actually, the Seminal, as
a tribe, each person historically back in the 1700s, the Seminal people are made up
of a bunch of tribes. There was a tribe there, that lived there, but there was also other
tribes that came and relocated with them and got lumped in as a Seminal people. Now they're
acknowledging their differences. Like, the Mikasuki are now their own separate tribe,
and they weren't considered that before. The reason why I want to study Tuvalu is because
right now they're trying to get people aware of what's going
on in their nation as a direct result of climate change. You know, it's not economy. It's not
anything else but climate change that's causing them to lose their homelands. So because they're
the first people to emerge and be on the forefront of this, I wanted to be there and use them
as how is the world responding to these eco refugees? How is the
world going to respond once again to people who are going to have to be relocated?
FEMALE VOICE: I have a couple of questions. My first question, for
people who are connected with the land, who are paying attention, the issue of climate
change is clearly evident. Many times in indigenous cultures, a connection to the land is embedded
in the culture. What are your recommendations for people coming from cultures who have intentionally
insulated themselves from the environment, who are no
longer mostly farming the land, they have to go to a grocery store to get their food.
They don't necessarily see or pay attention to the changes that are occurring each day.
The second question I have is specifically for Dr. Maynard. You mentioned in your presentation
that with the Exxon Valdez spill, the initial cleanup was actually more
detrimental to the environment, and I wondered if you could talk about that a little bit
more and if you see that same scenario playing out with this current oil spill.
DR. WILDCAT: I'll take your first question about--I made an allusion to it, and I'm kind
of cramped for time, never really directly addressed it. How do you make a connection--say
you're living--you've grown your whole life in Washington, D.C. or New York City or Chicago
or a suburb of Los Angeles. I think the way you do it is that you begin to, one, walk.
I think one of the things that people don't have any appreciation more is anymore the
space that they're in. I know not everyone's this way, but there are a lot of people who--and
it seems to only be getting worse with GPS systems, that aren't even paying attention
to urban landmarks because they got a little thing on the front of their dash that's telling
them where to turn. What happens when that won't
work? I think people need to get outside. If you want to think outside the box, get
outside the box, and you've got to get outside. And
what this means is, is you will get a keep appreciation for urban landscapes, maybe understanding
some of the issues about flooding, why storm water drainage isn't quite what you would
want it to be. I understand there was a little bit of that here happening the other day,
why maybe some power went down in places. But I think more importantly to that, Tom
said something this morning--I know most of you weren't here. Again, this may sound romantic
to some. I don't think it's romantic. I think it's realism. I think one of the things that
people need to do is start building homes where you have windows that open, where you
have walls that can be removed or slid open. This kind of barriers that we've created,
the way we've insulated ourself between out there and in here is what we've got to avoid
because my wife and I are probably one of the few people in Old West
Lawrence that does not have central air, and we--about this time of the summer, we're really
thinking why we don't have central air, but I will tell you, one of the advantages of
having windows that you open regularly in the old neighborhood that we live in, the
heart of Lawrence, Kansas, is that about 5:30, the alarms go off, and they're songbirds.
They make such a racket, I don't have to set an alarm because the birds wake me up.
And there's something very beautiful about that. When I do have to close the windows,
I will tell you honestly, the thing that I miss the most is hearing those birds in the
morning. That is a real, palpable connection. That's what people can do. Those
are some simple things we can do. Also, take a look at where your drinking water comes
from. Quit thinking about water in terms of when
you just turn that faucet on. That would be a good way to start. Does anyone know where
the drinking water in Washington, D.C. comes from? Is it coming from the river?
I wonder, and a lot of places in Kansas, you think it's the rivers, and you actually find
out it's groundwater. He was asking you about the cleanup.
DR. MAYNARD: Actually, I don't have a lot of details on that. I just was reading recently
a little bit about the cleanup. The cleanup was done for obvious reasons. Entire shorelines
were oiled, you didn't want to just leave it there, so people did go ahead and clean
it. Cleaning, especially in very cold waters like this, requires heavy--you
remove a lot of the substrate that's there. So I don't know if it caused more damage than
the original oil, but it's true in a lot of spills that cleaning it--for example, you
cannot even clean a marsh easily. If you clean it,
you remove it, basically. It's a much tougher problem in the tropics. It's not good in the
arctic either because it's cold temperatures, things don't evaporate quickly. So you're
kind of left with--you remove it because birds and other animals will get oiled, seals, whatever
if they haul up on it. But then again, you may destroy all the plants
or whatever were in that area. It's a tough problem. Doesn't have easy answers, especially
in a place like a marsh. FEMALE VOICE: My husband and I traveled down
here from Philadelphia because the themes that were being discussed here today were
so central to the things that matter to us, and
it just seems so often like there's an urgency to awakening the larger society that we just
don't have the luxury of a lot of time to trigger the kind of change that will, on a
wide, wide scale, for people that have not been connected to the spirit of Mother Earth
and to their surroundings, to get them out of their mentality of thinking, resource,
profit, exploitation, and thinking spirit, survival, community, relationships, as you've
been saying. You folks who are indigenous and have strong
ties to indigenous--to the indigenous people, you know, you are aware
of this on a level where you know your own survival and the survival of the larger planet
and all of us is connected to recognizing these conditions and finding creative ways
to change your thinking so that we can live more in harmony with these forces, but you
know, you're 1%, right on that graphic, and there's a whole 99% out there that is deliberately
insulated, is making choices that are not driven by these long-term values.
So my head is just spinning with yes, yes, yes, yes, yes to everything that everybody
said, and then the question for me is what can I do? What can we do to try to get our
segment of the world to react with the urgency, to embrace the kind of changes in the way
we live and the choices that we make with our dollars and cents. And I guess that's
a little bit of a rant and just a passionate statement of
what you've told me today and how that makes me feel. Anything you can say to help me leave
here with like one or two things I could do would be helpful.
And I had another more specific question about there were a number of examples in the presentations
that were made of how the observations, the keen observations that had been
made by various people had been explained to them by science, and they were able to
say--I mean, I'm saying to myself, oh, yes, that's why what I observed every season, what
I observed the way these larvae developed, that's
why. That's the scientific basis of it. I was wondering if there were some examples
going the other way, where an example of an observation triggered a thought for a scientific
study or a scientific direction that would close that whole feedback loop.
MS. JONES: I'm going to start out giving my answer to the first part of your
question. It doesn’t really make me popular among my group, but it's my--Dr. Wildcat and
a lot of people have their ideas on how people can have their own responsibility in climate
change and things like that and conservation. But what I encourage people because what I
see is a huge problem is the complacency of businesses. So what I do, and I encourage
my family and friends and pretty much anybody who will listen to me, is look at your leaders
in your local towns. I know we just had a vote the other day about our congressmen.
Those are the people who affect change in the government, and the government can create
guidelines and things like that. It's our responsibility to hold our leaders
accountable to what we want to happen. It's not just about Democrat and Republican. For
me, it's about what are they voting on? What's their history? What's their personal
views on the land and advocation for people and things like that.
So looking at who is speaking on your behalf to these businesses, who's speaking on your
behalf to the government because in my eyes, that's just as valuable as personal responsibility.
That's a part of personal responsibility, is seeing who's speaking
for you, and are they delivering the message that represents you.
MR. MORENO: Well, she asked us also about how indigenous people have contributed
to science or affected science in a positive way as well as Western science has affected
indigenous people, both positive and negative. I think most of the knowledge that you can
find in any biology course or ecology course, all of the relationships that are embedded
in nature, when they talk about the behavior of a bear, let's say, their
reproductive behavior, it wasn't until some western scientist came in to write about it.
It's knowledge that humans have collected for thousands and thousands of years. Some
of them were just observed a couple years ago, but some others were narrated from some
indigenous people to someone that knows how to
write, that is writing. Oral traditions is what I'm headed to. Oral traditions are huge
encyclopedias of human history, of human--of nature, ecology, biology, -
- any computers we can go on and search stuff. I think that oral traditions are very important
because when you get to understand your own oral tradition, you'll find that--I went to
college for five years, but I found that my oral traditions in the tribe are way more--how
can I say? Complete, sophisticated, than what I just learn in five years going
everyday to a classroom. So I don't know if that gets on the points that you were talking
about. MS. JONES: I want to say, too, that that's
kind of how our group started. When we became interns our first year, we were encouraged
to think about what's happening on our reservations and our homeland, what's happening. We started
there. There's a man studying Navaho culture and
corn and what's happening because of climate change. There's a woman who's studying the
mountains there and how the dust is covering the
mountains because of dust storms and things like that. So each one of us started out with,
hey, this is what's happening in my community, so now we can learn about why that's happening
in climate change and what they're saying about the future of that. I don't know a lot
of mainstream things that work that way, but that's how we were started and we were encouraged
to approach our research topics. I noticed that a lot of other tribal colleges, when
we talk to them, too, they're kind of doing the same thing.
They notice something happening in their own communities that they see, and because of
that, they're studying the research behind that. So that's the process that we take.
DR. WILDCAT: One comment about what you can do, and I have a feeling you've already
done this, but plant a garden. Doesn’t matter where you live. If you got some earth and
it's right in front of one of these old brownstones over here on the way to Georgetown,
you know, they got all these kind of landscaped plants in there. Put some peppers. Put some
tomatoes in there. You'll have to look at how much sunlight you get and things, but
grow a garden. Get your hands dirty. I think that's something that has some real value.
DR. BARREIRO: I would add something, Dan. Don't be silent. This is the purpose
of this here today is we need to communicate these realities again and again because there's
so much signal coming at us that people forget and they live their daily life, and it's not
easy. A lot of it has to do with policy making. The country's run by policy. It's not our
individual choice. We have no choice but to drive a car 99% of the time.
We have no choice but to fly a plane to go somewhere and so forth, use these new technologies.
And all of that is driven by policy. So let's not be silent. If you see it in front
of your eyes, a letter to the editor, communication, communication, communication. We know these
realities exist, but it seems like they easily drop off to the side.
We'll take a couple of more questions, and before it's over, I do want to tell you that
at 4:00 p.m., starting right about now on the second floor,
there's a celebration of a new exhibit, and at 5:00 p.m. outside, we have some wonderful
musicians, and it'll be a good concert. DR. MAYNARD: Can I make one comment, too?
You asked about instances where perhaps special knowledge has come from indigenous observations
to the science community, and we had kind of an interesting
experience recently because we're having a sensor we're trying to determine--we're working
with the reindeer herders, and they're having an increasing problem of something
called rain on snow because now you have more climate variation, even in the wintertime,
the temperature sometimes goes above, and lots of snow, and it gets really cold. It's
frequently 30 below. But occasionally, because of warming, I suppose, and variation, the
temperature will get slightly above freezing, and it will rain instead of snow.
Then of course temperature drops, and then you get an ice layer. And then it shows again.
If you get ice layers really locking the animals out from getting at any lichens that sustain
them, they're underneath all the snow. So it's a very serious problem for reindeer,
and these are large herds up in northern Norway and
Siberia. So if you have a rain on snow incident, it's
really important to know about because then you have this ice layer. We were trying to
figure out what the signals told us from the satellites.
It's a very hard thing to discriminate between water on snow, snow and ice. We're puzzling
over one little instance. So we checked with our reindeer herder colleagues. Sure enough,
they were a great calibration validation exercise. They said, yeah, sure, that day it rained.
Perfect. So we had rain on snow, and they gave us information.
It was extremely valuable for calibrating the instrument.
DR. BARREIRO: We'll take one question here. ISHMAEL: Hi, my name is Ishmael. I don't particularly
have a question. I just want to thank you for your wonderful observations, and the way
I was thinking how you embrace Mother Earth
as a spiritual entity, and I was wondering how you were going to be able to translate
that or explain that to other people, to have that
concept, as the mother as a spiritual--and all living things as a spiritual entity. You
described it very well as you spoke. All living things, the animals as being your brothers
and sisters, and all life, and you know, I had a dream, you know, that Mother Earth was
crying to me, and she was telling me, I give and give, and they take and take. I
had this dream vividly. I shared it with my wife, and she was crying as she was telling
me this, you know? But I know you people take it naturally because you've always embraced
the earth as a spiritual, living thing, and it's--I like the way you said it. It's not
a resource. It's a living thing. Thank you. DR. BARREIRO: I think we can take one more
question. This - - back here's had his hand up for a while, and we're going to have to
cut off the dialogue at that point. DEAN: Oh, thank you. I'm an Indian lawyer.
I'm a true believer in tribal sovereignty. One of the--I'm just kind of stunned that
nobody has been--Jose alluded to things that use fossil fuels, but nobody's really made
the connection. To change the trend of global warming, to avoid the most catastrophic impacts,
we have to move to a post-fossil fuel economy. We have to get really efficient. It hasn't
been happening. You've passed some legislation in the house, and it gets stalled in the senate.
We have an apparently dysfunctional system. We can't deal with this overwhelming problem.
To some extent, things are happening at non-federal level. Over 500 municipal governments have
pledged--taken on--launched strategies to deal with reducing their carbon
footprint through things like government operations, land use planning, building codes and such.
These are the kind of things that tribal governments ought to be doing.
What I want to suggest to you tribal college students is take this message to your tribal
leaders. We need the voices of tribal leaders moving us to an efficient, renewable energy
based economy. DR. BARREIRO: Thank you, Dean, and thank you
everyone. Thank our speakers, especially the young people
who are so involved. [Applause]
DR. BARREIRO: Second floor, good celebration, and outside at 5:00, concert.