Climate scientists are working with indigenous tribes
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When the warm nights used to come each summer, Frank Ettawageshik would spend most of his time outdoors, sleeping outside, right on the ground. Today, he balks at the thought.
"I was 35 or so before I ever saw a tick," says the 74-year-old executive director of the United Tribes of Michigan, a Native American advocacy group. Now in northern Michigan, he says, "there's ticks all over the place".
Ettawageshik belongs to the Anishinaabe people, whose members are from the Great Lakes. His own Tribal Nation is the Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians, who have lived in the northwestern shores of Michigan's lower peninsula for centuries. Besides the spread of ticks, a phenomenon exacerbated by rising temperatures, they've witnessed the struggling populations of whitefish in nearby Lake Michigan and the gradual changes in harvests from the sugar maple tree, whose name in Odawa is "niinatig" — meaning "our tree". Research suggesting warmer temperatures might force sugar maples out of Michigan add to Ettawageshik's concerns. "Our tree is going to be moving away from us," he says.
Ettawageshik's tribe has observed many changes to their ancestral lands over hundreds of years, but Ettawageshik says human-caused climate change is different. "It's happening at a pace that we don't normally see."
For many people, climate science brings to mind satellite observations, temperature records or the analysis of ice cores. But there's plenty more data besides that. Indigenous communities that have long lived close to the land — and have traditionally depended on deep knowledge of their environments to survive — often hold their own records and recollections. These can include extraordinary details about alterations in weather patterns, changes in vegetation or unfamiliar behavior of animals that have emerged under their watch.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20231102-climate-scientists-are-working-with-indigenous-tribes
About time! Indigenous people might know more than we do.