Asserting Native Resilience: Pacific Rim Indigenous Nations Face the Climate Change

CURRENT RESPONSES

PAGE 108 ASSERTING NATIVE RESILIENCE: PACIFIC RIM INDIGENOUS NATIONS FACE THE CLIMATE CRISIS own local economies as a way to determine our own destiny? Now is the time to act. We can start by assessing our current economies. Food and energy consume massive portions of our tribal economies —nearly half of the average tribal economy is spent outside the reservation on energy and food. This creates a huge economic leak. We can set a goal to re-localize tribal economies by developing energy efficiency, renewable energy, and sustainable food…. There is a great deal of work taking place in our communities to relocalize food, energy, and to build resilient and sustainable economies. T he current debates around climate change often seem depressing and overpowering. The discussion usually centers on the global scale of “global warming,” and how can one person or family help protect the entire world? Changing individual habits is a start, but simply changing light bulbs is just not enough to slow the growth of fossil fuel industries that emit carbon gases into the atmosphere. Changing the habits of global industries and political institutions seems to move at a more glacial pace than the glaciers that are melting, especially when some leaders still blindly express skepticism that climate change is actually occurring. The changes that are necessary for survival are not happening at the level of the individual nor at the level of national or global policy. The most promising responses are at the level of local communities and regional bodies , working together to mitigate or adapt to the changing climate realities. The solutions that work might not be found at the United Nations or the U.S. Congress but in stitching together a series of local responses into regional quilts that can enhance the resilience of each ecosystem. With political self-determination, traditional ecological knowledge, and a resilient sense of community, Indigenous peoples are better suited to survive climate change than the mainstream, energyaddicted , shopping-mall society. Indigenous resilience requires turning ideas quickly into action. The Native communities that prepare the earliest for the inevitable changes will be those that make it. As the Nisqually treaty rights leader Billy Frank Jr. says, “Let’s stop talking about things and let’s get out there and roll up our sleeves and get busy.” The Ojibwe Anishinaabe community organizer and economist Winona LaDuke wrote in Indian Country Today on November 4, 2009: We have a shot at being self-determining or we can be the victims. This is a time of tumultuous change, economic downturns, accelerating climate destabilization, and the depletion of oil supplies…. If we don’t act, we will be caught in a very difficult place as indigenous peoples. We need to make decisions about the future of our communities and what that future will look like. Will we continue to rely on the outside industrial economy for our food, energy, and other basic needs or will we look to create our CURRENT RESPONSES Salmon bake at the 2011 Quileute Days festival in La Push, Washington. ...