Cool Ideas for a Long, Hot Summer: Indigenous Sustainability
In our miniseries Cool Ideas for a Long, Hot Summer, we’re working with Arizona State University’s Global Futures Lab to highlight bold ideas about how to mitigate and adapt to climate change. The miniseries has explored how economics can be used to advance environmental justice, how solar-powered canoes can protect the Amazon from deforestation, and how refugees create communication networks to respond to climate change.
On the final episode, host Kimberly Quach is joined by ASU professor Melissa K. Nelson. Nelson shares her thoughts about the impacts of climate change on Native American communities, agriculture, and what can be learned from Indigenous sustainability.
Resources
- See more of Melissa K. Nelson’s work on her website.
- Listen to the Cultural Conservancy’s Native Seed Pod, a podcast hosted by Nelson about Native foodways, ancestral seeds, and traditional ecological knowledge, and visit their Native Foodways page.
- Visit the Native American Food Sovereignty Alliance and the Traditional Native American Farmers Association websites to learn more about Indigenous farming techniques.
- Learn more about indigenous practices and environmental sustainability by reading Traditional Ecological Knowledge Learning from Indigenous Practices for Environmental Sustainability edited by Melissa K. Nelson and Daniel Shilling.
- Check out the other episodes in our Cool Ideas for a Long Hot Summer mini-series!
Transcript
Kimberly Quach: Welcome to The Ongoing Transformation, a podcast from Issues in Science and Technology. Issues is a quarterly journal published by the National Academy of Sciences and by Arizona State University.
I’m Kimberly Quach, digital engagement editor at Issues. On Cool Ideas for a Long Hot Summer, we’ve been working with ASU’s Global Futures Lab to highlight cool ideas about how to respond to climate change. We’ve explored how economics can be used to advance environmental justice, how solar-powered canoes can protect the Amazon from deforestation, and how refugees create communication networks to respond to climate change.
On our last episode of our mini-series, I’m excited to be joined by professor Melissa K. Nelson to learn about the impacts of climate change on Native American communities and what we can learn from indigenous sustainability practices.
Melissa K. Nelson: Thank you, Kimberly. I appreciate the invitation.
Quach: So the first thing I wanted to ask you is about the impacts of climate change. Could you tell us about the indigenous communities that you’re part of and you work with, and what are the challenges that they face due to climate change?
Indigenous peoples call themselves the canaries in the coal mine when it comes to all environmental change, but especially climate change.
Nelson: Yes, often indigenous peoples call themselves the canaries in the coal mine when it comes to all environmental change, but especially climate change. I was born and raised in California, and so I’ve worked a lot with native California Indian tribes, a lot of coastal tribes. And then also living in Arizona, in the Sonoran Desert, in the desert Southwest, working with a lot of the Native American nations and tribes in the southwestern area. My own tribe is up in the upper Midwest in the northern plains, the Turtle Mountain Chippewa Indian Reservation on the border of North Dakota and Manitoba, Canada. And we too are suffering from extreme changes due to climate change.
I think some of the most dramatic ones that we are all aware of is just unpredictable weather. Native knowledge is based on traditional ecological knowledge, and literally hundreds and thousands of years of data, of understanding the patterns in nature when the rains come in, when the thunder comes in, when the animals migrate. Today, those changes are happening at such a rapid and unpredictable rate. So things like having the salmon migrate up the river so that they can harvest and have their first salmon ceremonies, their feasts feed the family. It was all tied to their economy, their culture, their spirituality. That is really changing. Likewise, my nation, the Chippewa Cree, rely on moose and buffalo. And the migrations of those traditional animals are really dramatically changing because the food is not available where it used to be. Lakes are drying up, berries are desiccated. And so the traditional patterns of food procurement have really dramatically changed for folks who still relied on wild foods.
And then for farming communities, it’s really challenging because of the lack of rain. The soil moisture has become so dry. It’s a process called desertification. And so farmers are really struggling—all farmers—and native farmers especially with their smaller crops. So those are just…I could go on and on, but there are many different ways. I primarily serve indigenous peoples. Being a mixed race native woman. My dad was white Norwegian, my mom, Native American. And so I’ve really focused a lot of my research and activism and educational work serving Native American and Indigenous communities, and they’re very concerned about climate change and its impact on the land, on the water, and on our cultural practices.
Quach: So one of the focuses of your work, and what you were talking about earlier is the food system at large. Could you talk about the impact of the industrialized food system on sustainability and our climate? And what are Native practices that we should implement to improve that?
There are many different ways now, combining indigenous agricultural techniques and more contemporary sustainable agricultural practices like organic and regenerative farming, to transform our food systems because they’re in dire straits.
Nelson: Oh, yes. That is a great question. The industrial food economy or food system has dramatically impacted the health and sustainability of our earth, primarily due to all of the chemical inputs. Instead of relying on organic compost and other natural inputs to replenish the nutrients in the soil—which all organic, regenerative, Indigenous agriculture and traditional agriculture for centuries relied on—now, the use of chemical fertilizers of phosphorus and nitrogen has really created a process called eutrophication, where the runoff has really killed a lot of lakes and freshwater streams and water sources. Likewise, then there’s a lot of chemicals sprayed on—herbicides, fungicides, pesticides—and that all again runs off into water systems. That is the source of life for everything. So industrial agriculture has relied too much on these chemicals and also relied and focused on cash crops. So singular monocrops like cotton; we should not be growing cotton in the desert because it’s so water intensive and all of the little insects love it. So it has a lot of chemical dependency. And so we have to really focus more on polycultures which Native agriculture has always used more than one species. We have the traditional three sisters of Native American agriculture: corns, beans and squash, because they’re ecologically and nutritionally symbiotic. They support each other. The beans are nitrogen fixing for the soil. The squash leaves help shade the soil and retain moisture and create a better habitat for the corn. The corn, it has the large stalk that the beans can crawl around. So it’s really about symbiosis, mutually beneficial feedback loops with our Indigenous agriculture.
And just moving from aerial spraying irrigation to drip irrigation. Most of the aerial spraying—when you see the tsk tsk tsk water sprinklers—in the desert, 50% of that water is evaporated in the air before it actually even reaches the plants and the moisture. But if you put in drip irrigation, it conserves the water and the plants actually get more hydrated. So there are many different ways now, combining indigenous agricultural techniques and more contemporary sustainable agricultural practices like organic and regenerative farming, to transform our food systems because they’re in dire straits. The argument is always, you can’t grow that much food without using industrial fertilizers and pesticides. That’s the argument. But no, we haven’t really even tried it at the scale that we could try organic farming.
Quach: You anticipated one of my questions, which is a big counter argument, is how the monoculture came to be because of the need to feed so many people. Shifting back to the polyculture model seems to have a lot of challenges. One of them is the criticism you already brought up, and another is cultural, right? We’re very used to being able to buy a tomato in December.
Nelson:
If we literally just mapped our food sheds even a thousand miles—and it’s something I do with students, mapping our food sheds—we really can eat more locally and eat lower on the food chain and learn how to minimize our carbon imprint on the planet.
Exactly. So it is a full spectrum system transformation that is needed. And if we educate consumers—that’s why I’m in education and part of the Swette Center for Sustainable Food Systems at ASU. We have to educate consumers. We need to lower our carbon footprint on where food comes from and eat more locally, even regionally. Even if we just try to eat within our region, maybe one state or two states, which I think is very challenging. If we literally just looked at our food shed of a thousand miles. We were at the center of that circle and looked at all of the food that was produced, dairies, ranches, berry picking lettuce farms, small scale community gardens, farmer’s markets, sustainable meat packing areas. If we literally just mapped our food sheds even a thousand miles—and it’s something I do with students, mapping our food sheds—we really can eat more locally and eat lower on the food chain and learn how to minimize our carbon imprint on the planet. We can also really help transform the agricultural industry by demanding different types of food. We have a lot of power as consumers with what we eat for breakfast and what we eat for lunch and dinner. We have more power than we think by putting our money where our mouth is and purchasing different types of food. And also, social activism is also very important. Writing letters to our leaders and requesting and demanding changes in our food system. So I think it’s like I said, a full spectrum transformation from education to consumerism to the production and to policy.
Quach: Yes, I think that’s a very Issues-y pipeline because as an individual consumer sometimes there are a lot of things that make it really difficult to eat locally. One of them being access and expense, of course. So we need not just individual action, but policy change to make it more feasible for many people to access this type of agriculture.
We call it food apartheid. We don’t call it food deserts anymore because to the Akimel O’odham and the Navajo and the Pueblos, the desert is filled with food and filled with medicine.
Nelson: That’s right. No, there’s a whole environmental justice component. Absolutely. And we call it food apartheid. We don’t call it food deserts anymore because to the Akimel O’odham and the Navajo and the Pueblos, the desert is filled with food and filled with medicine. And so to call it a food desert is to denigrate the desert as a sacred place of life for many, many traditional peoples who’ve been in the desert. But food apartheid is real. Communities of color have suffered disproportionately from the pollution I mentioned earlier, and other pollution like factories and runoff and freeways, and also suffered disproportionately by not having access to fresh produce in grocery stores. They have to travel too far and it’s too expensive. So there’s structural poverty issues that also need to be addressed through policy and social change.
Quach: So you talked extensively about how we could bring these practices into our own lives by becoming a localvore, some of the other things that you mentioned, but are there other Indigenous practices that the listeners should adopt into our own lives to help mitigate the impacts of climate change? And if we’re interested in learning more, what should we do?
Nelson: Yes. There are many, many great organizations. I’ll speak just very regionally. We’re in the Arizona and the Southwest and desert farming and desert agriculture. The Native American Food Sovereignty Alliance is a wonderful organization. Lots of volunteer opportunities, online webinars, resources available. They’re based in Arizona in New Mexico. There’s the traditional Native American Farmers Association that also has an annual Indigenous permaculture training that all people are welcome to. And you learn all of these traditional techniques of drip irrigation and waffle gardens and water catchment systems, and so many different ways that we can learn how to use drought tolerant landscaping in our backyards—if we’re so lucky to have a backyard. Even people in apartments growing a few plants in a little shared patio and apartments to reconnect with nature. I think that’s part of it too. So much of our modern life is focused on mediated experience through technology, our phones, our computers, Zoom, televisions, et cetera, and really reconnecting with the sources of life, our waters, our foods, plants, animals, the air, fire.
There’s many different ways from small scale to large scale that we can make a positive impact to address climate change.
I think one of the other areas that Indigenous peoples really have to offer is an understanding of cultural burning and traditional fire management. Fire was seen as a medicine, not as danger, evil. It was something to be feared, certainly if it was out of control, but fire could be used as a resource management tool to reduce biofuels and help our forests be more healthy so that if lightning strikes, there’s not all this fuel load and biomass that creates these catastrophic, massive wildfires that get out of control. So Native American burning practices—what we call cultural burning—is finally catching on with the US Forest Service and Natural Resource Conservation Service, the US Department of Ag. People are realizing due to climate change, we’re having increased catastrophic fires because we have not been managing our landscape and our forests and our resources and tending to them with care and sustainable stewardship, which is really a value and a practice of traditionally ecological knowledge that was kind of lost with the preservation and conservation movement that focused on, it’s the only way to preserve nature is you just lock it up in a nature reserve and don’t touch it, or only have wealthy privileged people go hike in it on occasion. And we have to really transform that model of conservation because humans have to interact with nature. We are part of nature, and so we need to learn how to do that in sustainable ways and cultural burning, traditional agriculture, what we now call regenerative agriculture. There’s many different ways from small scale to large scale that we can make a positive impact to address climate change.
Quach: What you were saying about being disconnected from nature and nature being a bit of a place you go to, not a place that you’re in, really resonated with me as someone who’s always lived in cities. I think a lot of times access to nature is not…it feels actually like a very privileged white American thing. It wasn’t something my parents knew to do. It was just not part of our lives. And it’s something I’m only learning now through conversations like this and thinking about my place in the system.
Melissa K. Nelson:
Yes. Thank you for bringing that up. Yes. I mean, for a lot of people of color, urban areas were safer. Rural areas were not as safe. So it’s really this reckoning also too, with racial justice is another part of this story with reconnecting with nature, and there’s a lot of movement and actions now that are trying to do that in a much more better way. The combination of environmental justice and Indigenous rights and sustainability and regenerating a positive relationship with the natural world because it’s also good for mental health. It’s good for human health. It’s all connected.
Kimberly Quach:
Well, thank you so much for joining us. This has been a really enlightening conversation, not just about Indigenous communities, Indigenous knowledge, but how we should all think about our place in the world.
Melissa K. Nelson:
Will thank you so much, Kimberly, for the great questions and great conversation. Wonderful to speak with you today.
Kimberly Quach:
Check our show notes to learn more about Indigenous practices and environmental sustainability, and to find links to Melissa K. Nelson’s work.
Please subscribe to The Ongoing Transformation wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks to our audio engineer Shannon Lynch. I’m Kimberly Quach, digital engagement editor at Issues in Science and Technology.
I hope you enjoyed our mini-series! Our next season will launch on September 24! Please write to us at [email protected] with topics you’d like us to cover this season. Thanks for listening.