This story is the final feature in a Vox special project, Changing With Our Climate, a limited-run series exploring Indigenous solutions to extreme weather rooted in history — and the future.

On a freezing January morning in 1863, American soldiers attacked a Northwestern Shoshone camp along the Bear River in what is now Idaho and slaughtered hundreds of Shoshone people in what is most likely the largest massacre of Native people in the US on a single day. The massacre was horrifically brutal. “[The soldiers] would grab the small children by their braids and crush their heads and bodies into the frozen ground,” Rios Pacheco, a Shoshone tribal elder, said.

Pacheco told me that, for generations, Shoshone people passed down stories about some parents being forced to let their babies float down the river that day so that their crying would not alert the soldiers to where a group was hiding along the riverbank. 

After losing their territory over the course of decades to Western expansion and violence, the tribe went generations without collectively owned land. 

But in 2018, more than 150 years later, the Northwestern Band of the Shoshone Nation bought back over 500 acres of land at the site of the Bear River Massacre. 

Since European colonization, Indigenous nations across North America have lost nearly 99 percent of their land. That seizure of Native territory and the development of American industry led to a devastating loss of life, culture, and community. It also set humanity on a course that was harmful to the environment. Western development has led to habitat and biodiversity loss and fueled climate change, spurring more extreme weather, such as drought, wildfire, and floods that have grown worse and more frequent. 

The Bear River land purchase was part of a growing movement, generally referred to as Land Back, that’s empowering Native people to address generational trauma and restore landscape health.

In recent years, hundreds of thousands of acres of ancestral territories have been returned to tribes. The movement is part of a larger reckoning, too: Last year, the US government concluded its Land Buy-Back Program for Tribal Nations, a decade-long effort to acknowledge historical wrongs and return land to tribal ownership. Over the course of the program, nearly 3 million acres in 15 states were consolidated and restored to tribal trust ownership. 

Land Back success stories often come with splashy announcements, but what tribes do afterward isn’t as well-publicized. And it’s in these often overlooked stories that tribes are doing work that doesn’t just help heal the injustice they suffered, but creates meaningful steps to adapt to climate change and build a more resilient environment.  

The Northwestern Band of the Shoshone Nation plans to embark on an ambitious restoration project at the massacre site, which they call Wuda Ogwa. The project will help make the area more climate resilient through the planting of native trees and the restoration of a wetland complex, which will add an estimated 10,000 acre-feet of water or more to the Great Salt Lake, which is disappearing because of extreme heat and drought.

After the Shoshone were displaced from the land, the massacre site was looted, and in the following years, the site was used by settlers for everything from cattle grazing and farming to a railroad and a failed resort. During the Great Depression, Russian olive trees were planted to help reduce soil erosion, but those trees are now considered an invasive species that sucks up water. 

Over the years, this all took its toll on the land. It also reduced one of the key water sources that feeds the Great Salt Lake. Now, drought is making the situation worse. 

As they work to overcome years of oppression and violence, the Northwestern Shoshone are also focused on healing the land. “We’re going to start to use that land as a place to regenerate not just the Earth, but also the people,” Pacheco said.   

For Indigenous communities, land has never been about simple ownership, but instead is about building a deep, complex relationship with the land. Now, as they begin to reclaim more and more ancestral territory, tribes are demonstrating that Indigenous communities can lead the way on climate adaptation through creative partnerships and ambitious restoration projects. 

All of this means that Land Back is not only an important cultural story, it could also prove to be a key part in the fight to build climate resilience. 

What is the Land Back movement? 

Although Indigenous people have been fighting for and regaining their seized land for hundreds of years, the modern concept of Land Back, sometimes backed by social media campaigns and well-heeled nonprofit groups, has only emerged more recently. The #LandBack hashtag, in particular, has found its own cultural niche thanks to moments like the viral social media posts shared by groups like the NDN Collective or influencers like Blackfoot meme creator Arnell Tailfeathers from Manitoba.  

Throughout the 20th century, many tribes steadily built up the funds to buy back their land. In the 21st century alone, dozens of tribes and Indigenous organizations have reclaimed tracts of land that total hundreds of thousands of acres across the country. 

Increasingly, tribes are finding new allies in conservation and environmental spaces, who recognize the positive impact that tribal land stewardship can have on the environment. 

Land Back can come about in different ways. Sometimes, tribes are able to directly buy back land with their own funds, as the Winnebago Tribe in Nebraska did. A nonprofit group can buy land for a tribe before donating it back to them, as the Trust for Public Land is doing with 30,000 acres it is returning to the Penobscot Nation in Maine. In 2018, an individual gave a couple acres of land back to the Ute Tribe just a few years after buying it. 

Then there are more nuanced co-management situations, such as Canyon de Chelly, which is a National Monument under the purview of the federal government, with the Navajo Nation maintaining some land and mineral rights. Most tribes, however, say that full ownership with no strings attached is the best way to uphold tribal sovereignty. 

Jan Michael Looking Wolf Reibach is the tribal lands department manager for the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde. “I think the most complete answer for a tribe is when they can recover the lands and have sovereignty over their lands and exercise our sovereignty,” he said. “The strongest and most powerful way for the tribe to restore our connection and bring healing to the land is when it comes back into tribal ownership.”

Anne Richardson is the chief of the Rappahannock Indian Tribe, whose ancestral territory is located in what is now Eastern Virginia. Richardson, who can remember her father and grandfather fighting with the state for recognition of their sovereign rights, believes that tribes are proving across the country that everyone else should have been listening to them all along. Traditional knowledge, passed down through generations, was once derided as primitive by Western scientists, but Richardson believes acceptance of that type of knowledge is finally beginning to happen. “Scientists are amazed that we had this knowledge and we never had a degree in science,” she said. “They need that traditional knowledge because our people flourished on these lands for thousands of years.”

Land Back projects are a chance for the tribes to build stronger relationships with each other and the land. Along the way, water is getting cleaner and land is becoming more climate resilient, even as the political outlook in the United States looks grim for the climate. 

President-elect Donald Trump has promised to withdraw (again) from the Paris climate agreement, among other actions that experts say could prove disastrous for the environment. These include opening public lands for oil drilling and resource extraction, as well as rolling back environmental regulations and undoing climate-friendly federal programs like tax credits for home energy improvements. 

Under these circumstances, any climate adaptation projects could prove to be invaluable mitigation against an administration that could add an estimated 4 billion tons of carbon dioxide emissions by 2030. 

Jason Brough, a Shoshone PhD student in anthropology and environmental policy at the University of Maine who has helped to map the Wuda Ogwa site, said that tribal Land Back projects could serve as a kind of safety net against potentially harmful federal climate policies. “If Indigenous communities and their partners can have these little niches where animals and plants are safe, that could be really important to get us through these next few years [under Trump],” Brough said. 

Of course, tribal sovereignty also means that tribes could decide to use the land they regain for something other than climate projects, per se, including for housing or economic development. But although there are many different Land Back projects with a variety of goals and processes, Reibach says the ultimate goal is the same: rebuilding a healthy relationship with the land and each other based on reciprocity rather than extraction. 

“Regardless of the project or the reason to acquire land back into tribal ownership, the process is very healing for us because it restores our connection to the land,” he said. “We view these lands as being part of us.”

Why Land Back can be a climate solution 

Across the country, tribal Land Back projects are proving, acre by acre and tree by tree, that their work is benefiting the climate. 

In Virginia, the member tribes of the Indigenous Conservation Council for the Chesapeake Bay are engaged in Land Back and restoration projects to help blunt the impact of climate change on the Chesapeake Bay, which could see more than 5 feet of sea level rise in the next century. In 2022, for example, the Rappahannock Tribe reclaimed 465 acres of land on what is called Fones Cliffs in Eastern Virginia. The tribe’s work on the land includes herring restoration, oyster restoration, and native tree planting. Much of the land was previously a large cornfield, and chemicals like phosphorus from fertilizer have degraded the water quality in the river. 

Two hours south, the Nansemond Indian Nation is working to reduce invasive species, protect against erosion, and restore water quality on a piece of land they acquired earlier this year that was once the site of a cement factory. Cameron Bruce, the Environmental Program Coordinator for the Nansemond Indian Nation, says he has noticed more birds and larger herds of deer on the property since the tribe began restoring it. 

In Oregon, the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde is working to restore the Willamette Falls area, which was recently the site of a paper mill. Lindsay McClary, restoration ecologist for the tribe, is working with her team to restore stream flow, replace culverts to create fish habitats, remove invasive species, and bring back fire to the landscape. Last year, the tribe conducted a prescribed burn on one piece of land for the first time in 100 years. McClary says that the impact of Indigenous land management is particularly clear in places like the Willamette Falls site, which was previously home to a Blue Heron Paper Company mill. “We’re helping restore some areas that were flooded by someone else’s maybe less than thoughtful decisions,” she said. 

“We see time and time again, those places become productive ecologically,” Jason Brough said of Indigenous projects on reclaimed land — meaning those lands “start having benefits for not just our own communities, but for everybody.” 

For Brough, Wuda Ogwa carries extra personal significance. One of Brough’s ancestors was shot in the chest at the Bear River Massacre but survived.

Rios Pacheco says that only one or two people from most family groups survived, but the fact that those people now have many descendants is a mark of the tribe’s resilience. Despite the pain and trauma that Brough still says exists at the site, he and the tribe are looking toward making it better for the future. Brian Andrew, the project engineer, said their approach to restoration is not simply returning the site to the way it was before the massacre. “We don’t want to put exactly what was there because we want things to flourish and can survive in today’s climate and future climate scenarios,” Andrew said.

In some ways, it is remarkable that just a few years after regaining such a culturally significant piece of land, the tribe is already working on a project that could benefit the entire region by adding desperately needed water to the Great Salt Lake. “That’s what’s beautiful about it,” said Maria Moncur, the tribe’s communications and public relations director. “We did it for our people, and it just so happens to help the watershed.”

“I know it’s a struggle,” Brough said. “I know we’ve been trying for over 500 years. But we’re at a junction right now where they get to make that choice again … between a path of living with Earth or a path of living against Earth.”

In early November, the Northwestern Shoshone organized a community planting event at the Wuda Ogwa site. Over two days, hundreds of both Indigenous and non-Indigenous volunteers came to plant thousands of new trees. Tribal leaders say that this work strengthens the tribal community and the environment, but also works to improve their ties with non-Native neighbors and community members. 

“What we’re doing at that massacre site is we’re paying tribute back to those victims,” George Gover, the executive director of the Northwestern Band of the Shoshone Nation, said. “We’re honoring them by putting water and life back into the Great Salt Lake. That’s what this project is all about: life.”

This story is a part of Vox’s special project, Changing With Our Climate, a limited-run series exploring Indigenous solutions to extreme weather rooted in history — and the future. It also appeared in our Today, Explain newsletter.

Hi, I’m Paige Vega, Vox’s climate editor. Over the past few months, I’ve been working with Joseph Lee, a New York City-based journalist and member of the Aquinnah Wampanoag Tribe, on a series exploring Indigenous solutions that address extreme weather and climate change. And today, on Indigenous Peoples’ Day, we’ve published the project’s latest feature, a story that takes us to Idaho, where the Coeur d’Alene Tribe is undergoing a sweeping, multi-decade effort to restore an important wetland on the reservation. Their restoration, guided by the return of ancestral food sources, could serve as a model for the rest of the country. You can read it here.  

Stories like the Coeur d’Alene’s highlight the value of Indigenous solutions as we face increasingly extreme weather and natural disasters and navigate the brutal effects of the climate crisis.  

Around the world, Indigenous people have the smallest carbon footprint, according to the United Nations, but are more vulnerable to the impact of climate change because they disproportionately live in geographically high-risk areas. 

At the same time, these communities are also key sources of knowledge and understanding on climate change impacts, responses, and adaptation. Their traditional knowledge — focused on sustainability and resilience, from forecasting weather patterns to improving agricultural practices and management of natural resources — has increasingly gained recognition at the international level as a vital way to tackle climate change.

I talked with Lee about the process of exploring several tribes’ climate dilemmas, and why the alternative posture they’re taking can offer us uniquely humble, approachable, and nature-first holistic approaches — something we could all take to heart. 

Our conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Paige Vega: Let’s talk about the project Changing With Our Climate and how it came to be. What were some of the goals you had — things you really wanted to hit home through these stories?

Joseph Lee: We wanted to look at different ways Indigenous people are adapting to climate change and extreme weather. For years, I’ve been hearing a lot about how Indigenous people are on the front lines of climate change and that Indigenous knowledge and land stewardship are good for the environment, so we wanted to explore in depth what that actually looks like in different Indigenous communities. In each story, we really wanted to focus on a specific community, to show the diversity of Indian Country, the challenges tribes are facing, but also the range of creative solutions they’re working on. 

How do you draw on your own perspective and life experiences as well as your professional experiences reporting on Indigenous communities?  

Writing this series gave me a lot of opportunities to think about my own tribe, the Aquinnah Wampanoag. For example, in writing about the Coeur d’Alene Tribe’s water potato harvest, in our story that published on Vox today, I was reminded of my tribe’s annual cranberry harvest, which I just attended. Or when I visited the Shinnecock Nation in August, I couldn’t help but see the similarities between their tension with their wealthy Hamptons neighbors and my tribe’s experience on Martha’s Vineyard. I think my personal experience can help me think about what questions to ask, but my background doesn’t give me any sort of secret code to understanding other tribes. Every tribe is different, and my goal for this series was to show the specific situations facing each featured community. 

What is the value of traditional ecological knowledge and Indigenous solutions? What can all communities learn from the distinct way that tribes grapple with extreme weather and climate change?

Indigenous traditional ecological knowledge is based on generations of experience with land and environment. The Coeur d’Alene Tribe, for example, relied on a beloved elder’s memory when they began reconnecting old stream channels in their wetlands restoration project. And in our first piece [about how an Alaskan tribe dependent on sea ice is adapting to rapid warming], Roberta Tuurraq Glenn-Borade, an Iñupiaq researcher, told me how she is gathering local observations about the climate in the Alaskan Arctic to help leave a detailed record for the future. That’s what Indigenous knowledge is, she said — an understanding developed over years and years. All of these stories show how it’s about constant evolution and looking forward. Indigenous knowledge has never been set in stone, and in the face of climate change, Indigenous people are adapting more than ever. 

What were some of the highlights or unexpected insights that blew you away?

One of the things that struck me is that Indigenous people have been saying and doing these things for years, so the question becomes what’s been stopping them [now]. Sometimes colonialism can seem abstract, but there are so many clear examples, whether that’s systemic racism in the Hamptons against the Shinnecock Nation or the legacy of allotment policies on the Coeur d’Alene reservation. Government policies have made it that much harder for tribes to adapt to climate change. Threats to tribal sovereignty can also be seen as threats to climate adaptation. 

On the other hand, despite the legacy of colonialism, some of these solutions are really straightforward ideas, like bringing good fire [also known as controlled burns] back to the land after decades of fire suppression policies. There’s a lesson here that we don’t have to overcomplicate these ideas, we just have to not just listen to people who have been doing the work for generations, but support them or get out of their way. 

What’s one lesson or takeaway that you’d like to leave readers with?

There are two things that I kept hearing while reporting these stories. The first is that we can’t control nature, that trying to impose our will on the environment has never worked. For the Shinnecock Nation on Long Island, for example, they understand that no matter what they do, they can’t stop the water from rising. So they are working with that knowledge to find a solution that will work for their community. 

The second is that we need to be thinking more long-term. The real change is going to take generations. A number of the Indigenous people I spoke to for this series talked about how they don’t expect to see the results of their work in their lifetimes, but they believe in it anyway. People in the Coeur d’Alene Tribe talked about how the previous generation of tribal leaders fought for legal justice but never saw the fruits of their labor, and now this generation understands they may not be around to see the salmon fully return, or their wetland restoration completed.

 I think that kind of commitment to an effort that you may never see completed is something we could all learn from. 

This story is the fourth feature in a Vox special project, Changing With Our Climate, a limited-run series exploring Indigenous solutions to extreme weather rooted in history — and the future.

Last October, Aiyana James attended her first water potato harvest on the reservation of the Coeur d’Alene Tribe in northwestern Idaho. The weather was unusually cold, but she was determined to harvest her first water potatoes, a small wetland tuber that’s one of the tribe’s key traditional foods. 

The smell of smoke and drying elk meat filled the air along the shore of Lake Coeur d’Alene, where the tribe set up food booths and educational stations. She waded into the frigid water barefoot to dig for the small tubers, while back on land, tribal members cooked them in a traditional pit bake, where elk, camas (a flowering plant with edible bulbs), and other locally harvested foods are layered.

James, who grew up in Portland, Oregon, and spent summers and school breaks on the reservation, was excited to take part in the harvest for the first time after moving to the reservation after college. But something was wrong: Early-season snow dampened the harvest, and although it was only a light dusting, tribal leaders spoke during the opening prayers about how unusual the conditions were. It had been a dry summer, and the water potato harvest was bad, something that has been happening more and more in recent years. 

“I know that this isn’t supposed to be how it is,” James said. “Deep down within me, I’m like, ‘This just doesn’t feel right.’”

After their land in northwest Idaho was carved up by 1909 federal allotment policies, Western agriculture, and logging thatback persists on some level today, the Coeur d’Alene Tribe lost a massive amount of acreage and, with it, their ability to manage the land and maintain balance between environmental protection and economic development. Salmon and trout disappeared from the streams. Fires became more frequent and powerful. Water potatoes and other key plants like camas, once staple foods for tribal members, started to disappear. 

Now, extreme drought is making the situation even worse. 

All of this is part of a reinforcing cycle of land degradation and climate change that the Coeur d’Alene Tribe has been fighting for decades. It’s a fight that James has now joined as one of the tribe’s first climate resilience coordinators. 

To protect their land and community, the Coeur d’Alene are in the middle of an ongoing, multi-decade effort that relies, in part, on elder knowledge to restore an important wetland. 

The tribe is bringing back beavers and salmon, restoring native grasses, and repairing stream channels. Collectively, those efforts are designed to restore balance to the landscape, make it more resilient to future climate change by fostering interconnected ecosystems, and, tribal members hope, one day allow them to rely again on important ancestral foods like the water potato.

“We’ve been living off of the foods that are on our land for thousands upon thousands of years,” James said. “Reconnecting with that food reconnects us with our land.”

Bring back the water potato, help the climate

Across the country, ecological restoration is increasingly seen as a key part of the fight against climate change, and wetlands provide an especially important service in an era of global warming: They absorb carbon from the atmosphere. 

For the Coeur d’Alene tribe, a healthy wetland signifies a way to curb rising temperatures that will provide the basis for the return of a rich food source and a traditional way of life. That a wetland serves as the lynchpin means that the tribe is taking on the restoration of an ecosystem that is especially threatened as the world’s climate trends hotter and more arid. Because wetlands are areas where water is at or near the surface for large parts of the year, severe bouts of drought made more common by climate change threaten their existence.

According to the US Fish and Wildlife Service, more than half of the wetlands in the lower 48 states are gone, and the rate of loss is only accelerating. Between 2009 and 2019, an area of vegetated wetlands in the US the combined size of Rhode Island disappeared. 

There’s an overarching effort underway to help these imperiled landscapes. The 2022 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act included $1.4 billion for ecosystem restoration and resilience, while President Joe Biden also signed an executive order setting a national goal to conserve at least 30 percent of the country’s lands and waters by 2030. 

The Coeur d’Alene aren’t alone in their focus on restoration, but they’re especially good at it. And their uniquely patient, humble approach could serve as a model for other communities working to restore the environment and prepare for climate change. 

Tribal knowledge and expertise is especially important for restoration because Indigenous people are the ones who know what the land was like before it was degraded and what techniques will help restore it. The thread that ties it all together is traditional food, like the water potato. These cultural foods build connections between people and land and act as an especially tangible measuring stick of the impact that those connections can have on the environment. 

James says that camas, for example, grows better when it is regularly harvested. But because so much Coeur d’Alene land is now owned by non-Indigenous people, tribal members often don’t have access to camas fields, and some that have been unattended for years are now suffering. 

“We need these foods, but they also need us to flourish and to grow and get better,” she said. “If we do these things right and we focus on restoring our relationship and restoring our connection with our culture, sovereignty, and traditions, then that’s going to have lasting effects.”

An environmental restoration — and a cultural one, too

On the Coeur d’Alene reservation, soil health and biodiversity have declined, the water temperature is rising, and extreme weather like heat waves and drought are increasingly frequent. But the tribe’s restoration work is beginning to pay off.  

In the summer of 2022, an adult salmon swam in Hangman Creek for the first time in around 100 years. Two years after the tribe released juvenile salmon into the creek, and after an arduous journey out to the Pacific Ocean and back, the tribe welcomed salmon back to the creek for the first time in generations. 

For Ralph Allan Jr., the tribe’s fish and wildlife program manager, it was the culmination of 20 years of work that began with long days of fieldwork like planting trees. Now, he’s leading the department as it prepares to bring salmon back to the reservation. 

Allan is also working to plant the seeds for a new generation of restoration advocates. He has led an internship program to get college students out in the field and three tribal members are currently enrolled in fish and wildlife degree programs. At the water potato harvest, Allan makes sure that department staff are working with the youth, showing them how to harvest the potatoes and pulling the kids out of the mud when they get stuck. 

This cultural and community work is part of the tribe’s restoration effort. Allan worries that the tribe’s younger generation is not as connected to the land as he was growing up. “We’re not just reintroducing the species of salmon back to our people,” he said. “We’ve lost that cultural connection to the salmon as well, so we’re reintroducing a whole culture of salmon.”

While salmon are a priority, they are just one piece of a complicated, interconnected ecosystem the tribe is working to restore. Take beaver dams. Dams raise the water table, extend the area along the banks of a river or lake that more animals and plants can inhabit, and keep more water on the landscape. All of this makes the area more welcoming to salmon and other wildlife, but also makes the landscape more resilient to drought and extreme heat because wetlands absorb and retain water that is released during drier periods, explains Tyler Opp, the tribe’s wetlands coordinator. 

The beaver dams also support clean, cold-water habitats for salmon, but to do that, they need trees. Since 2019, the tribe’s environmental programs department has planted over 18,000 trees from about a dozen different species, and plans to plant another 4,000 by 2025. 

The tribe has used beaver dam analogs — man-made approximations — to encourage beavers to return and posts to reinforce existing beaver dams. Gerald Green, a wildlife biologist for the tribe, says they are currently supporting about seven beaver dams in the creek. 

Trees, beavers, salmon, water — they’re all part of a cyclical, interdependent system the tribe is trying to restore and support. Cajetan Matheson, natural resource director and a tribal council member, says that addressing climate impacts or restoration goals one by one will not work. “Everything is really related to each other,” Matheson said. “You can’t just clear-cut a mountain and say, ‘Oh, now we’ve defeated the fire problem.’ There’s way more to it than that.”

These projects take time. Tyler Opp says that even though the scale of the work that needs to be done can be overwhelming, the tribe’s approach helps keep things in perspective. 

By keeping longer-term goals in mind, like bringing salmon back, which could take decades, the tribe avoids Band-Aid solutions. The whole tribal government buys into this approach, year after year and generation to generation, and although the tribe is limited by funding and capacity, like many public agencies, this commitment allows them to focus on projects that will contribute to achieving that long-term vision. Despite the constraints, the tribe can unify behind a shared vision of the future, based on their collective history, knowledge, and appreciation for the land. 

“The tribe is able to prioritize things on a far longer time scale than state and federal agencies,” he said. “The tribe doesn’t have to think in terms of the next budget cycle for getting work done. All of [the things we are doing] are done for future generations.”

Almost everyone I talked to in the Natural Resources Department credits that perspective to Felix Aripa, a tribal elder who died in 2016. He is seen as instrumental in setting the tone for the tribe’s restoration work. 

Even Aiyana James, who never had the chance to meet him, says she’s listened to old tapes of Aripa. He was an early proponent of using beavers as a restoration partner and helped with things as straightforward as pointing out where a stream used to flow so that the technicians could use that as a guideline to restore the course rather than starting from scratch or guesswork. “The ultimate goal for anybody that works here in the Fish and Wildlife Program is to leave a legacy the way that Felix Aripa left his legacy and his mark on the program,” Allan said.

Before he passed away, Aripa helped Matheson and others put the tribe’s traditional seasonal calendar on paper. The calendar, which is based on seasonal indicators like tree sap rather than months and days, includes detailed information about foods, ecosystems, plants, animals, and human activities. “As we’re thinking broadly about how we approach restoration, it’s the framework that we can use,” Laura Laumatia, the tribe’s environmental programs manager, said. “It represents millennia of knowledge.” 

So while the tribe is proud of their progress, they are still working for the future. “I think it’s nice to work for 20 years in the same place because you do see some changes happening,” Laumatia said. “But we know that the fruits of our labor are really going to be 70 years from now.”

This story is the third feature in a Vox special project, Changing With Our Climate, a limited-run series exploring Indigenous solutions to extreme weather rooted in history — and the future.

There’s a modest hill in Seneca Bowen’s yard that gently slopes upward, away from an inlet that leads into southeastern Long Island’s Shinnecock Bay and eventually into the Atlantic Ocean. In 2012, when Hurricane Sandy ripped through Long Island, those few feet of elevation were the only thing standing between the flood waters and Bowen’s house. 

On a recent August afternoon, Bowen and I walked around his land as he recalled how Sandy wiped away the small beach at the edge of the property, where Bowen grew up swimming and fishing. Bowen showed me exactly how high the water came that year: 100 yards past the usual high tide mark. In the years since, that beach has become a grassy wetland that floods regularly, encroaching ominously on his home.  

Bowen, who is 36, lives on the Shinnecock Nation reservation on the eastern end of Long Island, where his community is facing a dire situation. 

About half of the Shinnecock Nation’s 1,600 tribal citizens live on an 800-acre reservation that includes 3,000 feet of shoreline on Shinnecock Bay. Of the roughly 250 homes within Shinnecock territory, around 50 are on the coast and in immediate danger from rising sea levels and increasing flooding. Powerful storm surges, which are also becoming more frequent, make all of this even worse. 

“We’re running out of space,” Bowen, who is the treasurer of the Shinnecock Nation Council of Trustees, told me. “Our population is going up. We haven’t been able to acquire more land.”

But water isn’t the only thing hemming the Shinnecock in. In every direction, they are surrounded by the multimillion-dollar homes of Southampton, sometimes mere feet from the border of the Shinnecock Nation. As Bowen stood facing the water at the edge of his land, he pointed out the Southampton Yacht Club, a private club directly across the water from his home. “We’re surrounded by some of the most wealthy people in the country and then you have us sitting here struggling to just make ends meet,” Bowen said. “I mean, hell, I’m a council member and I live paycheck to paycheck.”

For nearly 400 years, since Southampton was settled in 1640, the Shinnecock have fought to stay where they are. Now, climate change is making the fight to stay on their homeland even more difficult as sea levels rise and storms grow stronger and more frequent. In the past few years, the Shinnecock have employed a combination of strategies to protect themselves against rising seas, like planting beach grass to strengthen dunes and developing oyster reefs to blunt tidal energy. 

But unless the pace of climate change can be slowed, these solutions will not be enough to save Shinnecock lands, which currently represent only a fraction of their ancestral territory. The tribe’s 2013 climate adaptation plan predicted that nearly half of the Shinnecock reservation will flood after a major storm in 2050. Forecasts have only gotten worse since then. 

“At some point — I don’t want to say in the near future, but certainly by the time my kids are old enough to be in charge — half the rez is going to be underwater,” Bowen said. “We obviously don’t want to leave our homeland, but at some point we’ll probably be forced to do that.” 

What Bowen is talking about is known as managed retreat: the strategic relocation of people or communities away from areas vulnerable to climate impacts like flooding. 

Centuries of colonization have robbed Indigenous nations of most of their land, but as the Shinnecock grapple with climate change and retreat, they’re pursuing a solution that’s radical in the face of contemporary history: expanding their territory.  

“[Other] Council members and I have realized that we need to start making some serious money so that we can start purchasing land, not just for commercial use, but for residential purposes,” he said.

Unsurprisingly, most people are not excited about having to move away from their homes, especially when the impacts of climate change can sometimes feel abstract. But projections show that more people in the coming years — those who live near the coast, in overgrown forests, or in paths of destruction like tornado alley — may be forced to relocate. 

On Shinnecock territory, coastal areas represent such a large portion of their land that they will feel every inch they lose. Even without storms, Gavin Cohen, the Shinnecock Environmental Department’s natural resource manager, estimates that at least 7 percent and 15 percent of the current Shinnecock territory will be completely lost to water by 2050 and 2100, respectively. While all of Long Island, including Southampton Village, is projected to lose land, many of these communities have more land to fall back on, not to mention more resources to deal with climate change. 

The map on the left shows what 1 foot of additional mean average sea level rise would look like in the area near Shinnecock Bay; the image on the right shows what 7 feet of additional mean average sea level rise would look like. | Source: NOAA.gov

The Shinnecock are far from the only ones who will need to deal with this. Around 129 million Americans — nearly 40 percent of the population — live in coastal communities. Even if the world can significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the average sea level in the US could still be about 2 feet higher in 2100 than it was in 2000. With less aggressive climate action, projections show that sea levels in the US could rise by over 7 feet by 2100. 

Sea level rise at these rates means that millions of Americans will have to move, which will lead to devastating impacts on roads, schools, and other critical infrastructure. By 2050, for example, damaging floods are predicted to be 10 times more frequent than they are today. “It’s getting bad, and it’s only going to get worse because Mother Nature is far more powerful than we are,” said Sunshine Gumbs, project manager of the Shinnecock Ethnobotany Project. 

In July, the Atlantic hurricane season got off to a deadly start when Hurricane Beryl, the earliest Category 5 storm on record, made landfall, leading to dozens of deaths and billions of dollars in damage. The hurricane season, which NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center forecast to be above normal, extends to the end of November, and many of the strongest storms may be yet to come. 

These storms come with violent winds, storm surges, and rainfall that can cause flooding and other damage in coastal communities. As climate change makes these storms more frequent and more devastating, many more coastal communities must reckon with their increasingly precarious positions. 

But relocating an entire community is an enormous task. 

When Shavonne Smith, the director of the Shinnecock Environmental Department, thinks about possible relocation, she thinks about her massive extended family, nearly all of whom live on the reservation. “How do we take as many of us together as we can?” she said. “Because when people say that, you know, ‘you just have to move,’ it’s not that simple just to move. It’s not like me moving by myself. We’re talking whole families. How do you have somewhere for whole families to restart again?” 

Smith, who has worked for the tribe for nearly 20 years, says she understands that some people may never leave, even as the waters reach their door. But she believes it is her job to prepare everyone for what’s coming and give them the tools to make choices. 

To do that, Smith has partnered with Malgosia Madajewicz, a Columbia University economist who is running a three-year study of community adaptation to coastal flooding. The study consists of four community workshops and is designed to help the tribe develop a multifaceted response to flooding. 

After just one workshop, Madajewicz says she is already finding valuable lessons in the Shinnecock approach. “They’re really planning for a few generations, whereas in other communities, there’s often a time horizon that revolves more around political cycles and is much shorter,” Madajewicz said. “If we have a hope of rescuing life from this crisis, protecting it into the future, we have to lengthen our planning horizons.” 

But relocating an entire people — especially around some of the most expensive real estate in the US — will take a massive amount of money and land. 

If the Shinnecock do buy more land for the community to relocate to, they would prefer for it to be in their ancestral territory, which covers thousands more acres and several adjacent towns. But Bowen says he and a few others have floated the idea of land in the Catskill Mountains, a forested area about a hundred miles north of New York City, and far from Shinnecock ancestral land. 

Leaving Shinnecock lands would be devastating, Bowen says, but buying land in the Hamptons is prohibitively expensive and rife with nimby — not in my backyard — opposition. 

In the past five years, the Shinnecock have embarked on a number of economic ventures, such as a gas station and travel plaza, only to see them delayed by lawsuits and local opposition. Bowen says they have had to fight for every dollar and permit, especially for proposals on land that the Shinnecock own outside of the reservation, in nearby Hampton Bays. 

“Every project that the tribe has ever tried to do has been slowed or stopped by some special interest group that’s in this area, by the town or the village itself,” Bowen said “What should have been a money-making opportunity has now turned into a revenue stream that goes to our lawyers to fight our battles in court.” 

As a member of the Aquinnah Wampanoag tribe on Martha’s Vineyard, I’m used to the juxtaposition of tribal communities and wealthy summer homes, but the level of ostentatious wealth on display in Southampton was jarring, even to me. On Southampton’s main street, I walked past real estate offices advertising homes in the tens of millions of dollars. I saw summer crowds flocking to boutique shops and restaurants. Minutes from Bowen’s home are verdant streets where tall hedges shield multimillion-dollar homes, pools, and tennis courts from view. Despite living just minutes away, Shinnecock territory residents are excluded from resident parking rates for Cooper’s Beach, a nearby beach that proudly advertises its recent ranking as one of the top beaches in the country.

William Manger Jr., the Mayor of Southampton Village, did not respond to a request for comment.

On the reservation, Bowen says that the median income is around $30,000, which is a tiny fraction of what some Southampton homeowners likely pay to maintain their manicured lawns. To be clear, that’s just the grass, not the horses, private chefs, cars, boats, or any of the other trappings of Southampton wealth. “As soon as you walk off of our territory, we’re surrounded by millionaires and billionaires,” Bowen said. “You know what that does to a person?”

Michael A. Iasilli, the Southampton Town Council liaison for the Shinnecock Nation, is trying to build bridges with the tribe. He acknowledged that some Southampton residents outwardly discriminate against tribal members. This October, Southampton Town will recognize the first Shinnecock Heritage Day, an initiative led by Iasilli, which he says is part of a broader mission of healing old wounds, educating the town about Shinnecock history, and finding ways for the tribe and the town to work together. “Look, they’re not going anywhere, and they were here before us,” he said. “And so I think we really need to try to work as best as we can with the most honest and sincere effort to really build this relationship together with them. I’m really hoping that we can, but it’s going to take time.” 

According to Iasilli, Southampton has the resources and the Shinnecock have the vision. Southampton already has funds in the form of its Community Preservation Fund and a Community Housing Fund. These are the kinds of financial resources that Seneca Bowen and the Shinnecock government are trying to build up. 

When I visited in August, Cohen, the Shinnecock natural resource manager, showed me drone pictures he had taken of the Shinnecock coastline. The alarming images showed just how close the water was to encroaching on not just homes but the powwow grounds and other important gathering places. The cemetery, which sits just feet away from Shinnecock Bay, has already flooded on multiple occasions.

Charles Cause, a 26-year-old Shinnecock musician, thinks that the cemetery flooding more severely could be the trigger that fully wakes up the community to the dangers of climate change. “I think once that starts to happen, you know, people are going to kind of get that, ‘holy moly, this is real’ feel and we’re going to take a lot more action on things,” he said. 

Even as she leads community conversations around relocation, Shavonne Smith is not ready to leave either, even though she understands there may be no other option. “This is all I’ve ever known,” she said.

This story is the first feature in a new Vox special project, Changing With Our Climate, a limited-run series exploring Indigenous solutions to extreme weather rooted in history — and the future. 

When Priscilla Frankson thinks about home, she thinks about ice — thick sea ice stretching out toward the horizon. 

Frankson, an Iñupiaq masters student in Tribal Leadership and Governance at Arizona State University, is from Point Hope (Tikiġaq), Alaska, a small city about 125 miles above the Arctic Circle and one of the northernmost communities in the United States. 

“For us, the ice is a part of land, even though every single year it changes and it’s always different,” she said. “I think of the way that my boots kind of crackle over the ice, or the different sounds that it makes when there’s a very thin kind of sheet of snow on the top, and how it’s a little bit softer.”

In Point Hope, where summer temperatures rarely break 60 degrees, ice and cold are a part of life. Thick, reliable sea ice is essential for harvesting whales, a key part of the subsistence diets, a lifestyle built around harvesting wild foods for personal and community use, of Point Hope’s Iñupiaq residents. 

Growing up, even when temperatures reached 40 below zero, Frankson would bundle up to go play outside in the snow or go hunting on the ice, while whales passed by. And on cold, cloudless nights, the northern lights would be spectacularly clear, flashing and dancing across the sky. It was a sight that Frankson said still seems too incredible to be real — even after years of observing it.

But climate change is threatening all of this.

Alaska is warming up to three times faster than the rest of the world, and the Arctic is warming nearly double that. Alaska’s North Slope, where Point Hope is located, saw an average annual temperature increase of 6 degrees since 1971. Since 1970, the US as a whole has warmed by 2.6 degrees. 

Although the difference between, say, a day that is 0 degrees and one that is 5 degrees may seem like no big deal, the impact of these rising averages is immense. 

Sea ice is forming later in the year than usual and is not as predictable as it used to be. As the permafrost thaws, siġlauqs — the traditional ice cellars carved into the land — are caving in or flooding. The animals that people rely on for food and goods — whales, fish, caribou — are also growing harder to find. 

Despite the challenges, Frankson, who researches the social impact of declining caribou populations, says that Iñupiaq people are not going to change their entire way of life, but instead are making small adjustments to changing conditions. “We’re not scared enough to stop hunting, we’re not scared enough to stop going out on the ice, we’re not scared enough to do any of this,” she said. “We’re just learning how to adapt, as we always have.”

To adapt to the warming climate, Indigenous people in Alaska are relying on their deep understanding and respect for the land, a kind of humility developed over countless generations. “You can’t really change the Arctic,” Frankson said. “You can only change with the Arctic.” 

Yes, daily life in Alaska — with its northern lights, its dependence on ice and the movement of caribou — may feel unrelatable. But this way of living in tune with the environment and gracefully adapting to a changing climate is becoming increasingly essential for the rest of the country. The strategies that Indigenous people in Alaska are developing show that sometimes the best forms of climate adaptation are achievable, local solutions. 

Generations of extreme conditions have equipped Alaska Natives with the willingness and ability to embrace this kind of adaptation. As the impacts of climate change grow increasingly severe in the rest of the country, we could all learn from that.  

Swimming may not seem like an adaptation to global warming. But in Alaska, it is. 

Hundreds of miles south of Point Hope, in Bethel, Alaska, the Kuskokwim River is the heart of the community, providing food, transportation, employment, and community throughout the year. 

The only way to get to Bethel is by plane, which can be very expensive, or by the river. In the winter, snow machines zip through town, heading up and down the frozen river to the dozens of villages that depend on Bethel for food, supplies, health care, and much more. In the summer, people travel by boat to spend days at their fish camps on the river, smoking salmon to eat throughout the rest of the year. In between, when the ice is forming or beginning to break up, the river can be dangerous: too frozen for boats, but too unstable for snow machines and cars. 

Lately, those shoulder seasons have been shifting, extending, and becoming terrifyingly unpredictable. 

Every year, flooding and erosion get worse, fish are dying, and the winter ice is becoming more dangerous. Kevin Whitworth, the executive director of the Kuskokwim River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission, says declining salmon populations are especially concerning. “It’s hard times,” he said. “Our people are subsistence-based people. They’re not economy-based people. They rely on the river as their grocery store. Their life is the river.” 

According to the Federal Subsistence Management Program, rural Alaskans harvest 295 pounds of wild food per person, more than the 255 pounds of domestic meat, fish, and poultry that the average American consumes per year. Fifty-six percent of the statewide subsistence harvest is made up of fish. Beyond its cultural and community importance, subsistence is crucial for Alaska Natives because of the high cost of groceries. In a study of 261 urban communities across the country, the Council for Community and Economic Research found that the three most expensive places for groceries were Juneau, Fairbanks, and Anchorage. Prices in more remote communities like Bethel are often even higher. 

Salmon’s drastic decline can be attributed to a number of causes, including warming waters and increased offshore trawling. Every year, ocean trawlers fishing primarily for pollock catch, kill, and discard about 141 million pounds of salmon, halibut, and other species, an extraordinarily wasteful practice that Indigenous people and other groups in Alaska have been rallying against. Meanwhile, communities upriver are severely limited in the number of salmon they can take from the river. “Right now, the salmon are crashing and we’re seeing big changes with the climate,” Whitworth says.

Bethel Vice Mayor Sophie Swope, who also sits on the Orutsararmiut Native tribal council, says that river conditions have become more dangerous for fishing and travel. “It used to be pretty dependable that you could just go drive out during the winter and it would be fine and safe,” Swope said. “Now, you have to keep an ear out for what the river conditions are.” 

Whitworth, who is Athabascan from McGrath, says that because of salmon’s increasing scarcity, people are taking greater risks to get fish even though the river ice forms later in the season and is less reliable, leading to accidents and drownings. 

So, facing declining salmon populations and a dangerous river, Indigenous people in the region are shifting their norms, too. While chinook and chum salmon are restricted, sockeye salmon, a less traditionally popular and available fish, has become an increasingly viable alternative. 

Chinook has been a staple of Indigenous subsistence diets for generations, but people are doing what they must to use what is available now. Traditional salmon fishing techniques make it hard to separate different species of salmon, so Whitworth and the Kuskokwim River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission have been encouraging local fishers to use dip nets, large circular nets that allow people to target sockeye. 

In the commission’s 2023 end-of-season report, sockeye made up about 40 percent of the estimated total salmon harvest on the lower Kuskokwim, a number that Whitworth says is much higher than it used to be. 

As warming continues to impact the river, the local community has also been taking steps to protect its people. 

In 2014, Yup’ik elder Beverly Hoffman and others finally succeeded in a decades-long effort to build a community pool in Bethel, which is now a resource for people throughout the region to learn how to swim, preparing them for an increasingly unpredictable river. Hoffman and others recognize that they cannot control the river, but they can help prepare the community to survive its dangers. 

Swimming lessons and dip nets might sound like tiny changes in the face of global climate trends, but these are the kinds of local adaptations that will help communities thrive in a warming world. Outside of Alaska, planting trees to create more shade in urban heat islands or hiring more lifeguards for public pools could have a similar impact.

But these solutions are within reach and meaningful; they literally save lives. 

Such approachable adaptations mean understanding that although we have a limited ability to change the climate, there are many more options to change our own behavior. 

“This is what Indigenous knowledge is”

As temperatures continue to rise, Alaska Natives are turning to intergenerational knowledge and community observations to build a wealth of data that they hope will urge non-Indigenous decision-makers to listen to what they have to say. 

In Unalaska, the largest city in the Aleutian Chain, the Qawalangin Tribe is gathering community feedback on climate change and what the people are experiencing. The tribe will then use these observations to help develop its climate resilience plans, which include culture camps with traditional dances and classes on kayak making, traditional food nights, and water quality testing programs. 

Vera Metcalf is the executive director of the Eskimo Walrus Commission, which represents 19 coastal communities. Metcalf says that Indigenous walrus hunters have adapted to climate change by participating in research projects led by agencies like the US Fish and Wildlife Service. “In the past, we were largely ignored in research occurring in our homeland and waters,” she said. “When you combine the two ways of thinking, it really becomes a rich resource of information.” 

Roberta Tuurraq Glenn-Borade, Iñupiaq from Utqiaġvik, is the project coordinator and community liaison at the Alaska Arctic Observatory and Knowledge Hub, where she works with observers from four communities in the Alaskan Arctic. 

Community observers share details like air temperature, wind speed, ice conditions, and animal observations, sometimes sending in photos of animals being harvested. Glenn-Borade and her team then take this data and share it with agencies like the US National Weather Service, which releases forecasts for the region. Glenn-Borade says that, historically, these forecasts prioritized larger ships offshore rather than Indigenous people living on the coast and hopes that using local observations will lead to better forecasts for Indigenous communities. “That kind of foresight of what the conditions will be can really make a difference between life or death,” she said. 

Glenn-Borade also says this kind of local observation provides invaluable historical context about how the coast and the ice have changed over the years, what is within normal ranges, and what is unexpected. 

“That’s what Indigenous knowledge is,” she said. “It is constant tracking and understanding and monitoring what’s going on and being prepared to respond on the fly.” 

As the world warms, these examples from Alaska offer a warning that we can’t simply do everything the way we used to. Saudi Arabia, for example, can no longer ignore the deadly impacts heat is having on Hajj. Places like the Pacific Northwest can no longer count on mild summers and will save lives by investing in cooling infrastructure. But they also offer hope that if we can shift away from trying to change the environment to suit us, instead of the other way around, there may be a chance of finding creative, unexpected ways of changing with our climate.

When I spoke with Glenn-Borade recently, she told me she and her people are proud “that we’re still here. We’re not going to die off. Our languages aren’t going to die off. We will adapt. We’ll continue to adapt our lifestyles as the environment changes.”