Changing With Our Climate

In recent years, there’s been a growing appreciation for Indigenous land stewardship and traditional knowledge. But what gets overlooked is that successfully managing those lands means Indigenous people have already survived severe climate events and extreme weather.

Now, Indigenous communities are leading the way in climate adaptations — from living alongside rapidly melting ice to confronting rising seas and creating community support networks.

Indigenous knowledge does not mean going back to “traditional” methods; it means evolving, a characteristic that has always been a part of Indigenous life. There’s no easy fix for the planet. But Indigenous people have simple solutions rooted in the depth of their knowledge.

Recently we launched Changing With Our Climate, a limited-run series exploring Indigenous solutions to extreme weather rooted in history — and the future. This summer and fall, we’ll be publishing five features that center an Indigenous community confronting extreme weather on the front lines.

This series has not set out to mythologize Indigenous communities with bespoke, unapproachable, or mystic traditional practices and solutions — but instead underscores humility as a throughline. Indigenous people realize we cannot bend the world to our human will. We’re far better and more resilient when we tune in and lean into changes when possible.

By showing the connections between storms, climate disasters, and issues of tribal sovereignty, Changing With Our Climate will explore what it really means when we say that climate change is an existential threat — and how we can work together to find a way out.

The Land Back movement is long-overdue justice. It’s also a climate solution.

What Indigenous knowledge could mean in the fight to curb global warming.

Wetlands absorb carbon from the atmosphere. The Coeur d’Alene’s restoration would do more than just that.

Next to some of the priciest real estate in the world, the Shinnecock Nation refuses to merely retreat from its vulnerable shoreline.

How one Karuk fire crew leader is decolonizing our relationship to fire.

Alaska is warming far faster than most of the world. For Indigenous people on the front lines, adaptation can be surprisingly simple.

There’s no easy fix for the planet. But Indigenous people have simple solutions rooted in the depth of their knowledge.