There’s been a good deal of talk about the weather lately. According to the National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration, this March was the hottest on record in the lower 48 states. And this past winter? A joke. The fourth warmest on record, and the third-least snowy. There have been earthquakes and tornados, and even reports of hybrid sharks.
Most of us have registered this elemental weirdness in one way or another. Our “non-winter” has come up in countless conversations I’ve had in past months. Some people (usually liberals) see it as a result of man-made global warming. Others (usually conservatives) call bullshit on the theory. But for the most part, it hasn’t caused much alarm. Until very recently, most Americans have treated the issue of climate change as something to be debated—as something abstract, even political.
But not all Americans. Native Americans, the people who have been on this land the longest, tend to consider climate change a matter of fact. For years indigenous individuals and groups, like the Indigenous Environmental Network, have voiced concern over climate change, pointing as much to changes they’ve seen in ancestral lands as to scientific studies. Now, month after month of unseasonably hot and destructive weather and reports of strange animal behavior have confirmed many suspicions that dramatic shifts are underway.
“People who have deep inter-generational knowledge about a landscape or a seascape aren’t wasting any time talking about whether or not this is happening,” said Daniel Wildcat, a professor at Haskell Indian Nations University in Lawrence, Kansas, and an expert on indigenous environmental thinking, who has seen “almost an invasion” of armadillos move north into his state.
“I think there’s a difficulty in getting through to people who live in a society that’s so geographically mobile,” Wildcat said. “Indigenous people are stepping out on this because their tribal identities, who they are as people, don’t come from nation-state status or written constitutions. Their identities are emergent out of landscapes and seascapes.”
In northeastern Minnesota, along Lake Superior, the fastest-warming fresh body of water in the world, a group of Chippewa Indians are dealing with the issue of changing climate and identity head on.
“Who we are is changing because the land is changing,” said Seth Moore, a wildlife biologist for the Trust Lands Department of the Grand Portage Band of Lake Superior Chippewa.
There were days last winter when the weather was 60 degrees higher than average in Grand Portage, Moore told me. And he said the warming is nothing new. The average August maximum temperature has increased by about five degrees Fahrenheit from 1960 to the present, while the average February snow depth has decreased by about 50 percent since 1950. The changes have badly disturbed the ecosystem in Grand Portage, resulting in an invasion of gray squirrels from the south, the total depopulation of trout in some area lakes, and an exponential increase in deer. Deer in particular have spelled trouble for moose, the Chippewa’s primary cultural subsistence species, which has plummeted 60 percent in population over the past decade.
