My experience assisting the local indigenous community helped me see how much being connected with the land and ourselves really matters in life. I am grateful for my opportunity to help them get funding to keep their precious culture alive. The action of gathering food from native plants is an important aspect of native culture and is primarily done by women. Most funding that indigenous communities receive focuses on hunting which is done by men. By funding gathering we are not only preserving the health of the local ecology but also boosting gender equality and cultural resilience.
Landscape Level Adaptation and Conservation Project
Cultural survival for Native Americans is inseparable from healthy ecosystems, abundant fish and wildlife, water quality, and biodiversity. The Nez Perce Tribe manages from ridgetop to ridgetop, from the mountains to the sea. The Tribe’s Indian Claims Commission (ICC) contains some of the largest tracts of public land and protected land in the West, is largely rural and undeveloped, contains farms and ranches that provide habitat, and is home to many wildlife species that need room to roam, and fish that need cold water.
However, increasingly severe cycles of drought, heat waves, extreme precipitation, fires, and erosion have led to massive fish kills, closed fishing seasons, tick outbreaks, and emerging diseases in wild game, and changes in wild gathered foods and medicines. These changes represent an existential threat to the spiritual life and cultural survival of the Nimiipuu, the Nez Perce people.
By the end of this century, habitats and species are expected to shift upslope and north, shrink, or disappear altogether. Precipitation is projected to change from snow to rain, snow-melt and run-off will change in volume and timing. Heat waves are expected to be longer and more extreme, and wildfires are projected to increase in severity and size. As a result, water (timing and abundance) is one of the Tribe’s greatest concerns. Culturally important wild plants (berries, roots, foods, and medicines) are already changing in quality, timing, abundance, and size, and these changes are likely to accelerate.
Current paradigms, management structures, and capacity are simply inadequate to address these issues at the scale and speed required. The only way to build capacity to address these issues rapidly is to collaborate with other stakeholders in a new way. Uniquely, this project is being led by a Tribe. The heart of this effort is to integrate the resilience of humans and wildlife, and cultural survival into landscape level conservation planning.
The initial partners in this effort are the Nez Perce Tribe, Yellowstone to Yukon, Greater Hell’s Canyon Council, Nimiipuu Protecting the Environment, and David Mildrexler with Eastern Oregon Legacy Lands loosely called the Blues to Bitterroots Coalition until further input is obtained. The initial funding to kick off this initiative is from the BIA Tribal Resilience Program. We plan to convene regional land managers, tribes, stakeholders, and citizens in a coalition to work on landscape level adaptation planning efforts that focus on connectivity for wildlife, restoring habitats that support traditionally harvested plant foods, increasing food production for local communities, and growing an ethical, inclusive, and adaptive restoration economy / a healing economy.
Our first proposed projects under this umbrella are the Seasonal Round Trail Project and the Camas to Condors Project. Please click on the links below to learn more.
Nez Perce Tribe Climate Change Adaptation Planning Project
Sponsored by: BIA Tribal Resilience Program, and the EPA
Resilience and Adaptation Planning Project
The Nez Perce Tribe is producing a comprehensive vulnerability assessment and adaptation plan that addresses the impacts of climate change on water, fish, wildlife, forests, food sovereignty and food security, cultural resources, and community well-being. The Water Resources Division formerly produced the Clearwater River Subbasin adaptation plan. This project updates and expands upon that effort. In addition, the tribal climate change staff have a number of additional projects underway to support and expand the adaptation planning process in order to prepare for implementation, and fund long-term adaptation and mitigation efforts including a climate and culturally smart toolkit project, a climate smart agriculture project, and a landscape level planning project.
The Nez Perce Tribe Climate Change efforts are not limited to Water Resources. The Nez Perce Tribe Executive Committee and many Divisions at the Tribe have already been responding to and planning for climate change. This project is to provide current information and support to those efforts. The exciting climate change adaptation and resilience projects happening within Water Resources are featured on the Water Resources climate change planning page HERE.