Native peoples have enjoyed a great many millennia of flourishing cultures and “green” economies in the rich and diverse environments that comprise these native homelands in the Americas long before “green” was fashionable. Every American Indian tribe today is the recognized descendant of indigenous ancestral nations, tribes, villages, bands and communities that have successfully adapted to changing environmental, historical and social circumstances to survive into these modern times. Simply put, those that did not adapt are no longer with us.

Five hundred years ago Europe sought an open water route to the fabled treasures of China. This quest for an imagined “Northwest Passage” sparked the exploration of the Americas, and fired up an Industrial Revolution that set off a rapid chemical change in the Earth’s life-giving atmosphere, accelerating the build up of “greenhouse gases” and producing a warming beyond anything the planet has experienced in the last half-million years.

Worldwide, indigenous peoples are the first and worst hit by global warming. As subsistence cultures dependent upon intact habitats, they are directly threatened by climatic changes that disrupt the stability of existing habitats. But their deeply adaptive cultural roots may well provide contemporary indigenous communities with a unique foundation in the face of accelerating impacts of global climate change that are no longer mere threats to some unimagined future, but rather changes occurring daily throughout Indian country.

A decade ago, nearly 200 tribal representatives gathered in Albuquerque for the first Native Peoples, Native Homelands Climate Change Workshop. There, with government and university climate scientists, indigenous leaders examined the environmental vulnerabilities in 20th century Indian country and discussed the traditional and contemporary understandings of the sometimes abrupt and dramatic and sometimes quite and subtle changes observed by Native peoples.

Long before Vice President Al Gore’s movie and Nobel Prize for bringing mainstream awareness to the issues of global warming, Native communities dependent upon hunting, fishing and gathering knew the seasons were slipping. Winter freezes are coming later, and thaws earlier. New animals, lacking local names, are moving into traditional hunting and fishing grounds where they had not been seen before. Birds that used to winter elsewhere now linger through the seasons. Drought-stressed trees that once co-existed with insect communities, are now infested with exponentially exploding populations of plague-like proportions and their normal arboreal defense of excess sap production no longer works against the pine and spruce beetles in hotter, drier habitats.

After 10 years, the call has gone out again from the community of tribal colleges and universities through NASA and the American Indian Higher Education Consortium, three veteran Indian organizations, namely, Honor the Earth, the Indigenous Environmental Network, and the Intertribal Council on Utility Policy, and several interested federal agencies, including NOAA, will join tribal leaders, planners, resource managers and tribal college faculty and students, to once more discuss what has been learned over the last decade. The group will share what steps have been taken to inventory and assess threats and changes to tribal resources in the face of shifting weather patterns and to explore successful paths for building tribal capacity and community resiliency.

The Second Native Peoples, Native Homelands Climate Change Workshop will be held Nov. 18 – 21 at the Mystic Lake Casino on the homeland of the Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux (Dakota) Community. This workshop is critically needed and timely because the just-released 2009 National Assessment of Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States did not include an in-depth consideration of American Indians, Alaska Natives, or Native Hawaiians or their respective lands.

Under the leadership of co-chairs Dr. Dan Wildcat (Haskell Indian Nations University) and Winona LaDuke (Honor the Earth), the 2009 Native Peoples Native Homelands Workshop, like the first, will examine the impacts of climate change and extreme weather variability on Native peoples and their homelands from an indigenous cultural, spiritual and scientific perspective. The goal of the workshop is to share and develop immediate responses, adaptation actions and proactive recommendations to ensure the survival of indigenous communities.

Bob Gough is secretary of the Intertribal Council on Utility Policy. He was co-chair of the first Native Peoples, Native Homelands workshop and is on the steering committee of the upcoming workshop.