Last October, Aiyana James participated in her first water potato harvest on the Coeur d’Alene Indian Reservation in northwestern Idaho. Although the weather was unusually cold, she was determined to harvest her first crop of water potatoes, small wetland tubers that are one of the tribe’s important traditional foods.
The smell of smoke and dried elk meat filled the air along Lake Coeur d’Alene, where the tribe set up food booths and education stations. She waded barefoot through the frigid water to dig up small tubers, and when she returned to land, tribe members cooked the tubers in a traditional pit roast. There, moose, kama (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 holidays on the reservation, was excited to participate in his first harvest after moving to the reservation after college. But something was wrong. Although early season snow affected the harvest and only a small amount fell, tribal leaders spoke during opening prayers about how unusual the situation was. The summer was dry and the water yam crop was poor, something that has been happening more and more in recent years.
“I know this is not what it’s supposed to be,” James said. “Deep down, I’m thinking, ‘This isn’t right.'”
After the land in northwestern Idaho was cleared by 1909; federal allocation policy, western agriculture and logging This still exists to some extent today, with the Coeur d’Alene people losing vast amounts of land and, with it, their ability to manage their land and maintain a balance between environmental protection and economic development. Salmon and trout have disappeared from the river. Fires became more frequent and powerful. Key plants such as water yam and barracuda, which were once staples of the tribe’s diet, began to disappear.
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Now, extreme drought is making the situation even worse.
All of this is part of the reinforcing cycle of land degradation and climate change that the Coeur d’Alene Tribe has been fighting against for decades. James has joined the fight as one of the tribe’s first climate change coordinators.
The Coeur d’Alene Tribe is in the midst of an ongoing, decades-long effort to rely in part on the knowledge of its Elders to restore critical wetlands to protect their land and community.
Tribes are bringing back beaver and salmon, restoring native grasses and repairing river channels. Collectively, these efforts will restore balance to landscapes and promote interconnected ecosystems, making them more resilient to future climate change and one day allowing us to once again rely on important ancestral foods like water potatoes. Tribal members want to be able to do so.
“We’ve been living off the food of the land for thousands and thousands of years,” James said. “By reconnecting with that food, we reconnect with the land.”
Bring back water potatoes and improve the climate
Across the country, ecosystem restoration is increasingly seen as a key part of the fight against climate change, and wetlands play an especially important role in an era of global warming. Wetlands absorb carbon from the atmosphere.
For the Coeur d’Alene people, healthy wetlands mean a rich food source and a way to limit rising temperatures, the foundation for restoring their traditional way of life. The linchpin role of wetlands means tribes are working to restore ecosystems that are especially threatened as the world’s climate tends to get hotter and drier. . Wetlands are areas where water is at or near the surface for most of the year, so their existence is threatened by frequent and severe droughts caused by climate change.
According to U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service; More than half of the wetlands in the lower 48 states have disappeared, and the rate of loss is only accelerating. Between 2009 and 2019, the United States lost lush wetlands the size of Rhode Island.
Comprehensive efforts are underway to save these endangered landscapes. Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act of 2022 Includes $1.4 billion For ecosystem recovery and resilience, President Joe Biden also signed An executive order that sets a national goal to conserve at least 30 percent of the nation’s land and waters by 2030.
Coeur d’Alene isn’t the only one focused on restoration, but they’re especially good at it. And their uniquely patient and humble approach could serve as a model for other communities working to restore their environments and prepare for climate change.
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Tribal knowledge and expertise are especially important for restoration because indigenous peoples know what the land was like before it was degraded and what technologies can help restore it. The thread that ties everything together is traditional foods like mizu yam. These cultural foods forge connections between people and land and serve as particularly tangible measures of how those connections impact the environment.
James says that barracuda, for example, will grow better if harvested regularly. However, because much of Coeur d’Alene’s land is now owned by non-Natives, tribal members often cannot access Camas fields, and some are now suffering after years of neglect.
“We need these foods, but we also need them to thrive and grow and get better,” she said. “If we get these things right and focus on repairing our relationship and restoring our ties to culture, sovereignty and tradition, it will have a lasting effect.”
Environmental restoration and cultural restoration
On the Coeur d’Alene Reservation, soil health and biodiversity are declining, water temperatures are rising, and extreme weather events such as heat waves and droughts are becoming more frequent. However, the tribe’s recovery efforts are beginning to bear fruit.
In the summer of 2022, Adult salmon swimming in Hangman Creek For the first time in about 100 years. Two years after the tribe released juvenile salmon into the stream, and after an arduous journey to the Pacific Ocean and back, the tribe welcomed the first salmon into the stream in generations.
For Ralph Allan Jr., the tribe’s fish and wildlife program manager, it was the culmination of 20 years of work that started with long days of field work, including planting trees. He now heads a department that prepares salmon for return to reservations.
Alan is also working to sow the seeds of a new generation of restoration advocates. He leads an internship program that sends college students into the field, and three tribal members are currently enrolled in the Fish and Wildlife degree program. During the floating potato harvest, Alan makes sure that the department’s staff work with the young people, teaching them how to harvest potatoes and pulling them out of the mud if they get stuck.
This cultural and community activity is part of the tribe’s recovery efforts. Alan worries that the tribe’s younger generations are not as connected to the land as he was when he was growing up. “We’re not just bringing salmon back to the population,” he says. “We’ve also lost our cultural connection to salmon, so we’re trying to reintroduce the whole salmon culture.”
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Although salmon are a top priority, they are only one part of a complex, interconnected ecosystem that tribes are working to restore. take beaver dam. Dams raise the water table, expand the shoreline area of rivers and lakes for more plants and animals, and retain more water on the landscape. All of this not only makes the area more welcoming to salmon and other wildlife, but also protects the landscape from drought and extreme heat, as wetlands absorb and retain water released during dry periods. The tribe’s wetlands coordinator, Tyler Opp, explains:
Beaver dams also support clean, cold water habitat for salmon, which requires trees. The tribe’s Environmental Programs Department has planted more than 18,000 trees of about 12 species since 2019 and plans to plant 4,000 more by 2025.
The tribe has used beaver dam analogues, or man-made ones, to encourage beaver return, and has installed posts to reinforce existing beaver dams. Gerald Green, the tribe’s wildlife biologist, said they currently support about seven beaver dams on the stream.
Trees, beavers, salmon, and water are all part of the cyclical, interdependent system that tribes are trying to restore and support. Cajetan Matheson, director of the Department of Natural Resources and a member of the Tribal Council, says addressing climate impacts and recovery goals one by one won’t work. “Everything is really interconnected,” Matheson said. “You can’t just clear-cut a mountain and say, ‘Oh, we’ve solved the fire problem.’ There’s more to it than that.”
These projects take time. Tyler Opp said the scale of work that needs to be done can be overwhelming, but the tribal approach helps put things in perspective.
By keeping long-term goals in mind, such as salmon recovery, which can take decades, the tribe avoids Band-Aid solutions. Tribal governments across the board buy into this approach year after year and generation after generation, and while tribes, like many public agencies, are limited by funding and capacity, this effort helps tribes achieve long-term goals. You can focus on projects that help you achieve your goals. vision. Despite constraints, tribes can unite around a common vision of the future, based on common history, knowledge, and recognition of the land.
“Tribes can prioritize things on a much longer time scale than state or federal agencies,” he says. “Tribes don’t have to think about the next budget cycle to get the job done. All about [the things we are doing] Done for future generations. ”
Almost everyone I spoke with at the Department of Natural Resources credits tribal elder Felix Aripa for that perspective. passed away in 2016. He is credited with helping set the tone for the tribe’s restoration efforts.
Even Aiyana James, who never had the chance to meet him, says she has heard old tapes of Aripa. He was an early proponent of using beavers as restoration partners, and as a guideline for engineers to restore courses, rather than starting from scratch and guessing where streams were flowing. I helped with simple tasks such as pointing out things. “The ultimate goal for everyone here in the Fish and Wildlife Program is to leave a legacy, just like Felix Aripa left a legacy and a mark on the program,” Alan said.
Before his death, Aripa helped Matheson and others put the tribe’s traditional seasonal calendar on paper. This calendar is based on seasonal indicators such as sap rather than months or days and includes detailed information about food, ecosystems, plants, animals, and human activities. “We’re thinking broadly about how we approach restoration, so that’s a framework that we can use,” said Laura Raumasia, the tribe’s environmental program manager. “It represents thousands of years of knowledge.”
So while the tribe is proud of their progress, they continue to strive for the future. “I think it’s great to work in the same place for 20 years because you can see some changes happening,” Raumasia said. “But we know that the fruits of our labor will not actually be reaped until 70 years from now.”
