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Indigenous Design and Climate Change Adaptation

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Indigenous design draws from Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) and brings cultural relevance and innovation to climate change adaptation. Indigenous design is also cognizant and respectful of Indigenous cultural traditions. There are several examples of Indigenous design as it relates to climate change, including practicing cultural burning and building infrastructure and architecture using local sustainable materials harvested locally.

Cultural burning is a form of slow controlled fires. The practice of cultural burning has different purposes among diverse Indigenous communities. In addition to managing wildfires, cultural burning is also practiced for “cultural and language preservation, fuel mitigation, food and medicinal plant revitalization, and habitat enhancement.” Cultural burning is a form of TEK, based on many centuries of experience among Indigenous peoples, and continues to be practiced worldwide. Australian architect, Julia Watson, uses the term “Lo-TEK” to reflect “resilient infrastructures developed by Indigenous people through Traditional Ecological Knowledge.” According to Watson, “Lo-TEK” subverts the term “low-tech,” which is a reference to outdated technology. Watson proposes that the term “Lo-TEK” is a much better description of Indigenous TEK in contemporary designs that work with nature and the climate. In turn, cultural burning is a form of Lo-TEK.

Some examples of Indigenous design in architecture include buildings that minimize environmental impact using sustainable materials like mud, bamboo, and adobe brick. Houses in the Mizoram region of Northeastern India—referred to as Zawlbuk houses—are built using bamboo, which grow readily in the local forests. The houses use “wood, leaves of trees, mud, grass, and straw” and have been known to survive natural disasters, like floods. Building with adobe brick is “an ancient construction method…dating back to 8300 BC” and a useful alternative to wood in arid regions. Adobe brick is used in building houses around the world, including in rural Kyrgyzstan and among the Pueblo in southwestern United States. This  traditional construction method permits a home to remain cool during the day and for the sunbaked bricks to slowly release heat overnight, revealing the adobe brick’s high thermal mass.

Indigenous design, including climate-related TEK, is at great risk of appropriation by non-Indigenous governments and practitioners, if there are no legal frameworks to protect it. Greater respect for, and promotion of, Indigenous engagement is needed to determine if, when, and how TEK is documented and shared. The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) has created a toolkit to assist Indigenous communities, and those who work with Indigenous peoples, to reflect upon whether TEK practices are documented (or need to be), and if so, how to do so fairly. Given that climate-related Indigenous knowledge has been recognized by the United Nations as a way forward, intellectual property will remain an important challenge to address before more widely integrating Indigenous design in climate change adaptation planning.

In turn, any effort in advancing the application of TEK, and therefore, Indigenous design, in climate change policy will require that Indigenous peoples are not sidelined from sustainable development policy and planning processes.

 

By Leela Viswanathan

 

(Image Credit: Eric Barbeau, Unsplash)

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Fighting Fire with Fire: Reducing Wildfire Risk Through Indigenous Fire Stewardship (IFS)

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Extreme heat and the resultant forest fires are an annual occurrence in Canada. The impacts can be devastating for communities and could alter Earth’s climate. There is growing recognition that Indigenous fire stewardship has a positive long-term impact on managing forests and mitigating the risk of uncontrollable fires around the world.

Indigenous fire stewardship (IFS) is the use of fire by diverse Indigenous people to assist in “responding to climate and local environmental conditions to promote desired landscapes, habitats, [and] species.” IFS serves “to increase the abundance of favored resources to sustain knowledge systems, ceremonial, and subsistence practices, economies, and livelihoods.” Indigenous fire stewardship practices are collaborative and attempt to support communities to become more “fire dependent” by enhancing a community’s reliance on fire to create optimal conditions in the landscape that support a community’s livelihood and capacity to protect the ecosystem from the adverse impacts of wildfires. This compares to simply being “fire adaptive” and remaining “informed and prepared” to “safely coexist with wildland fire.”

Diverse Indigenous nations are implementing fire stewardship practices and are “revitalizing traditional burning” to develop “wildfire mitigation strategies that can maintain or enhance cultural attributes of First Nations communities.” Also referred to as “cultural burning” the controlled burning of dead grass, for example, improves the habitat for some animal species, and encourages new vegetation. Drawing from intergenerational knowledge about fire and sharing “beliefs and practices among fire-dependent cultures,” IFS consists of a combination of “fire regimes, fire effects, and the role of cultural burning in fire-prone ecosystems and habitats.” The impact of IFS on Indigenous communities is strongest where there is also a connection between rural wildland and urban regions, and where a combination of permanent and seasonal human settlements exists, along with trails and roads that involve managed habitats for food, among other gifts of Mother Nature.

Along the West Coast of the United States (i.e., region of California), the Karuk Tribe and the Yurok Tribe have engaged in partnerships with the Nature Conservancy Training Exchange (TREX) and the Western Klamath Restoration Partnership to ensure that Indigenous fire stewardship practices are implemented across multiple tribal, federal, and private lands and jurisdictions. In another example, The First Nations Adapt Program, funded by Indigenous Services Canada,  assesses  “climate change vulnerabilities and [identifies] Indigenous cultural values and traditional burning knowledge.” The partnership of The First Nations Emergency Services Society – Forest Fuel Management (FFM) and three First Nations communities, the Shackan Indian Band, Xwisten (Bridge River First Nation) and the Yunesit’n National Government, has resulted in key educational outcomes including a storytelling project and videos from the Shackan and Xwisten Indian Bands, outlining the importance of cultural burning revitalization.

Given that complete fire suppression is impossible, fire can be used as a tool for forest management. In turn, centuries-old Indigenous practices of controlled burning – fighting fire with fire – must become part of a global solution to reduce the risk of wildfires ravaging the planet.

 

By Leela Viswanathan

 

(Image Credit: Matt Palmer, Unsplash)

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