Tlingit & Haida's Climate Adaptation Plans Helps Tribe's Plan for the Future

We went through an entire community process looking at the drivers of climate change and what those mean by, like, per resource in Hoonah. We bounded our climate planning based around food for now. We've relied on Klinken Haida to help kind of develop that framework, and then now we've adapted that framework for Hoonah. In Southeast Alaska, we never really used to see the climate impacts per se as you would up north with the permafrost melt or communities being washed away by the ocean. It was more subtle here in Southeast Alaska, but within the last couple years we're seeing it now in our face with the atmospheric rivers coming in, causing landslides.

What does that do to the ecosystem? What does it do to our natural resources, the fish that we depend on? And not only that though, we're also seeing also the glacial outburst. What does that look like on a social and an economic impact level? And right now we're in this moment of climate change.

And so we've been talking here at the retreat about the need to look to Indigenous knowledge or traditional ecological knowledge to help inform what decisions we might make today, given the drastic changes we're seeing in our climate. And so it's really important that, you know, Tlingit and Haida is able to turn and work with the local tribe to understand, like, given what you know about that place, you know, how can we support it? You know, Tlingit and Haida certainly can't know all those oral histories and that information. Food is the foundation of so much of like what's important culturally and to the values of the community. So that's why we started there.

With local knowledge and like just living there, like you can understand pretty well like what a drought means for fish, what it means for berries. And so then like that allows us to start thinking about solutions a little faster.