This session will share promising approaches, lessons learned, tools, and resources developed by Pala’s federally funded Tribal Climate Health Project (TCHP). In the last five years, this program has worked to strength U.S. Tribal capacity to assess and prepare for the health and other impacts of climate change through trainings, peer knowledge exchange, tools, nation-wide partnerships, data development, research, and direct assistance. This session will highlight the latest information on the health impacts of climate-induced wildfire, drought, heat, storms, and flooding on Tribes. It will detail how Pala has used its own adaptation experiences to inform the TCHP and how the TCHP continually informs Pala’s adaptation efforts.

This roundtable will offer a conversation among colleagues working together to build collective power for community-led adaptation that is centered in the self-determination of Tribal communities. It will offer concrete practices and considerations for community-led processes to build partnerships, preserve culture, mobilize for advocacy and action, and advance solutions for community-led adaptation. 

The panelists will discuss the importance of centering Indigenous Knowledges and wisdom in climate adaptation, a collaborative, community-led effort to protect and preserve cultural heritage and restore wetlands in coastal Louisiana, and a community-led process to develop federal policy recommendations on climate-forced displacement, among other topics.

Participants will come away from the session with concrete examples and guidance for how to support community-led adaptation through research, funding, and advocacy.

This session will include three individual presentations from speakers Raymond Martinez, Joshua Rosenau, and Shasta Gaughen. These presentations will explore topics including community engagement, the integration of Indigenous and Pueblo cultures into adaptation planning, and transportation resilience and how it relates to access to health and emergency services. Speakers will touch on challenges and lessons learned throughout the planning and adaptation process.

Inhabitants: An Indigenous Perspective is a 76 min feature documentary that follows five Native American communities as they restore their traditional land management practices in the face of a changing climate. Through conversations with Tribal project leaders and supporting foundations, the filmmakers developed a plan for creating a film to help document five Tribal land management projects. The five stories include sustaining traditions of Hopi dryland farming in Arizona; restoring buffalo to the Blackfeet reservation in Montana; maintaining sustainable forestry on the Menominee reservation in Wisconsin; reviving native food forests in Hawai’i; and returning prescribed fire to the landscape by the Karuk Tribe of California. Although these five tribal stories are not connected geographically, they share a common vision of restoring their cultural traditions to ensure a more resilient future in the face of a changing climate. This film was made collaboratively with a Tribal Advisory Board, which includes representatives from each of the Tribes highlighted in the film and the Kalliopeia Foundation. These partnerships allowed the filmmakers to ensure that the film is accurate, culturally appropriate, and meets the needs of the communities represented.