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Features, Sustainability and Climate Change | February 21, 2021
Students at Aaniiih Nakoda College (ANC) are determined to utilize their education to help combat the looming climate change crisis and the effects it will have on their Fort Belknap community. Children at ANC's White Clay Immersion School have built their own weather station and created an Aaniiin language book on climate change for elementary school children. Meanwhile, students in the college's new four-year degree program in Aaniiih Nakoda ecology are taking the Tisitaal/peda (fire) class, comparing burned and unburned areas on the Montana prairie with grasslands restoration and climate change in mind. Other students in environmental science are immersed in studying the buffalo pasture, measuring biomass and carrying capacity as the effects of global temperature rise take hold.
Elsewhere on the Fort Belknap reservation, allied health and environmental science students are collecting mosquitoes during the summer months to test for the West Nile Virus and to predict outbreaks of the disease in their community, while ANC instructor Dan Kinsey is conducting a long-term monitoring study of organisms found in the Milk River, the community's drinking water source, to assess water health. And the new "Grow Our Own" nursing program is collaborating with the college's farm to stress food security, nutrition, and the benefits of community members establishing their own gardens. All these initiatives are like streams that flow into a much larger river-a confluence that will be needed if we are to be proactive and adapt to climate change as Indigenous peoples the world over.
LOOKING TO THE FUTURE
Today, the youth of the world are leading the fight against climate change. One only has to read about Greta Thunberg, named Time magazine's person of the year in 2019, whose activism has led to climate strikes around the world. At the White Clay Immersion School on the ANC campus, eighth graders Cassius Conway, Marie Hogan, and Svea Hogan have likewise developed a keen interest in climate change. Conducting their own research, they have surveyed community members about the issue and interviewed the Tribal Environmental Program office director, Ina Nez Perce, to find out what plans are in place at the tribal level. The students' interest in climate science spilled over to a desire to measure...