This story is the fourth feature in a Vox special project,Changes with our climateA limited-run series that explores indigenous solutions to extreme weather rooted in history — and the future
Last October, Ayana James participated in her first water potato harvest on the Coeur d’Alene Tribe’s reservation in northwest Idaho. The weather was unseasonably cold, but he was determined to harvest his first water potato, a small swamp tuber that is one of the tribe’s staple traditional foods.
The smell of smoke and dried elk meat filled the air along the shores of Lake Coeur d’Alene, where tribes had set up food booths and education centers. He wades barefoot into frigid water to dig up the tiny tubers, when back on land, tribal members cook them in a traditional pit bake, layered with elk, camas (a flowering plant with edible bulbs) and other locally harvested foods.
James, who grew up in Portland, Oregon and spent summers and holidays at school, was excited to participate in the harvest for the first time since moving to the reservation after college. But something was wrong: early-season snow dampened the crops, and though it was only a light dusting, tribal leaders spoke about how unusual the conditions were during opening prayers. It was a dry summer, and the water potato crop was poor, something that has been happening more and more in recent years.
“I know it’s not meant to be,” James said. “Deep inside me, I thought, ‘This doesn’t feel right.'”
Their land in northwestern Idaho was carved out by 1909 Federal appropriation policy, Western agriculture, and logging While some of the backwaters remain today, the Coeur d’Alene tribe has lost large amounts of acreage and, with it, the ability to manage their land and balance environmental protection and economic development. Salmon and trout have disappeared from streams. Fires become more frequent and stronger. Water potatoes and other root crops such as kama, once the staple food of tribal members, began to disappear.
Now extreme drought is making the situation worse.
It’s all part of a powerful cycle of land degradation and climate change that the Coeur d’Alene tribe has been battling for decades. It’s a fight that James has now joined as the tribe’s first climate resilience coordinator.
To protect their land and community, the Coeur d’Alene are in the midst of an ongoing, multi-decade effort that relies in part on ancient wisdom to restore an important wetland.
The tribe is bringing back beaver and salmon, restoring native grasses and repairing stream channels. Collectively, these efforts are designed to restore balance to the landscape, encouraging interconnected ecosystems to make it more resilient to future climate change and, tribal members hope, one day allow them to rely again on important ancestral foods like water potatoes.
“We’ve been living off the food that’s been on our land for thousands of years,” James said. “Reconnecting with that food reconnects us to our land.”
Bring back water potatoes, help the climate
Across the country, ecological restoration is increasingly seen as a key part of the fight against climate change, and wetlands provide an especially important service in an era of global warming: They absorb carbon from the atmosphere.
For the Coeur d’Alene tribe, a healthy wetland represents a way to stem rising temperatures that will provide a rich food source and the foundation for a traditional way of life. A wetland that serves as a linchpin means the tribe is restoring an ecosystem that is particularly threatened as the world’s climate trends warmer and drier. Because wetlands are areas where water is at or near the surface for a large part of the year, their existence is threatened by severe droughts caused by climate change.
According to US Fish and Wildlife Service, More than half of the wetlands in the lower 48 states are gone, and the rate of loss is only accelerating. Between 2009 and 2019, an area of vegetated wetlands in the United States the combined size of Rhode Island disappeared.
A massive effort is underway to help these damaged landscapes 2022 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act Includes $1.4 billion for ecosystem restoration and resilience, when President Joe Biden signed an executive order setting a national goal to conserve at least 30 percent of the nation’s land and water by 2030.
Their focus is not alone on restoring Coeur d’Alene, but they are particularly good at it. And their uniquely patient, humble approach can serve as a model for other communities working to restore the environment and prepare for climate change.
Tribal knowledge and skills are particularly important for restoration because indigenous people know what the land was like before it was degraded and what strategies will help restore it. The thread that ties it all together is traditional food, such as water potatoes. These cultural foods create connections between people and the land, and serve as a particularly tangible measuring stick of the impact these connections can have on the environment.
James says that cama, for example, grows better when it is cut regularly. But because so much of Coeur d’Alene’s land is now owned by non-tribals, tribal members often don’t have access to camas fields, and something that has been unusable for years is now suffering.
“We need these foods, but we also need them to thrive and grow and get better,” she said. “If we do these things right and we focus on restoring our relationship and restoring our connection to our culture, sovereignty and heritage, it will have a lasting impact.”
An ecological restoration – and a cultural one too
On the Coeur d’Alene Reservation, soil health and biodiversity have declined, water temperatures are rising, and extreme weather events such as heat waves and droughts are becoming more frequent. But the tribe’s recovery work is beginning to pay off.
In the summer of 2022, a Adult salmon swim in Hangman Creek For the first time in nearly 100 years. Two years after the tribe released juvenile salmon into the creek, and after an arduous journey to the Pacific Ocean and back, the tribe welcomed salmon back to the creek for the first time in generations.
For Ralph Allan Jr., the tribe’s fish and wildlife program manager, it was the culmination of 20 years of work that began with long days of field work planting trees. Now, he’s leading the department as it prepares to bring salmon back to the reservation.
Alan is also working to plant the seeds for a new generation of recovery advocates. He has led an internship program to get college students into the field, and three tribal members are currently enrolled in fish and wildlife degree programs. While cutting water potatoes, Alan makes sure the department staff is working with the youth, learning how to cut potatoes and pulling children out of the mud if they get stuck.
This cultural and community work is part of the tribe’s recovery efforts. Alan worries that the younger generation of the tribe is not as attached to the land as he was growing up. “We’re not just reintroducing salmon species to our people,” he said. “We’ve also lost that cultural connection with salmon, so we’re reintroducing a whole culture of salmon.”
Although salmon are a priority, they are part of a complex, interconnected ecosystem that the tribe is working to restore. Take the beaver dam. Dams raise the water table, expand the area along a river or lake where more animals and plants can live, and put more water on the landscape. All of this makes the area more welcoming to salmon and other wildlife, but also makes the landscape more resilient to drought and extreme heat because wetlands absorb and retain water released during dry periods, explained Tyler Opp, the tribe’s wetlands coordinator.
Beaver dams also support clear, cold water habitat for salmon, but they need trees to do that. As of 2019, the tribe’s Department of Environmental Programs has planted more than 18,000 trees from about a dozen different species and plans to plant 4,000 more by 2025.
The tribe used beaver dam analogs — man-made projections — posts to encourage beavers to return and reinforce existing beaver dams. Gerald Green, the tribe’s wildlife biologist, said they currently support about seven beaver dams in the creek.
The trees, the beavers, the salmon, the water — these are all part of a cyclical, interdependent system that the tribe is trying to restore and support. Cajetan Matheson, natural resources director and tribal council member, said climate impacts or recovery goals won’t work one after the other. “Everything is related to each other,” Matheson said. “You can’t just cut a mountain and say, ‘Oh, now we’ve beaten the fire problem.’ There’s more to it than that.”
These projects take time. Tyler Opp says that while the scale of the work that needs to be done can be overwhelming, the tribe’s perspective helps put things in perspective.
With long-term goals in mind, such as bringing back salmon, which could take decades, the tribe eschews Band-Aid solutions. Entire tribal governments take this approach year after year and generation after generation, and although the tribe is limited by funding and capacity, like many government agencies, this commitment allows them to focus on projects that will contribute to long-term achievement. Despite vision limitations, tribes can unite behind a shared vision of the future based on their collective history, knowledge and appreciation for the land.
“Tribes are able to prioritize things on a much longer time scale than state and federal agencies,” he said. “The tribe doesn’t have to think in terms of the next budget cycle to operate. all [the things we are doing] done for future generations.”
Almost everyone I spoke to in the Department of Natural Resources credited Felix Arepa, a tribal elder, with this vision. Died in 2016. He is seen as instrumental in setting the tone for the restoration work of the tribe.
Even Iyana James, who never got the chance to meet him, says she heard old tapes of Aripa. He was an early proponent of using beavers as a restoration partner and helped with simple things like pointing out where a stream flows so technicians could use it as a guide to restore the course rather than starting from scratch or guesswork. “The ultimate goal of anyone who works here in the fish and wildlife program is to leave a legacy the way Felix Arepa left his legacy and his mark on the program,” Allan said.
Before she died, Aripa helped Matheson and others put the tribe’s traditional seasonal calendar on paper. The calendar, which is based on seasonal indicators like tree sap rather than months and days, contains detailed information about food, ecosystems, plants, animals and human activities. “As we’re thinking broadly about how we can move toward recovery, this is the framework we can use,” said Laura Laumatia, the tribe’s environmental program manager. “It represents a thousand years of wisdom.”
So while the tribe is proud of their progress, they are still working on the future. “I think it’s good to work in the same place for 20 years because you see some changes happen,” Laumatia said. “But we know that the fruits of our labor are really going to be 70 years from now.”
