News Articles Task: Indigenous Affairs
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News Articles Task: Indigenous Affairs
- How Tribal Nations Are Planning for and Dealing with Climate Change
The livelihoods, health, and cultural practices of many tribal nations continue to be adversely affected by the impacts of climate change. The impact is also being felt on the ecological resilience of their territories. In order to properly effect resilience strategies, it has become imperative that these indigenous people have self-determination. As a result, they are now at the forefront of climate adaptation and mitigation actions guided by their indigenous values and knowledge. Their leaders spearhead their climate change responses through some of the ways described below.
Across the country, all tribal nations have begun building resilience and adaptive capacity to the effects of climate change (US Climate Resilience Toolkit, 2023). When people prepare proactively for climate change, the costs, vulnerabilities, and impacts are reduced over time while also pushing efficient and rapid responses to the changes. While these efforts of adaptation and mitigation are spreading across the country, they are still insufficient among the indigenous people, especially in the reduction of increasingly negative economic, environmental, and social consequences. It has become imperative that traditional knowledge is integrated with scientific information so that the greatest opportunities for adaptation are experienced.
To properly adapt to the multiple stressors that come with climate change, it has become imperative that the assessment of the composite threats is done together with the making of tradeoffs among risks, benefits, and costs of available options (US Climate Resilience Toolkit, 2023). Other stresses like poverty, habitat fragmentation, and pollution exacerbate climate change vulnerability. All over the US, indigenous communities continue experiencing increased intensity and frequency of extreme events, unpredictable availability of water, and infrastructure losses. Despite the awareness about climate change being raised, indigenous communities continue to experience these effects because of a lack of expertise, training, access to information, human resources, and funding (US Climate Resilience Toolkit, 2023). Unless these are availed, indigenous communities will continue to suffer the impacts of climate change, and many lives could be lost, as well as their conditions severed. ABC News is the best place to tell this because of its wide coverage and consistent reporting on matters surrounding climate change in the US.
- The National Day of Mourning
Mahtowin Monro sits back and remembers how they used to celebrate the Thanksgiving holidays back in her childhood. Their elementary class would be divided into two, with some children dressed as indigenous peoples with headbands and paper feathers and the others assigned to represent the pilgrims with tall hats and bonnets (Griner, 2023). These children would then be told to act out the Thanksgiving holiday myth. The myth is that when the Euro-westerners came to America, they embraced their newfound indigenous neighbors with a hearty feast and open arms.
Monro looks at this and acknowledges that even as a child, he always saw something wrong with this. Today, she is part of a ceremony that is meant to honor the real history of the indigenous peoples in North America, which the Thanksgiving ceremony plays a major role in erasing. On every fourth Thursday of November, as the rest of the students go to celebrate the Thanksgiving holiday, she, together with other members of the United American Indians of New England, meet in Plymouth, Massachusetts, for another ceremonial christened the National Day of Mourning (Griner, 2023).
This event is partly spiritual, and they take time to remember and protest. They acknowledge the various atrocities that were committed against Aboriginal people during the colonial days and also what was done in the residential schools in Canada and the United States. Some of the human injustices that were done in these schools include physical, sexual, and emotional abuse (Tsosie, 2023). Other issues, such as in relation to the destruction of the environment, climate change, and fishing rights, are also looked at. Accordingly, the indigenous people of the United States deserve to be respected, and the correct history of the US regarding them be put into the light. The best place to tell this story is on ABC News because of its extensive network and wide coverage.
References
Griner, A. (2023, November 23). How a Rejected Thanksgiving Speech Forged an Indigenous Holiday Tradition. Aljazeera. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/11/23/how-a-rejected-thanksgiving-speech-forged-an-indigenous-holiday-tradition
Tsosie, R. (2023). Accountability for the Harms of Indigenous Boarding Schools: The Challenge of” Healing the Persisting Wounds” of” Historical Injustice.” Sw. L. Rev., pp. 52, 20.
US Climate Resilience Toolkit. (2023). Tribal Nations. https://toolkit.climate.gov/topics/tribal-nations