How Native Farmers Pair Ancestral Knowledge with Climate Expertise
When looking for ways to fight our warming climate, Native farmers and land stewards argue we should center Native voices.
Mary Oxendine grew up in Robeson County, NC, among the Lumbee people. As a child of multigenerational farmers, she grew up picking peas and butterbeans, working with her grandmother making sausages, and plucking chickens.
As an adult, she worked her way up in the local government’s food security program. But when her father passed, she found herself reconnecting with farmers in the fields.
“I was looking for what made me feel grounded and what made me feel like I belonged. And, I just started growing things. I got a community plot at Hawk’s Nest Healing Gardens… and really felt like I was reconnecting with myself and with the land and with my ancestors,” says Oxendine. “For me, it’s really about having a deep relationship with the plants and with the rest of nature, caring for them like you would actual family—gently picking up their branches. There’s a deep relationship and reciprocity, because I care for them and then they care for me.”
Oxendine says this interconnectedness colors her every choice and step and that it is inherently an Indigenous mindset.
“If we spray an insecticide, yes, maybe it kills that one insect, but it also could potentially impact other pollinators that will decrease my yield,” says Oxendine. “It’s impacting birds and the ecosystem and affecting the water and drinkability of water for humans, but also the water toxins that are impacting fish and other wildlife in the water. To me, the best way to impact climate is before you do something, think deeply and ask what are the real impacts of that act.”
Historic violent storms, destructive floods, rising sea levels and melting polar ice caps dominate our lives and headlines. But, are we past the point of no return, or can we still have a positive impact on the planet and life on it?
Climate scientists and US leaders believe so, although the window is narrow.
But how can we change course, and who has the answers? Oxendine believes Native farmers deserve a word.
Native environmental views can fight climate change
Despite measures taken since, human activity and the El Nino phenomenon continued to accelerate global warming to the point of experiencing the hottest years on record in 2023 and 2024. One wonders, with cutting-edge scientific advances, national and international mitigations, and an increasingly common understanding of climate change, why does the problem persist so tenaciously?
Beth Roach is a member of the Nottoway Indians of Virginia. She is also the co-founder and owner of Alliance of Native Seedkeepers, Bertie County Seeds retail shop, and Quitsna Conniot ancestral gardens with Justin “Fix” Račhakwáhstha Cain, who is Tuscarora (Skaroreh Katenuaka).
They both have extensive lived experience as land stewards, as well as deep multi-generational connections to agriculture and forestry stewardship.
“We study our local environment intensely [all day, every day] and notice both subtle and dramatic changes,” says Roach. “From these observations, we adapt our practices. We anticipate changes in our growing zones and educate others. We advocate for climate adaptation planning through Indigenous frameworks.”
They were able to ascertain early that the hardiness zone where they live was shifting due to climate change, and are already taking preventative steps to nurture seeds and plants that would be endangered. As important as modern-day scientific methods and data are, they also have a unique take on understanding our woodlands ecosystem by learning from the past.
“We utilize traditional place names and translate them in order to understand how our ancestors saw the water and land,” says Roach. “Additionally, we use these translations to assess changes in our ecosystem and climate.”
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Roach and her colleagues believe that Native people know the story of the land, and have the connections through lived experience, oral histories passed down, blood memory and documented history to understand where it has been, what their ancestors observed, and what it needs to thrive into the future.
And the land responds in kind to mindful stewardship. For example, simple but measured clearing of invasive plants, such as cultural burning, yields surprising results when Earth is allowed to finally breathe. Native plants spring up once again from the freed soil. Loving fertilized with the ash of its stewards, the forest is cleansed of excessive pests and invasives safely for established growth to flourish.
However, industrial carbon dioxide, PFAS, chlorines, bromides, CFCs and plastics harm air quality and increase temperatures, accumulate in rain and waterways or deplete protective ozone layers and cause contamination long after their release. Not only is the story of the land unknown, unwanted, and dishonored by apathetic corporate self-serving, it is actively quashed by intimidation, violence and legislative manipulation. And the land responds to this as well.
A climate-conscious approach must first honor the land, its people, and its story.
Creating programs for and with Native people
One of the programs created to put Native voices first in the discussion of climate change is First Nations Development Institute’s Stewarding Native Lands program. It has offices in Nevada and New Mexico, and serves tribes as well as Native nonprofits across the nation and it has five program areas. The stewardship program overlaps with food sovereignty and cultural programs because they are so intertwined culturally.
The stewardship program has four initiatives, and one that specifically addresses climate. Mary Adelzadeh, senior program officer with the institute, has much to say regarding increasing the capacity of Native land stewardship models. She also stresses operating from a mindset and position of strength—as overcomers—not victims.
“Because when you think about this climate challenge, it is rooted in the fact that Native people and their knowledge was contained onto reservation systems, and in order to really have a transformative change in climate, we really need to invest in the adaptive capacity of these Native communities, to be able to scale it out.”
The Stewarding Native Lands program works toward supporting co-management and co-stewardship of federal lands. These are sovereign-to-sovereign agreements, where tribes could enter into these arrangements with federal entities such as the Bureau of Land Management, the Forest Service, and National Park Service.
Their focus is land access, establishing and bolstering the workforce, and the nuts and bolts of what it would take to scale Native land stewardship. The traditional Western conservation frameworks weren’t designed for and are not really accessible to tribes. Her approach is that new conservation, finance, opportunities that are directly accessible to tribes should be decided upon.
Along the lines of investment, Amir Kirkwood, CEO of Justice Climate Fund, spoke about their works with programs empowering such endeavors. One is the Clean Communities Investment Accelerator (CCIA) program, part of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund (GGRF) program.
“That program was really designed to have community lenders—could be banks, CDFIs, could be other funds—that did not have existing climate or greenhouse gas reduction programs in place, to basically fund their ability to build a program at their individual organization for the benefit of the communities,” he says.
The fund was awarded $940 million on August 16. The idea is that by working with those banks at the community level, they can help them to not only deploy capital in greenhouse gas reductions but raise outside capital to compliment federal funding, and utilize that as wrap-around funding for initiatives with additional community benefits—such as job creation, supporting local businesses, or contributing to better health outcomes in those communities.
“So, that’s where community banks have always been a valuable asset locally, is that they have that comprehensive focus on the communities. And so, this is exciting because it’s able to add to what they already do, with some of the work around climate finance as well,” says Kirkwood.
Reclaiming land
Some independent projects are already having groundbreaking impact in their communities as well as restorative climate implications. One such initiative is Makoce Ikikcupi, a Reparative Justice project on Dakota land in Minisota Makoce (Minnesota). Ahán Heȟáka Sápa (Luke Black Elk, Thitȟuŋwaŋ Lakota) works with the program as a farm director. It’s a Dakota-run organization out of Minnesota, and the name actually means “Land Reclamation.”
Currently, they have purchased three separate pieces of land situated throughout Minnesota, and Ahán Heȟáka Sápa is the farm director for their second village site, Hohwoju Otunwe (Village of Vibrant Growth). It is located near Mountain Lake, Minnesota, which is a small town in southern Minnesota. There are a couple of different groups, or what’s modernly called tribes. But they all fall under what they call the Očhéthi Šakówiŋ, which means the Seven Councils Fires.
“One of the things that Indigenous people really lack is access to land. My tribe has control of two million acres on the books, but really we only have about a million acres accessible to our people. And even then, we have been taught by the capitalist education system that we should be sort of fearful in going outside and picking natural plants or you know, even so much as growing your own food,” says Ahán Heȟáka Sápa.
They consider themselves to be free Oceti people, and aren’t funded by any tribal organization or tribal entity, to avoid a precedent of Native people buying land back with their own money.
“We don’t want to set a precedent for our children to have to find their own funding and use their own money to do this, because it’s really still ours, this land that we’re around. All of Minnesota was once Dakota territory and we really feel strongly about coming back to this area,” says Ahán Heȟáka Sápa.
Chana J. White is a mother, grandmother, farmer, and Master Beekeeper. She works with Whitaker Small Farm Group and Eastern North Carolina Farmer Collaborative, and also owns and operates Native Brand Honey. One challenge faced even in Indigenous circles is disenfranchisement from cultural and foodways; however, White speaks of the benefits of access to oral histories and elder wisdom, which she can pass on to next generations of agriculturalists and climate keepers.
“Thankfully, we have some old heads still around that let us know and have taught us when to plant root crops, above the ground crops, when to seed, and when to pull weeds. We even watch certain animals because they know when rain is coming. I believe it’s important to listen and pay attention,” she says.
Can we imagine a society that honors the Earth instead of exploiting it?
This will only happen as Native voices are sought for solutionary committees and legislative decisions in every locale, compensated for their contributions, and renewed to their ancestral homelands for restorative land stewardship and ownership.
Beth Roach can see it also. “Ensuring Native engagement and leadership of our water, land, and seeds ensures protection of each for many more generations to come. Inspired by the traditional wisdom of seven-generational thinking, we envision a future where our children and theirs can thrive in harmony with the Earth, cradling their culture and justice in equal measure,” she says.
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