The Native Wisdom Film Festival Showcases How the Pacific Northwest is Leading the Fight Against Global Warming

We spoke to producer Rose High Bear about the interrelationship of Native peoples and climate change.

(courtesy of NWFilm.org)
By Crystal Contreras

"It was said that there will come a day," explains Rose High Bear, "when the people of the world will look to Native Americans and other indigenous people to learn how to take care of the earth and how to take care of one another." Not only is the Native Wisdom Film Festival she produces crucial for preventing catastrophic climate change, it's also prophecy.

Storytelling and climate science join forces at the festival, where Native elders of the Pacific Northwest share the changes they have witnessed as the planet rapidly grows warmer. Recording Native elders' stories is something that High Bear has been doing for years, but it wasn't until recently that she and producer-director Lawrence Johnson had the equipment to start making documentaries. The four short films they produced show how climate science and Native knowledge are working side by side to reclaim lost heritages and restore our planet's most precious resources.

Rose High Bear

WW spoke to High Bear about the Native Wisdom Film Festival and our region's unique role in preventing climate change.

WW: Can you give some background into how these films came about?

Rose High Bear: We’ve been experiencing climate issues in Alaska for over 50 years now. The climate scientists at University of Alaska Fairbanks and University of Alaska at Anchorage have all been turning to Alaska Native elders because they have this astute observation of nature. They’ve got this gift. They can talk about how the world has changed, and some of them are in their 90s. They know their watersheds, they know their sacred landscapes so well, and they know how they’ve changed. But not only that, they know what their grandparents said about their environment.
As an Alaskan Native, I was alarmed at the changes that were being witnessed by Native elders. Around 2012, I talked with a number of climate scientists at UAF and UAA, and that’s when I understood what they were doing. They were making these recordings and using the elders’ observations in climate science. So there was an integration between traditional ecological knowledge and climate science. We always recorded our elders to save their messages, and I realized that we had to do this work of sharing their observations with the world.

What is unique about the Pacific Northwest in regards to climate change?

This is a sacred landscape for hundreds of tribes, some of which are not federally recognized. So we have thousands of people who lived here for thousands of years and kept the Pacific Northwest pristine, to the point where Lewis and Clark and the early explorers came in, and it looked like it was totally unoccupied.

Our people, as do many other Native nations, know how to take care of their sacred landscapes, they know how to take care of their watersheds. To us it is sacred because there's a spirit in it that we work with. We're a spiritual people, and we just don't work without that connection with our ancestors, and remembering the future generations that are going to be here long after we're gone.

What can we do to understand the Pacific Northwest's global role in preventing climate change?

Our role in the Pacific Northwest is to share with the world what’s going on here locally and making it engaging enough to attract attention of people. We have to pray for people. I don’t believe we can ever be angry at someone. I don’t believe we can ever demonstrate hatred, animosity, resentment, we can’t put that out in the world, there’s too much already.
What do you think the folks here in the Pacific Northwest have to learn by building relationships with our friends in Alaska?
The very first climate refugees are Alaskan Natives in a small village of Newtok, Alaska. It got to the point where it wasn’t the ocean that was invading them, it was the permafrost that was thawing. So everything underneath them, which had been probably been frozen for thousands of years, became thawed, and the whole village was toppling. So they had to move to more solid ground. We got to see what the elders had to say about that. And so what they are is the canary in the coal mine, and we can learn from their experience. They’re like a grandparent to us when it comes to the climate response.

What role does preservation and reclamation of Native languages and cultures have in preventing climate change?

We need to know our Native language. With the names of some plants, we’ll describe its purpose, its creation, its uses. Otherwise you’ve just got a Latin name and an English name. So we would be losing an element of our relationship with the plant world—with the four-legged world—if we didn’t have our language. When it comes to climate change, we’re in a place where we’re trying to restore what could be threatened or lost. One of our biggest species we’re concerned about is the Pacific lamprey eel. It is a sacred food to the people. There’s a medicine in it that saves the lives of elders who are fragile and declining. It’s older than the dinosaurs, and yet it could be wiped out in our generation.
SEE IT: The Native Wisdom Film Festival screens at NW Film Center’s Whitsell Auditorium on Saturday, April 15. 2 pm. See nwfilm.org for a list of films and tickets.

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