Climate in Crisis: Environmental Change in the Indigenous Americas (Part I)

For millennia, Indigenous communities throughout the Americas have maintained profound and expansive relationships with the natural world. However, beginning in the 1500s, Europe’s conquest and colonization of the Americas forced ways of using natural resources that clashed with traditional Indigenous modes of relating to the world.

This fundamental difference in worldviews—one that sees animals, plants, and the land as interrelated and equal, and another that privileges human needs above everything else—has resulted in ever-escalating threats to Indigenous homelands, ways of life, and survival, as well as the unprecedented level of climate change affecting the planet today.

The pipeline, which crosses under Lake Oahe, just upstream of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, started operation in 2017 and was originally slated to cross the Missouri River near Bismarck, but was moved out of fear that an oil spill would contaminate the state capital’s drinking water. Despite numerous lawsuits and protests, many of which culminated in violence toward protesters, the pipeline was completed after President Trump issued an executive order in January 2017. The pipeline, which handles 570,000 barrels a day, is a direct threat to the tribe’s drinking water and sovereignty.

The exhibition is divided into seven regional groupings and countries spanning North, Central, and South America. Using political borders as an organizational framework is complicated because it disregards the spread of myriad cultures across the continents before nation-states with political borders existed. However, by grouping the works by country, the exhibition underscores the geopolitical nature of any attempt to combat the climate crisis today.

Indigenous peoples of numerous tribal affiliations and nations have lived in the Northwest Coast region of North America, bordering the Pacific Ocean, since time immemorial. Their ancestral homelands encompass present-day British Columbia in Canada, and Alaska, Washington, Oregon, and Northern California in the United States. Though diverse in their cultural and political identities, the tribes of the region share a reverence for the natural world, and family clans and belief systems are rooted in the environment and its life-giving resources.

The Hopi refer to these ancestral lands as Hopituskwa (“Hopi land”), and the Zuni refer to them as Ulohnanne (“world” or “universe”). Both communities rely on traditional knowledge and ecological rhythms to sustain farming techniques that are central to Native customs, rituals, and life.

The Hopi and Zuni are among several tribes who identify the Bears Ears area in Utah as part of their ancestral homelands. These lands are sacred, and in 2016 President Barack Obama established Bears Ears National Monument. However, the subsequent Trump administration reduced its size by 85 percent in order to permit uranium mining and gas and oil drilling. After winning the 2020 presidential election, President Joe Biden restored the national monument to its original boundaries—but the back-and-forth shows how fragile environmental protections can be.

What is a kachina doll? Carved kachina figures, such as the fierce ogre Tsaveyo, are representations of supernatural beings and can have a sacred or educational purpose. During some ceremonies, the carvings are given to female community members to reward virtuous behavior, recognize a recent marriage, or teach girls about religion.

For the Hopi, a supernatural being that represents a life force or embodies a natural phenomenon such as the sun, the moon, a plant, or an animal is called katsina (commonly anglicized as “kachina”) by the Hopi. Such beings have the power to control rainfall, crop growth, and fertility; to cure and protect; and to act as messengers between the gods and human beings.

The Spiro Mounds archaeological site in present-day eastern Oklahoma was the western outpost of a series of prosperous cultures, referred to as Mississippian, that developed in the riverine regions of the Midwest and Southeast between 900 and 1650. In one of the mounds, a hollow chamber was found containing thousands of ceremonial objects—including this cup—that had been brought there from all over the Mississippian world. The ritual chamber and most of the offerings date to about 1400, when the Little Ice Age was causing disturbing environmental changes, and suggests that the chamber was an attempt to summon a new age of stability and abundance.

Continue to Part II of this exhibition to learn about the Indigenous peoples of Mexico, Central and South America.