The effects of climate change are already evident in communities across the U.S. To both mitigate and coexist with this new reality, indigenous leaders across the country are driving solutions that prioritize both people and the environment. We’ll travel to Alaska to hear how kelp farming is helping coastal communities and species adapt to climate change…and then to Hawai’i, where a Native-led organization combined indigenous knowledge and modern engineering to help prevent disastrous flooding. Plus, we’ll learn from the people working to elect more Native leaders in politics – and why that’s so vital. In this episode, we’re looking to Indigenous communities to navigate climate change. Learn more about how you can build change at actblue.com/buildthechange or follow us on Instagram and TikTok.
The effects of climate change are already evident in communities across the U.S. To both mitigate and coexist with this new reality, indigenous leaders across the country are driving solutions that prioritize both people and the environment. We’ll travel to Alaska to hear how kelp farming is helping coastal communities and species adapt to climate change…and then to Hawai’i, where a Native-led organization combined indigenous knowledge and modern engineering to help prevent disastrous flooding. Plus, we’ll learn from the people working to elect more Native leaders in politics – and why that’s so vital.
In this episode, we’re looking to Indigenous communities to navigate climate change.
Learn more about how you can build change at actblue.com/buildthechange or follow us on Instagram and TikTok.
Build the Change Ep 4 - Indigenous rights & climate change
Transcript
ALOK
Hey listeners. Just a heads-up: this episode contains mentions of suicide. Listener discretion is advised.
DUNE
When we head out to sea, you know, depending on how far away your farm is, and ours are 20 minutes by fast boat, hour and a half by a boat that does eight knots. You get out to the farm and you see all these buoys, you see all these lines. And you start pulling up your lines – which could be 100-150 feet long, and some of 'em are really heavy.
ALOK
This might not be what you think of when you picture a farm. But that's exactly what it is. Off the coast of Alaska, undulating in the waves, you’ll find miles and miles of one versatile crop.
DUNE
And you pull that kelp out of the water, it's just, it's happy and it's beautiful. It's salty and it's oceany and the flavor – you immediately feel energized because you, you're eating something wild.And then once you blanche it, you know, or dry it turns this chartreuse green. It goes from a brownish color to this beautiful chartreuse green.
ALOK
Kelp is more than just beautiful. It’s playing an important role here, on the frontlines of a changing climate.
Dune Lankard is an indigenous leader who has been fighting climate change for years. As rising and warming seas and storms threaten the life and livelihood of this fishing community, he’s finding more sustainable ways to help the community survive – like kelp farming.
As we all grapple with the effects of climate change…let’s look to the original stewards of the land.
Indigenous communities across the country are pushing for solutions that prioritize people and climate.
In partnership with ActBlue, this is Build the Change, a show about the people at the center of progress.
I’m your host, Alok Vaid-Menon. I’m an author, poet, actor, advocate… And your companion for this trip around the country. We’re in search of the most compelling causes, and stories from the candidates, activists, and everyday people driving them forward.
Today, we’re talking about Indigenous rights - and why, in the face of climate change, they matter more than ever.
In the many fishing communities across Alaska, and particularly the remote areas where many Alaska Natives reside, climate change is impossible to ignore.
Warming seas are killing fish. Rising sea levels are forcing entire communities to move. And more frequent and severe storms make going out in a boat – a necessity – far more dangerous. People need to find a different option.
To understand how we got here, though, let’s go back - to 1989. Cordova, Alaska, a small community of just a few thousand people, came to a standstill while the world watched.
CNN
The tanker Exxon Valdez. Gouged by a reef. More than 8.5 million gallons poured into Prince William Sound, a prime fishing and recreation area.
NBC
It’s not only the largest oil spill in U.S. history. It’s by far the largest in such a remote, pristine area.
NBC
Day 10 of the oil spill crisis. And the clean-up effort still just beginning.
ALOK
This was the second largest oil spill in U.S. history. And for Dune, it changed everything.
DUNE
My name is Dune Lankard. I'm an Eyak Athabaskans native from the Copper River Delta in Prince William Sound, and I'm from the Eagle Clan. And my Eyak name is Jamachakih, which means little bird that screams really loud and won't shut up. And I earned that nickname shortly after the Exxon Valdez oil spill because, um, I found that I had to be louder than everything else, yet remain a voice of reason, so people would listen.
ALOK
Like most people in town, he grew up fishing.
DUNE
As long as I knew that I could make it to my boat and untie that boat and head
out to sea, I was gonna be okay.
ALOK
The spill changed all that.
DUNE
And so while I was going out, I saw the dead animals, I saw all the oil in the water. I've never been to war, but it was like going to war only knowing that you've already lost the war.
ALOK
Thousands of people lost their livelihoods. Hundreds of thousands of plants and animals died. And the solutions weren’t great, either.
DUNE
The number one response to oil spills is dispersants, which is like taking carburetor fluid and dumping it in the ocean, and how that could make the situation better. I have no idea other than that. It sinks the oil into the water column.
ALOK
This didn’t solve anything for the town. Cordova is the ancestral home for the Eyak tribe. The native and non-Native population both depend on fishing to survive.
DUNE
Cordova’s never been anything but a glorified fish camp. We've always figured out how to make it out on the sea to catch herring, or salmon, or crustaceans or whatever it is. But when the spill happened, there were divorces, there was breakup of fish cooperatives, there was drug and alcohol abuse, there was suicides. There was loss of hope and belief in the American dream. Let alone our Alaskan dream.
ALOK
Companies, governments - it seemed like everyone was failing Cordova.
DUNE
And I really thought that the government would come in the Alaska delegation, um, the president of the United States – someone would come and try and figure out how to help us, but no one came. So I realized that I had to step up and do everything I could to protect our homelands.
ALOK
So he spent nearly three decades fighting Exxon Mobil in court. The town did finally win a settlement: $500 million, down from the $2.5 billion they had asked for. Exxon spent an estimated $2 billion on clean-up. Dune says the damage was done.
DUNE
They would've had more success had they taken $1 bills outta the $2 billion and took a 747 over the oil spill and dropped all those dollar bills,
ALOK
It seemed like everyone wanted to stand between Dune’s community, and their ancestral land – their way of life. Cordova [Core-DOE-va] never fully recovered from the spill. And then, the effects of climate change started becoming more and more apparent.
Dune decided to do something about it. He’d already taken on Exxon Mobil in court. And now, he wanted to take action to ensure Alaska Native communities could continue to access their ancestral lands. The lands they’d lived off of for thousands of years.
He founded Native Conservancy - a non-profit organization dedicated to doing that work.
DUNE
It's always been about preserving, defending and enforcing our inherent rights of sovereignty, subsistence, and spirituality.
ALOK
He’s also finding ways to make sure that communities can adapt to continue to live off that land. After witnessing several bad years for fishing, including a heat wave that killed thousands of fish…
DUNE
Anything that couldn't migrate fast enough died because they suffocated.
ALOK
He did some research, and decided to make a minor career change. From a fisherman…to a farmer. A kelp farmer, to be exact.
DUNE
Growing up as a fisherman, kelp was always a nuisance. It was always in our way. It was in between us and the fish, and it was on deck and super slippery. So you'd almost, you know, fall down trying to get the kelp overboard. But we would always eat it.
ALOK
He realized the Eyaks - and other native peoples - had a long history of harvesting kelp. And kelp, as it turns out, is not only resilient to climate change - it can actually help mitigate some of its effects - like a particularly bad heat wave.
DUNE
So with these kelp farms, you're gonna be able to create habitat that's gonna cool those temperatures. So it’s not gonna be direct heat.
ALOK
Thus protecting hundreds of species that depend on kelp to survive. Kelp farms also create more of a barrier as sea levels rise - protecting land and sea alike.
DUNE
You're gonna have less erosion because you're gonna have less waves impacting the ocean as the ocean rises.
ALOK
And, because it’s such a fast-growing and dense plant, kelp can even help sequester carbon. And kelp is an economic lifeline to communities that depend on the ocean for their livelihood.
DUNE
Kelp is like the hemp of the sea. It has this amazing, miraculous ability to create a lot of solutions that we're facing right now as challenges on the planet.
ALOK
And like hemp, kelp can be used as a sustainable base for dozens of other products.
DUNE
Fertilizer compost, there's pharmaceuticals, there's nutraceuticals, there's bioplastics, there's biofuels, there's clothing. I mean, the list goes on. Kelp can really help.
ALOK
Kelp is very much a new frontier. It took a lot of trial and error to learn. Dune and his team started at step one - growing the plants in tanks on shore that would eventually go in the water…
DUNE
And so we built our own hatchery program. That took a lot of learning, you know, 'cause we had to have a lot of filters and salt water and change in the water. And there's all these things that the seed was susceptible to...
ALOK
Once they figured that out, the next step was taking the kelp out to sea – to scale up. Think of it as propagating your plant, and then planting it in soil to actually grow...
DUNE
And then you had to figure out how to build your kelp arrays, your farm. You had to figure out how you were going to deploy the lines, then seed the lines, then monitor your lines…
ALOK
And finally, once they had nailed that:
DUNE
Harvest your lines in the spring.
ALOK
Luckily, they learned quickly - thanks to the fact that kelp grows pretty fast.
DUNE
Just to give you an idea of how miraculous kelp is – is it’s the fastest growing organism on the planet. So it can grow 18 to 24 inches a day. I joke with my fellow kelpers that one day they're gonna pay us to watch kelp grow.
ALOK
It took 4 years of work and learning, but Dune and his team have planted kelp across 100 miles – in the very same waters where oil still lingers from the Exxon Valdez oil spill.
Dune’s goal is to get other farmers out on the water, too. He wants to get 100 Native-owned farms set up in the next decade.
Good for the economy, and good for the environment. That’s known as regenerative economy. It’s central to the work that Dune is doing with Native Conservancy, a nonprofit organization that centers Native and Indigenous claims to their ancestral land.
DUNE
Ocean farming is about ocean back. So to me, land back plus ocean back actually equals people back, bringing our people back to our communities to learn how to live on the land and the sea in a different way than they did before.
ALOK
Last year, the House of Representatives introduced the Coastal Seaweed Farm Act. It’s the first major step to study and support seaweed farming at the national level. It also centers Indigenous communities in this work, prioritizing them for permits and other support in these nascent industries. For now, the act has stalled.
For Dune, the work is still ongoing. It’s something he learned back when he was fighting for accountability after the oil spill: if you want something done, you gotta make it happen.
DUNE
We have to believe in ourselves and that we have the ability to rise up because more than anything, you know, sitting back and hoping that someone else's is gonna come along or that there's someone coming, well, there's not. We're the best we got. And so we just need to rise up, sing Kumbaya, and figure out how we're gonna do this together, because otherwise we're going down in the same ship together.
ALOK
Across the globe, we’re all dealing with our own version of rising sea levels, hotter summers, colder winters, more extreme weather events. And that’s all the more reason to pay attention to the people actively putting climate solutions into practice. Especially the people who are facing the brunt of the climate risk.
TRISHA
This is the new norm. Disasters are going to come.
ALOK
That’s Trisha Kēhaulani Watson in Hawai’i.
TRISHA
As somebody who has, was born and raised here, Hawaii has definitely changed. Above all else, it's the storm events. It’s not necessarily sea level rise or these, I mean those things are absolutely true. I've lived through multiple hurricanes and seen them, but we've never had the flooding, the droughts, the winds…It's the storms that are the biggest threat because in a single few hours, an entire town can be decimated.
ALOK
As she’s watched the community struggle and try to adapt, she realized what needed to happen.
Trisha founded the nonprofit organization 'Āina Momona back in 2017, along with Walter Ritte - an iconic activist who’s been driving Native Hawaiian conservation efforts since the 1970’s.
TRISHA
With 'Āina Momona, it's really about justice, whether it's sovereignty and just that empowerment of the native Hawaiian and indigenous people. Also environmental work. We really, you know, believe in putting resources and boots on the ground to restore spaces. Our work is not about studying environmental degradation, but, you know, resolving it and responding to it and remediating it.
ALOK
Case in point: the flooding.
TRISHA
If you have a two foot layer of mud in your house, that is a huge problem economically, right? Or businesses that are in these hazardous areas, right? You can't operate that impacts the entire government. That impacts the entire community. And nobody was doing anything about it, right? It would flood people's homes, it would flood the road, and our crew would go out and do the cleanup.
ALOK
Trisha’s team would have to go and literally dig out the roads. And during the rainy season, this could happen as much as once a month. So they decided to do something about it…
TRISHA
Basically, if you can imagine if you have a mountain side – You dig almost like small ravines…
ALOK
Trisha’s team at 'Āina Momona created a prototype - and then put into practice what’s known as a swale.
TRISHA
So, you know, we can put in these swales that trap the water and trap the soil. Instead of all of this sort of gaining momentum and coming off the mountain, they’re staying on the mountain.
ALOK
It’s actually quite a simple engineering solution that captures rainwater. They developed it with technical support from engineering experts at the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
TRISHA
So it really is an idea that has come from a multitude of sources, originally an indigenous idea, but one that has been made more efficient, certainly by western science and modern engineering. And that's all the work we do, right? We’re not interested in just doing what we want. What we want is to do things that are highly effective.
ALOK
That’s where her work thrives - at this intersection. And she hopes others will look at this as a model: that it’s often the small, local groups, working on the ground, who know what the biggest problems are – and the best solutions.
TRISHA
I do think if you give community resources, and if you let community lead, I mean, I've seen it on our own projects, you absolutely can turn the tide so to speak, and you can turn things that were otherwise hazardous into resilience spaces.
ALOK
Supporting local organizations is key.
TRISHA
I know people like doing land acknowledgements, I give money, right? Like, if we are in somebody's space, to me it's not enough to be like, I would like to acknowledge the indigenous people. I think take the time to figure out who the indigenous people of that space are and donate to them.
ALOK
Just look at the Maui wildfires. Using ActBlue, 'Āina Momona was able to mobilize quickly in response to the disaster – raising millions of dollars, which they distributed to organizers and survivors on the ground.
TRISHA
It was me and a checkbook, I'll be honest. We were looking for people who were not getting the services they needed. We looked for people who were truly, you know, underserved.
ALOK
The flexibility of local organizations combined with fundraising efforts is where impact happens.
TRISHA
Reaching out to a global audience and making it easy to contribute to organizations that are small and rural and have long been underserved and marginalized like ours. To me that is an act of justice unto itself.
ALOK
Justice can also look like strengthening ties between local communities and elected officials. Often there’s not enough folks in leadership positions who have ties to communities - like Indigenous communities - that are working on the ground.
TRISHA
It means you are putting more Indigenous people in leadership positions. Not because they're indigenous, but because of their intelligence and their skillsets and their understanding of community, and because they're good scientists and they're good environmentalists.
ALOK
There are real barriers potential Indigenous leaders and lawmakers face when getting into politics.
JORDAN
When native folks are thinking about running for office, I think one of the primary challenges that, um, that we're trying to work through is, uh, introducing them to a system that was not designed for them, nor most people in the United States actually these systems were developed, um, for straight, white, rich land owning men, right? and in this very short blink of an eye in the last 50 or 60 years, there has now been an opportunity for someone that doesn't match that profile to run for office.
ALOK
That’s Jordan James Harvill.
JORDAN
I’m a member of the Cherokee Nation and descendant of the Choctaw Nation, and I serve as the National Program Director for Advance.
ANATHEA
Advance Native Political Leadership was co-founded in 2016 with the mission to build a political home by and for indigenous people in the United States.
ALOK
And that’s Anathea Chino.
ANATHEA
Guu’wah’tse. How'ba. I am from Acoma Pueblo, New Mexico, and I am one of the co-founders and the executive director of Advanced Native Political Leadership.
ALOK
They work to create a new path for Indigenous people to run for office.
ANATHEA
Over 70% of us live off tribal lands. Like myself, I live in Philadelphia, and so when we are, like, when we are in a space and there are no federally recognized tribes in the state of Pennsylvania, and what I often hear in my own city is that people didn't know that indigenous people still existed. In the vastness of all of the challenges that we have, we are still fighting to be seen as contingent contemporary human beings.
ALOK
Jordan grew up in California, which is home to the largest Native population in the country. But even still, Jordan didn’t see himself represented by his leaders. And that can lead to real policy problems - as leaders may not be tuned in to the specific needs of a community.
JORDAN
So there's about 519 – 520,000 elected offices, um, within the United States. 96% of those are local, and they span everything from school boards at the local level up to president. Out of those 520,000 offices, we need roughly about 17,000 of them to be held by indigenous peoples of the United States in order to see basic representational parity. At this moment, we have just over 350.
ALOK
But getting a parity of Native leaders in office isn’t an easy proposition. There are very real, tangible challenges to getting elected – and serving.
JORDAN
Half of the states and, in the United States have citizen legislatures…
ALOK
Meaning, elected officials in many states aren’t full-time. They have outside jobs, and only serve in their role during part of the year.
JORDAN
You virtually don't get paid or you get paid very little. You get paid below the federal, um, uh, poverty line in most of these situations, which means that. the only way for you to be able to serve in them consistent consistently, a, a job that might take six plus months, that might require you to move to a different part of the state for large sections of time, um, one that, that may require 40, 60, 80 hours a week. What it means is that you have to already have had a business that gave you the flexibility to do that. Some type of job, though there are not many that gave you the flexibility to do that. Or, independently be wealthy, right?
ALOK
And, they might be the only Native person serving – which means they’re dealing with non-Native colleagues, while also navigating the political system and government.
Here’s Anathea again:
ANATHEA
And so when you - we’re - asking people who are existing with a number of different, very tangible challenges in their own lives, to then step further into a very brave act of working within a system that intended to eradicate us, that is a really steep sales pitch.
ALOK
It’s an uphill battle. But Advance Native is addressing it by creating a cohort of leaders through their leadership program. And connecting them with the resources – and community – they need to get and do the job.
JORDAN
I genuinely believe that our lived experience is our expertise and that has become the philosophy and the backbone of the Native Leadership Institute. I think that working through the program is trying to find a sense of community so that all of that feels possible still. And that you know, that there is a group of folks at home and throughout your journey that are waiting for you to get there and are ready to prepare and prepared to support you throughout the journey.
ALOK
Change may be slow, but it is happening, even in some of the highest offices in the U.S. In 2021, Advance Native was part of the effort to confirm Deb Haaland as the Secretary of the Interior. That made her the first Native American woman to serve as a cabinet secretary. When we talked to Trisha at 'Āina Momona, that moment was a big deal.
TRISHA
People like Deb Haaland, I, I might get teary eyed. Um, I never thought I'd live to see an indigenous woman leading something like the Department of the Interior.
ALOK
And the more we support leaders and organizations that prioritize the people they’re serving – the more we can build change for indigenous communities, and our planet as a whole. As Anathea put it,
ANATHEA
I firmly believe that our best days are in front of us.
ALOK
Let’s support local solutions, pave the way for better representation in our elected bodies, and continue to support Indigenous candidates and organizations up and down the ballot and across the country.
ActBlue is here to help you find, support, and even fundraise for the candidates and causes you’re passionate about. Learn more about these Indigenous-led organizations featured today,Native Conservancy, 'Āina Momona, and Advance Native Political Leadership – and maybe even how to start your own fundraising journey – at actblue.com/buildthechange.
Build the Change is created in partnership with ActBlue, produced by Wonder Media Network, and hosted by me, Alok Vaid-Menon.
Our production team includes Edie Allard, Lindsey Kratochwill, Sara Schleede, Abbey Delk, Hannah Bottum, and Paloma Moreno Jimenez. Our executive producer is Jenny Kaplan. Our showrunners are Rohita Javangula and Maria Jose Hurtado.
See you next time!