Putting Indigenous Knowledge Into Practice for Climate Change: The Tribal Adaptation Menu
Indigenous knowledge offers invaluable insights for how to approach climate change. This article describes a tool called the Tribal Adaptation Menu that provides a set of concrete, practical strategies, approaches and tactics for how to incorporate indigenous thinking into planning, policy, research and interventions for researchers, policy-makers and practitioners.
April 1, 2023 | Source: Agroecology Now | by Jessica M.
Indigenous knowledge for climate change
Indigenous people developed deep knowledge about their environment that they built through relationships with land and with place over hundreds and often thousands of years. They have learned how to live off the gifts of the earth and take care of them so that they will be healthy for many generations to come. This knowledge offers another way of seeing and understanding the world, one that is necessary to address climate change. Now scientists, governments and communities are finally recognizing that taking action to adapt to climate change is urgent and an increasing number of people are looking to indigenous knowledge for insight.
If you live in a place where indigenous knowledge has been buried under centuries of colonial culture, the idea that you could use it to adapt to climate change may feel vague. The Tribal Adaptation Menu (TAM) is a guidebook of sorts that translates indigenous knowledge from tribes in the Great Lakes Region of North America into concrete concepts, strategies, approaches and tactics.