For Native American tribes, the people and the land they live and survive on are woven together into a naturally harmonious relationship. As climate change has shifted from question to certainty – ocean waters are warming and rising while fossil fuels continue to pollute, resulting in extreme weather and disastrous conditions – this connection is made all the more obvious. When the earth is threatened, so, too, are the practices and rituals that are sacred to Indigenous peoples.
This November, WORLD has recognized Native American Heritage Month with documentaries featuring Native communities, stories that put a spotlight on the work being done at the individual and tribal levels to preserve tradition, culture and crucial ways of Native life that also contribute to the betterment of the entire country and world. We spoke to two filmmakers about why sharing these stories is so necessary and what the future holds for the intersection of climate change and all Indigenous life.
Darrell Hillaire (Lummi) is the executive director of Children of the Setting Sun Productions, a 10-year-old nonprofit started by a desire to share Native stories with the rest of the world.
“After my time in service to the Lummi people, I was only 62 years old. What am I going to do now? I decided that in my retirement I would continue to tell stories about the Lummi people, the Coast Salish people, and tribal people around the country. They carry certain gifts that need to be shared,” Hillaire said.
Hillaire’s film, “Scha'nexw Elhtal'nexw Salmon People: Preserving a Way of Life,” hits very close to home. The Local, USA documentary follows the Kinleys and Solomons, two Lummi families who have fished sockeye salmon for generations, but now face many challenges including population decline and farm raising. Hillaire explained how, to the Lummi people, salmon fishing represents so much more than simply making a living – it’s essential to their way of life.
“The story came from my time as the chairman of our nation. In 2010, all the fishers caught a lot of salmon, and I noted that when there were so many salmon coming back to our homeland, the mood of our people changed. It was palpable,” he said. “What's captured in the film is that [the salmon] didn't show up, and what that meant to the people and how that affected them, the ideas of fighting to preserve it, and then recognizing that that fight's been there all through our history.”
In “Fire Tender,” written, produced and directed by Roni Jo Draper (Yurok), women from the Yurok tribe share their knowledge and experience of controlled burning. Putting fire to the land advances the health of a forest: removing overgrown vegetation, adding nutrients to the soil, eradicating harmful insects, and feeding and sheltering wildlife. The Yurok have grown up with the understanding of fire as a tool, but for decades have been prevented from, even punished and killed for, burning due to federal wildfire policies. Today, with a change in perspective, Yurok women are bringing fire back to their land.
This documentary follows Margo Robbins, a Yurok woman and the executive director of the Cultural Fire Management Council. “Margo's work is to place fire on the land,” Draper explained. “Margo wanted her grandbabies to be held in a basket, but the forest had become unmanageable, and the way that it was being unmanaged was not allowing those [basket] materials to grow in a healthy way. So they work to bring fire back.”
Robbins and her team are also featured in Local, USA’s newest doc, “Firelighters: Fire Is Medicine,” by Sande Zeig. The goal of the organization – and the film – is to demonstrate how controlled burns are helping, not hurting, and in fact rectifying decades of disregard.
“Since forever, Yurok people and other Indigenous folks have used fire to maintain a healthy landscape. It became required that we tend the forest so that we could have those cultural things, all of these different activities to sustain human life. The forest became healthier, less prone to diseases or invasive species, and it thrived under that. We give to the forest, the forest gives to us,” Draper said. “We've been dealing with over 150 years of fire suppression in the area, which has resulted in unhealthy forests that can't support the wildlife or plant life that it needs to.”
For both Hillaire and Draper, telling Indigenous stories ensures that their ways of life are preserved, celebrated and passed down to the next generation.
“[Lummi] children learn at a very young age from their parents and grandparents how to do simple things like tie a knot, or take care of your boat, or hang a net, or be safe on the water, or share stories. Those things all lead you to recognizing that you’re carrying on in a way that's been carried on for thousands of years,” Hillaire said.
“I wanted to center Yurok lifeways, the cultural necessity for fire, how it matters to us in our daily lives and our daily living,” Draped echoed. “It's a privilege to be able to tell a story that is so meaningful to my family and that can also educate people.”
Fire and salmon are critical to the lifeways of the Yurok and Lummi people, respectively. But controlled burning and salmon fishing are just two examples of how Native practices play a larger role in the prosperity of every living being on this planet.
“Not putting fire in the forest has had pretty catastrophic consequences. Now what we're seeing are big fires that threaten folks in California and across the world. And people are wringing their hands, like, ‘What could we do?’ Well, what you could have done is allowed Indigenous folks to continue to care for the land,” Draper said.
For Hillaire, looking closer at the Lummi’s salmon is about recognizing how all things are connected: “We think of salmon as the indicator species. As the salmon goes, so goes the rest of the environment, including us. They go out in the ocean, to the exact same place that they were born, and give life to the next generation of salmon, and then they die. And when they die, all of those nutrients from their very being goes back into nature. It feeds other animals, trees, plants, and it eventually ends up in us,” he said.
It’s not lost on these filmmakers that their communities’ Indigenous practices are threatened by climate change. It seems that the consequences of our warming earth get more devastating as the days go on. The effects of the changing climate are already at so many of our doorsteps – for the Lummi and Yurok, especially.
“It's obvious that salmon are disappearing due to climate change. There's way too much pollution; the water temperature is significantly higher. We need to scale back our selfishness and greed for everything to really have a chance, whether it be salmon or rivers or trees – all living things. It's really up to us,” Hillaire urged.
“We are feeling the effects of climate change in a much harsher way, and fire suppression has intensified those effects. I think we still have a large number of people who don't believe that climate change is a result of human action. But it is – we are part of the land, we're not separate from it,” Draper said. “Fire is going to get more intense as the climate changes, as our world heats up, and we need to be prepared for that.”
But rather than idly watch this change happen, these leaders want to sound the alarm, and are looking toward the future to sustain both their ways of life and the health of Mother Nature.
“[The Kinley and Solomon families] are passing things that they've learned from their parents and grandparents on to their grandchildren, and it’s so rich in love and respect. I hope that the audience can see that [from the film], and that maybe they'll lead their families in another way that we can enjoy what we have here in all of our environments, wherever we might live,” Hillaire said.
Draper, too, sees the merit in progress, however small: “What is beautiful about Indigenous folks is we are accustomed to taking a long view. If it took 150 years to get in this state, it's going to take a while to get out,” she said. “But I have hope that if we continue and utilize these practices, that it could be better for my grandchildren's grandchildren. And I'm invested in doing what I can so that my grandchildren's grandchildren can have beautiful, healthy forests.”
Understanding Native American traditions and lifeways, and how they aren’t exclusive to tribes, will be significant in going forward as climate change continues to affect the landscapes so familiar to us. This Native American Heritage Month and all year round, watch WORLD films that bring you into these communities to hear from those fighting for all of our homes.
