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What Can Indigenous People Tell Us About Climate Change: Igor Krupnik
Written by Philip Burgess   
Friday, 24 February 2012 20:45
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Q: When did the period of acting strangely start?


Q: What indicators do indigenous communities use to measure change in their environment?

I.K.: I made a list of almost 30 things that people are looking for in the fall. These are things like the status of the ground, the freezing, the beginning of ice, how it forms, the species of birds migrating by, the conditions of the beach.






Q: How can this more nuanced perspective help scientists learn about the environment?

I.K.: You cannot jump across this divide in one jump. You have to build many steps in between, and move step by step. You won’t be able to increase your projections of Arctic ice in general just by listening to indigenous people, because they operate on a local level, and you operate on a global level. But what you can learn from indigenous people is looking at ice as a very dynamic body.

That literally happened on my watch, working with or talking to sea ice scientists. Back in the late 1990s or early 2000s, all they cared for was annual advance and retreat. Then they started to view it as a three-dimensional body—ice has thickness—and then as a four-dimensional body that has history within itself. The dynamics of this living body depend on how thick it is, how strong it is, where it originated, its history over a particular season of sea ice growth. This is how you build better models.



Q: In Alaska, where most climate scientists speak English, are there examples of scientific terms that don’t translate well, or vice versa—indigenous terms that don’t have a meaning in English?

I.K.: That’s a very good question, and unfortunately very few people are working on this, what we call cultural translation. Typical scientists normally don’t care about it. Take Pacific Decadal Oscillation, PDO. You come to the village, and ask, “Are you watching PDO?” They’ll say, “What is that?” And the term we translate as “a friend acting strangely,” what is that? It’s sort of an emotional statement rather than a specific term.

This is a result of just how little we’ve worked on this together. We assume that indigenous people were around for millennia, and scientists started looking into indigenous knowledge of climate change in the past 15 years. So I’m not surprised how little we know. That would be my main message: We know so little and we want so much from these people, from their knowledge. We want it immediately, we want it for our specific goals, we want it for our models, for our predictions, and this is not the way you address other people’s knowledge. It’s not a common commodity; it’s other people’s culture.

Q: What are the most important next steps to develop a better understanding of that knowledge?

I.K.: I would say the next step is to learn more from each other. I certainly would welcome many more young students being exposed to the way other knowledge systems work and how people look into climate change. We are in this together. We don’t have either a monopoly of knowledge or the best knowledge. So I believe the more we increase this multicultural, multi-knowledge perspective on what’s happening with us and the planet, the better it will be for us.

AAAS, Climate Change, Igor Krupnik, Indigenous peoples
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