The Native Peoples, Native Homelands Climate Change Workshop will be held October 28-November 1 1998, in Albuquerque, New Mexico. This workshop is designed by Native Peoples to examine the impacts of climate change and extreme weather variability on the people and their homelands from an indigenous culture and spiritual perspective and to develop recommendations as well as future response actions. Native Peoples, with their spiritual traditions and long community histories of change, adaptation, and survival in specific regions, can provide an invaluable contribution to the assessment and understanding of climate change as well as to the development of sustainable economies in this country.

Native communities are repositories of valuable human and natural resources with significant implications for addressing climate change issues. Like island nations, the land bases contained within Indian reservations represent significant land holdings often in relatively undisturbed tracts embracing a variety of microenvironments and containing a wide range of indigenous plant and animal species. Many of these species can serve as key indicators to monitor and document climate change.

Reservation communities are composed of multigenerations of Indian families who have resided in relatively fixed federal reservations. These communities have first-hand, detailed familiarity with the environment and its history over long periods of time and through various types of economic development. Most Indian cultures continue to rely upon strong oral traditions and pass on community knowledge about specific locations and past climatic variability.

Tribal concerns naturally span many generations, and strategic thinking is inclined for the long-term, not just short-term survival. The Tribal cultural world view envisions and accepts the natural relationship between the human and natural world. Basic cultural assumptions hold that all things in creation are related and each has effects upon the other.

The Native Peoples, Native Homelands Climate Change Workshop will be an opportunity for Native Peoples to inform the U.S. National Assessment on the impact of global climate change on Native Homelands and Peoples and to participate in the development of the national policy and research agenda. Areas of impact which will be considered in the workshop will include agriculture, energy, natural resources, vegetation, fish and wildlife, economy, tourism, disaster planning, water resources, culture, health and human populations. Participants will help develop position papers and policy recommendations. Invitations are going primarily to interested Native Communities, Tribal organizations, educational institutions, including Tribal leaders, natural resource managers, and Tribal college staff and students.

For more information, contact:

Mrs. Verna Teller, Director, Workshop Project Office, 700 4th St. SW, Albuquerque, NM 87102; (505) 242-3351; vernat@swcp.com