By Rick Watson, San Juan College, Farmington, New Mexico and Stan Morain, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM

For over 10,000 years, indigenous peoples have adapted to the arid and varied environments of the Southwest.  By developing surface water technologies that were compatible with generations of acquired ecological knowledge and other environmental and societal coping strategies uniquely suited to survival in the Southwest, these peoples developed some of the most complex and sophisticated societies in the Western Hemisphere.  The climate assessment task in the SW Native Peoples/Native Homelands Initiative funded by NASA investigates how remote sensing and spatial analysis technologies can be modified and integrated into modern tribal cultures and urban settings to generate sustainable, culturally appropriate life styles in the region.  It may be possible to resurrect and/or to reengineer these early strategies to fit projected climate variability and climate change scenarios over the next century.

For example, water harvesting and management strategies played a seminal role in developing Southwest indigenous cultures. Among the most important strategies were those designed to capture runoff for distribution to agricultural fields.  These strategies are found throughout the region from the Tohono Odham (Papago) Homelands of southern Arizona to the Anasazi of the San Juan Basin and the Pueblo Homelands of the Rio Grande.  They took several forms: (a) canalization (Hopi), (b) impoundments (San Juan Anasazi, Papago), (c) diversions (Chaco Anasazi), and (d) in situ storage such as pebble-mulch fields and grid gardens that conserved rain and snow fall for use during the growing season. 

Each of these practices is suited to specific environmental situations, and each left distinctive imprints on the landscape.  Remote sensing technologies, coupled with modern GIS, should be able to identify these imprints and environments.  The overall objective during a recent field campaign was to identify and assess the role these strategies played in the past in order to begin an appraisal of their potential for the future.  The potential for modernizing and reestablishing these technologies may be substantial. 

The distribution and location of pebble-mulch and other traditional water management systems may play an important role not only in rehabilitating successful technological systems, but also serving as indisputable evidence of previous indigenous use of both land and water resources.  The stimulus for the assessment of these practices comes from climate modeling scenarios that project warmer summers, somewhat wetter winters, and consequent shifting patterns of resources over the next century.  These changes will not be uniform over the region.  Each tribal area will be affected somewhat differently, as will all cultures in the Southwest.

During June and July, 1999 five Native American students -- Christopher Toya (Jemez), Mary Lynn Schildt (Zia/Blackfeet), Manesseh Begay (Dine'/White Mountain), Ursula Hudson (Dine'), and Celina Kahn (Dine') worked with a team of researchers from the Earth Data Analysis Center (EDAC) at The University of New Mexico. EDAC is engaged in a 3-year project sponsored by NASA's Earth Science Enterprise, Office of Applications, Commercialization, and Education (ACE) to address the Southwest element of the Native Peoples/Native Homelands sector of the National Assessment for Climate Change and Climate Variability.

The University of New Mexico - Preparation for University Research of Students in Undergraduate Education (PURSUE) program provided an important opportunity for five Native American Students to participate in unique and important research that is directly related to their cultural heritage. The Native Peoples/Native Homelands Initiative includes a 3-year task to assess ancestral and traditional water conservation and management technologies employed by indigenous peoples as a means for evaluating climate change impacts on modern regional cultures.  The aim is to understand past environmental coping strategies to understand better how to plan future sustainable economic development in the arid Southwest over the next century.

Research conducted during the summer field season included: field reconnaissance, mapping, and photodocumentation of pebble-mulch fields at the ancestral sites of San Marcos and Poshungue Pueblos; grid gardens on Picuris and Zia Pueblos; and a large dam and canal system on Navajo Nation lands near Newcomb, New Mexico. In addition, the student researchers conducted literature research on environmental and historical backgrounds of the investigated sites, received hands-on introduction to GIS, GPS, and remote sensing technologies as research tools, and conducted ethnographic interviews of tribal members from their own communities.

An important part of the assessment phase of the Native Peoples/Native Homelands project is the assessment of spatial technologies as they apply to the investigation of impacts of climate change on ancestral Puebloans.  Hyperspectral imagery and terrestrial characterization were applied in concert with Dr. Barry Rock from the University of New Hampshire. The terrestrial characterization was conducted to provide field verification for hyperspectral airborne MODIS imagery of the San Marcos Pueblo region. Hyperspectral characterization at Poshungue and Zia Pueblos was also undertaken.

Climate variability and climate change scenarios over the next 30-100 years project warmer summers and slightly wetter winters in the Southwest, but the trends are not uniform throughout the region.  Because Federal law fixes boundaries of Native American Reservations, strategies for long-term economic development must account for the possibility of changing environmental regimes on lands within those boundaries.  The Reservations cannot move.  Some environmental conditions will improve, but others will deteriorate.  Some of the identified impacts of these changes are of sufficient magnitude that they will require significant changes in current life styles for Native and transplanted cultures alike. The present project attempts to identify traditional strategies that may well serve the descendants of the ancestral Pueblo within these circumscribed environments

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