Education

Indigenous people have been managing water on a changing landscape for millenia. There are ancient examples of rainwater harvesting left for us by the ancestors across the landscape of Turtle Island. From water harvesting rock structures in the southwest that were used to collect and move water to corn fields and hydrate the landscape in passive and gentle ways to swales built by the Paiute in the Owens Valley, Indigenous people have been engaging with the energy of flow in nature as a way of being generation after generation. Unfortunately, when we began to make decisions about watershed management, Indigenous Knowledge was not consulted and many of our ways of using and managing water are extractive and without understanding of how water really moves through the body of our Mother Earth like blood in our own veins. Restoring right relationship with our waters is essential to addressing the impact of drought, desertification, and climate change. We are, after all, made up of mostly water and the fate of our water bodies on planet Earth is our own fate as well.

It is well known that Native people have caretakers and stewards of the land and water on Turtle Island since time immemorial. Traditional Ecological Knowledge about forestry, fishery, prairie, wetland, riparian, and coastal management has been transmitted from generation to generation through ceremony, storytelling, song, dance, prayer, and practice. Restoring these effective and time-proven land and water management practices is essential to restoring our right relationship to Mother Earth and each other. Working to connect Native land and water managers with the tools and support necessary to better integrate Traditional Ecological Knowledge into Tribal decision making and providing a conduit to helping Tribal people collaborate with federal, state, county, and city managers and planners to include Indigenous wisdom in broader decision making actions is important to ensuring that the next seven generations have the ability to enjoy the relationship within the natural world that was given to us in the original instructions.