Native Americans

As the climate crisis worsens, the very ground on which some Indigenous communities built their homes is shifting before their eyes. A new podcast looked at how tribes in Alaska and Louisiana are losing their land to climate change, forcing them to make tough decisions about whether to stay or to leave.

The Mountain West News Bureau’s Kaleb Roedel recently reported on the Fallon Paiute-Shoshone Tribe’s mobile health clinic, which provides health care to about 2,000 Indigenous people in Nevada. Roedel spoke to Our Living Lands Producer Daniel Spaulding about the ways climate change is impacting Indigenous health, and what tribes are doing about it.

The rural healthcare shortage has hit some tribal nations especially hard. One tribe in Nevada has found a solution: a doctor’s office on wheels.

Farrell Hayes represents something that veteran firefighters say is harder to come by these days: a young person who wants to get involved in firefighting.

Amid the climate crisis, some Indigenous nations are reclaiming and rejuvenating their land. Many of these projects are not just about reclaiming land and culture, but also about climate resilience.

Understanding ancient horse migration patterns could help us adapt to climate change. That's according to a new study from a team of Indigenous and non-Indigenous researchers.

Across the West, climate change is putting snow sports like skiing at risk. For Indigenous skiers, that adds to a long history of exclusion from the sport. Let My People Go Skiing is a new film highlighting those challenges and some of the possible solutions. The film follows Ellen Bradley, the film's director and a Lingít skier, to her homelands in Southeast Alaska, where she works with Alaska Native Youth.

Scientists and Iñupiaq hunters have been counting bowhead whales passing by the northernmost American town, Utqiagvik, for the past two months. It is part of an effort to evaluate the health of the whale population up north – and support subsistence in the area.

Dogbane, a hemp plant with white flowers, was once a key part of Nimíipuu, or Nez Perce, culture. Nimíipuu people used the stalks for a variety of purposes, including bags and baskets. But after American ranchers and farmers moved in, the plant was largely eradicated from Nimíipuu lands.

Choctaw citizen and filmmaker Colleen Thurston explores how Indigenous communities have been impacted by natural resource extraction and displacement in her new documentary Drowned Land, which is about the continued fight to safeguard Oklahoma's Kiamichi River.