Climate Change Forces Northwest Natives from Their Ancestral Homes

This article has been penned by Zoe Loftus-Farren who is a contributing editor at Earth Island Journal. She holds a JD from the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, and writes about climate change, environmental justice and food policy.

Fawn Sharp grew up in Taholah village, a small community on the Quinault Reservation nestled between the mouth of the Quinault River and the Pacific Ocean. She spent her childhood summers surrounded by water hiking along the local beaches near the village, scouring the rocks for starfish and other treasures. In the mornings, she was often up before the sun, out fishing with her grandparents on the river. Decades after she left home for college, Sharp is back on the reservation, this time living near the lake, some 35 miles from her childhood home in Taholah. Now she goes by President Sharp, and leads both the Quinault Indian Nation and the Affiliated Tribes of Northwest Indians. Since returning, Sharp has faced the kinds of tough issues that might have seemed outlandish, or even inconceivable, during her childhood. She has seen the tribe's salmon runs in sharp decline. She has observed the rapid retreat of nearby glaciers. And she has watched her childhood home, Taholah, endure dangerous flooding during increasingly harsh storm surges.

Given the growing threat that climate change poses to the "lower village," as tribal members refer to the lower portion of Taholah, paired with ongoing concerns about the village's vulnerability to earthquakes and tsunamis, Sharp and the Quinault leadership were forced to make an almost unthinkable decision: to leave home.

The Quinault have lived on the Olympic Peninsula for centuries, since long before the 1855 Quinault River Treaty established the Quinault Reservation and ceded vast tracts of lands to Washington State. The reservation is wedged between the towering mountains and dense temperate rainforest of Olympic National Park to the east and beaches and oceans to the west. It's bisected by the swift Quinault River, and is home to black bear, Roosevelt elk, and bald eagles. The tribe's ties to the land are strong. As is true in many Native communities around the world, the Quinault have borne witness to the marked signs of climate change over the past century. In Taholah -- which is home to some 825 people -- these signs are becoming increasingly impossible to ignore.

Globally, the twenty-first century has seen 16 of the hottest 17 years on record. In the Pacific Northwest, average air temperatures, which rose only 1.3 degrees Fahrenheit between 1895 and 2014, are expected to increase another 3 to 9 degrees Fahrenheit by 2100. Heavy rainfall events have increased in frequency, snowfall has decreased, and glaciers have pulled back, retreating deep into Washington's mountains. The Anderson Glacier, for example, which historically fed the Quinault River, shrank by 90 percent between 1927 and 2009. And as overall precipitation decreases and glaciers shrink, stream flows are also declining. Impacts extend to the coastline as well. According to moderate projections, ocean temperatures along Washington's Pacific coast are predicted to increase by 2 degrees Fahrenheit by the 2040s. Sea level rise, influenced by a range of factors -- including warming water temperatures and melting ice sheets -- is difficult to predict, but NOAA's latest report, released in January, projects that the world's oceans will rise between one and eight feet by 2100, a significant increase above previous estimates, which will lead to more frequent and stronger high tides and storm surges. These projections are more than just numbers for tribes in the Pacific Northwest. A November 2016 report from the 20 member tribes of the Northwest Indian Fisheries Commission lays out the extraordinary implications climate change has for Native communities. For these peoples, whose cultures and livelihoods developed around water and marine resources, a warmer future means declining fish runs, shrinking shellfish populations, loss of water supplies, and loss of opportunity to participate in traditional cultural activities, not to mention the disappearance of the land they have lived on for generations. Taholah has already gotten a glimpse of this warmer future and the threats it poses to tribal culture, resources, and well-being. The signs of climate change became apparent on the reservation at least a decade ago when the Quinault River's endemic blueback salmon runs declined sharply to a fraction of their historical numbers. The shrinking population could be traced in large part to the loss of the Anderson Glacier, which resulted in lower and warmer stream flows and more sediment in the river. A lack of blueback meant a depleted source of both food and income for the tribe. This devastating reality spurred the tribe to take action to protect the salmon. Shortly after that, Sharp was forced to declare multiple states of emergencies in the village because of increasingly frequent flooding of the lower portion of Taholah. One of these emergencies occurred in 2014 when waves breached the village's three-meter-high seawall, constructed in the 1970s. The Army Corps of Engineers partnered with the tribe to help rebuild the wall later that year, but flooding concerns emerged again in 2015 and the village was partially evacuated. As Sharp puts it, "The Quinault Nation has become the front line -- ground zero if you will -- in dealing with climate change." And though the tribe had already begun considering relocation years earlier, the 2014 flood was a final straw of sorts, after which the Quinault hired a team to help manage the village's move to higher ground.

Though Native communities have themselves done very little to contribute to the causes of climate change, worldwide they are among those impacted first and worst by global warming. They are also often uniquely positioned to recognize the early signs of changing environmental patterns and weather given their proximity to, and deep connections with, the lands they live on. "You're talking about communities that have been in place for generations, and live off the land and the waters, and they are seeing and experiencing the changes first and foremost," says Julie Maldonado, an environmental studies lecturer at University of California, Santa Barbara who specializes in environmental vulnerability and displacement of Indigenous peoples. "That relationship that they have, that long-term monitoring process, and that long-term knowledge they have of a place … they can see and understand and experience what is going on."

It should, therefore, come as no surprise that Taholah isn't the only Native community taking a proactive stance in the face of inevitable climate changes. In the Pacific Northwest alone, several other tribes are mounting relocation efforts, and many more are developing climate adaptation plans to build resiliency and prepare for rising temperatures on their reservations. The Hoh, who have a small reservation north of the Quinault on the Olympic Peninsula, the arm that juts out of the northwest corner of Washington State, have struggled with increasingly frequent flooding as well as loss of land to erosion. They are in the early stages of moving their tribal village, which is home to about 130 people. The Quileute, located even farther north up the Peninsula, are also at risk from rising sea levels, and are also planning a move. Farther inland, the Sauk-Suiattle tribe, whose housing and infrastructure along the Sauk River is vulnerable to erosion and flooding, are, too, in the early stages of relocation planning. Native communities beyond the Pacific Northwest, some of which face even more urgent climate dangers, are undertaking similar efforts. In Alaska, which is warming two to three times faster than the lower 50 states, the Army Corps of Engineers and Government Accountability Office have identified at least 31 villages facing imminent risk from climate change due to coastline erosion or flooding. So far, three Native communities have voted to move. Many other Native communities are adapting in place, at least for now. Moving an entire community is a monumental undertaking, riddled with complicated decisions and institutional barriers. To start, there's the issue of where to move. Ninety percent of the Hoh reservation is in a flood zone, and both Hoh and Quinault lands are especially vulnerable to earthquakes and tsunamis.

Meanwhile, in the United States, where more than half of the population lives within 50 miles of the coast, researchers estimate that some 13 million people could be displaced by 2100 from coastal flooding alone, the majority in the southeast. Then there's desertification, melting glaciers, and droughts, all of which are projected to contribute to the displacement problem. Unfortunately, despite the scale of the issue, there is an alarming lack of guidelines or regulatory structure for climate-induced relocations, or for community relocations in general. Monitoring and relocation guidelines for Native communities on the frontlines of the climate crisis could also help avoid the pitfalls of past relocation efforts. For all of these reasons, relocation is always a measure of last resort, considered only after, as Maldonado puts it, "everything else has been pursued, after all other options to stay in place" have been exhausted.

AJ/MG