Last October, Aiyana James attended her first water potato harvest on the reservation of the Coeur d’Alene tribe in northwestern Idaho. The weather was unusually cold, but she was determined to harvest her first water potatoes, a small wetland tuber that is one of the tribe’s most important traditional foods.
The smell of smoke and drying elk meat filled the air along the shores of Lake Coeur d’Alene, where the tribe had set up food booths and educational stations. She waded barefoot into the icy water to dig for the tiny tubers, while back on land, tribesmen cooked them in a traditional pit bowl, where elk, camas (a flowering plant with edible bulbs) and other locally harvested foods were cooked in layers. was placed.
James, who grew up in Portland, Oregon and spent summers and school breaks on the reservation, was excited to participate in the harvest for the first time after moving to the reservation after college. But something was wrong: Early-season snow dampened the harvest, and although it was only a light dusting, tribal leaders spoke during the opening prayers about how unusual the conditions were. It was a dry summer, and the water potato crop was bad, something that has happened more and more in recent years.
“I know it’s not supposed to be the way it is,” James said. “Deep down I’m like, ‘It just doesn’t feel right.’
After their land in northwestern Idaho was cleared by 1909 federal grant policy, Western agriculture, and logging which continues at some level today, the Coeur d’Alene tribe has lost a massive amount of acreage and with it their ability to manage the land and maintain balance between environmental protection and economic development. Salmon and trout have disappeared from the streams. Fires became more frequent and powerful. Water potatoes and other key plants such as camas, once a staple food for tribesmen, began to disappear.
Now extreme drought is making the situation even worse.
It’s all part of a reinforcing cycle of land degradation and climate change that the Coeur d’Alene tribe has been fighting for decades. It’s a fight James has now joined as one of the tribe’s first climate resilience coordinators.
To protect their land and community, the Coeur d’Alene is in the midst of an ongoing, multi-decade effort that relies in part on older knowledge to restore an important wetland.
The tribe is bringing back beavers and salmon, restoring native grasses and restoring stream channels. Collectively, those efforts are designed to restore balance to the landscape, make it more resilient to future climate change by fostering interconnected ecosystems, and, tribal members hope, one day allow them to once again rely on important ancestral foods like the water potato make.
“We’ve been living off the food that’s on our land for thousands upon thousands of years,” James said. “Reconnecting with that food reconnects us with our country.”
Bring back the water potato, help the climate
Across the country, ecological restoration is increasingly seen as a key part of the fight against climate change, and wetlands provide an especially important service in an era of global warming: They absorb carbon from the atmosphere.
For the Coeur d’Alene tribe, a healthy wetland means a way to combat rising temperatures that will provide the basis for the return of a rich food source and a traditional way of life. That a wetland serves as the hub means that the tribe is tackling the restoration of an ecosystem that is particularly threatened as the world’s climate trends become warmer and more arid. Because wetlands are areas where water is at or near the surface for large parts of the year, severe droughts made more common by climate change threaten their existence.
According to the US Fish and Wildlife Service, more than half of the wetlands in the lower 48 states are gone, and the rate of loss is only accelerating. Between 2009 and 2019, an area of vegetated wetlands in the US the size of Rhode Island disappeared.
There is an overarching effort underway to help these threatened landscapes. The 2022 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act $1.4 billion included for ecosystem restoration and resilience, while President Joe Biden also signed an executive order setting a national goal of conserving at least 30 percent of the nation’s lands and waters by 2030.
The Coeur d’Alene are not alone in their focus on restoration, but they are particularly good at it. And their uniquely patient, humble approach can serve as a model for other communities working to restore the environment and prepare for climate change.
Tribal knowledge and expertise are especially important for restoration because indigenous people are the ones who know what the land was like before it was degraded and what techniques will help restore it. The thread that ties it all together is traditional food, like the water potato. These cultural foods build connections between people and land and serve as a particularly tangible measure of the impact those connections can have on the environment.
James says that camas, for example, grow better when harvested regularly. But because so much Coeur d’Alene land is now owned by non-native people, tribal members often don’t have access to kamas fields, and some that have been unattended for years are now suffering.
“We need these foods, but they also need us to thrive and to grow and get better,” she said. “If we do these things right and we focus on restoring our relationship and restoring our connection to our culture, sovereignty and traditions, then it will have lasting effects.”
An environmental restoration – and also a cultural one
On the Coeur d’Alene Reserve, soil health and biodiversity have declined, water temperatures are rising, and extreme weather such as heat waves and droughts are becoming increasingly frequent. But the tribe’s repairs are starting to pay off.
In the summer of 2022, a mature salmon swam in Hangman Creek for the first time in about 100 years. Two years after the tribe released juvenile salmon into the creek, and after an arduous journey out to the Pacific and back, the tribe welcomed salmon back into the creek for the first time in generations.
For Ralph Allan Jr., the tribe’s fish and wildlife program manager, it was the culmination of 20 years of work that began with long days of field work planting trees. Now he leads the department as it prepares to bring salmon back to the reserve.
Allan is also working to plant the seeds for a new generation of restoration advocates. He led an internship program to get college students into the field and three tribal members are currently enrolled in fish and wildlife degree programs. At the water potato harvest, Allan makes sure that the department’s staff work with the youth, showing them how to harvest the potatoes and pulling the children out of the mud when they get stuck.
This cultural and community work is part of the tribe’s recovery effort. Allan worries that the tribe’s younger generation is not as connected to the land as he was growing up. “We’re not just reintroducing the salmon species back to our people,” he said. “We’ve also lost that cultural connection to the salmon, so we’re reintroducing a whole culture of salmon.”
Although salmon are a priority, they are only one part of a complex, interconnected ecosystem the tribe is working to restore. Take beaver dams. Dams raise the water table, expand the area along the banks of a river or lake that can accommodate more animals and plants, and keep more water on the landscape. All of this makes the area more welcoming to salmon and other wildlife, but also makes the landscape more resistant to drought and extreme heat because wetlands absorb and retain water that is released during drier periods, explains Tyler Opp, the tribe’s wetlands coordinator.
The bear ponds also support clean, cold-water habitats for salmon, but to do so, they need trees. Since 2019, the tribe’s environmental programs department has planted more than 18,000 trees of about a dozen different species and plans to plant another 4,000 by 2025.
The tribe used beaver dam analogs — man-made approaches — to encourage beavers to return and posts to reinforce existing beaver dams. Gerald Green, a wildlife biologist for the tribe, says they currently support about seven beaver dams in the creek.
Trees, beavers, salmon, water – they are all part of a cyclical, interdependent system that the tribe tries to restore and support. Cajetan Matheson, natural resources director and a tribal council member, says addressing climate impacts or recovery goals one by one won’t work. “Everything is really related to each other,” Matheson said. “You can’t just cut down a mountain and say, ‘Oh, now we’ve conquered the fire problem.’ There is much more to it than that.”
These projects take time. Tyler Opp says even though the scope of the work to be done can be overwhelming, the tribe’s approach helps keep things in perspective.
By keeping long-term goals in mind, such as bringing back salmon, which can take decades, the tribe avoids Band-Aid solutions. The entire tribal government buys into this approach, year after year and generation after generation, and while the tribe is limited by funding and capacity, like many public agencies, this commitment allows them to focus on projects that will contribute to that long-term reach. vision. Despite the limitations, the tribe can unite behind a shared vision of the future, based on their collective history, knowledge and appreciation of the land.
“The tribe is able to prioritize things on a much longer time scale than state and federal agencies,” he said. “The tribe doesn’t have to think in terms of the next budget cycle to get work done. All of [the things we are doing] is done for future generations.”
Almost everyone I spoke to in the Department of Natural Resources credits that perspective to Felix Aripa, a tribal elder who died in 2016. He is seen as instrumental in setting the tone for the tribe’s recovery.
Even Aiyana James, who never had the chance to meet him, says she listened to old tapes of Aripa. He was an early proponent of using beavers as a restoration partner, helping with things as simple as pointing out where a stream used to flow so the technicians could use it as a guide to restore the course instead than starting over or guessing. “The ultimate goal for anyone who works here in the Fish and Wildlife program is to leave a legacy the way Felix Aripa left his legacy and his mark on the program,” Allan said.
Before he passed away, Aripa helped Matheson and others put the tribe’s traditional seasonal calendar on paper. Based on seasonal indicators such as tree sap rather than months and days, the calendar contains detailed information about food, ecosystems, plants, animals and human activities. “As we think broadly about how we approach restoration, this is the framework we can use,” said Laura Laumatia, the tribe’s environmental program manager. “It represents millennia of knowledge.”
So while the tribe is proud of their progress, they are still working for the future. “I think it’s nice to work in the same place for 20 years because you see some changes happen,” Laumatia said. “But we know that the fruits of our labor are really going to be 70 years from now.”
