This space will look at impacts of climate change & related natural disasters, indigenous adaptation traditions, the VRC model and potential application to indigenous communities, and cooperative efforts between climate adaptation practitioners, indigenous communities, and with all levels of government and private adaptation initiatives globally.     

 

Thinking outside the box about indigenous peoples and our lives under climate change is our goal. We strive to share cultural knowledge with the world about climatic and land based histories that continue to form indigenous cultures.  As our elders have taught us, our own survival is linked to all parts of the living world.

​

Invitation to Authors

​

An open invitation to other authors and writers to contribute their views and knowledge of indigenous adaptation to this space is offered here by the Higher Ground Foundation generally to promote improvements in adaptation technology and methodologies for social protections of vulnerable populations; particularly indigenous peoples. 

​

The Higher Ground Foundation (HGF) will consider some adaptation scenarios presented in light of its Vulnerability Reduction Credits (VRCs™) Standard Framework to inform on sectoral approaches to climate impact adaptation, and socio-economic measurement of adaption approaches.  The HGF editorial staff will pose a few questions each guest authors for such illumination.

​

While the Higher Ground Foundation board does not necessarily endorse nor recant the opinions expressed in this column by various authors under Blake Gentry’s coordination, it will provide the web-based column as a means to exchange views about indigenous peoples and HGF’s goals for climate adaptation based on its economic model for valuating small to large scale climate adaption projects.

​

A note on the title: ‘We Carry our History with Us’: Climate Change and Indigenous Peoples.

 

"History is not the past, it is the present. We carry our history with us. We are our history.”

                                                            James Baldwin, 'We are not your Negro'

 

James Baldwin was a prescient author who wrote on both social discrimination and political repression. As an African-American, his writing as an outsider refuting and then recasting majoritarian views from a minority perspective is refreshing; it intellectually acknowledges what indigenous communities face in most countries today -  the reluctance of majority cultures now living in modernity to acknowledge indigenous peoples contemporaneously due to an unsettling past relationship.  Acknowledging indigenous longevity opens one avenue to a wider world of thought which can more fully inform climate adaptation.  Without such recognition, climate adaptation will be less possible. In the age of global communications, reporting on complexity in nature - reminds us that humans are as diverse as the world we inhabit.