Terry Williams is an ambassador for the earth.
At age 59, this Coast Salish man from the Tulalip Tribes has spent his adult life anticipating an unprecedented climate change that will alter life as we know it. Now, almost a year after an aneurysm that brought him to death’s door, Williams is like an indigenous evangelist for the earth, saying, “Get ready.”
Speaking this week at Evergreen State College to the Master’s in Tribal Public Administration class, Williams said the climate is changing faster than ever before in earth’s history. The signs are all around us. They include temperature extremes – unusually hot or cold weather. Spring arrives early, as do winter floods.
The result of a few degrees one way or another is enough to upset the balance of life, Williams says. Some animals that are central to our cultural consciousness may not survive another human generation.
“We’re losing ground,” he said. “Some affects are lethal. … If we continue as we are, we won’t be here at all.”
Williams is the commissioner of Fisheries and Natural Resources for the Tulalip Tribes. He has worked with the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity for 10 years. In the mid-90s Williams took leave from Tulalip for two years to be the first director of the Environmental Protection Agency’s American Indian Environmental Office. In that job, he traveled 150,000 miles by plane and heard everywhere that Indian communities are the canaries in the mine shaft of climate change.
Now Williams, who speaks softly, like an elder who you have to silence yourself to hear, first heard the prospect of climate change in the early 1970s.
“They said ‘ice age’ or ‘global warming,’” Williams remembers. “The difference is just wind.”
Now the wind is blowing in a direction that Williams believes will be hard to avoid. He lists a wide range of science fiction-worthy ecological disasters on our doorstep. He cites balls of methane gas rising from the floor of the Pacific off southern California; the structure of American forests are in near ruin; and a black cloud of industrial soot can reach the populous Pacific coast of the U.S. a mere four days after it leaves China.
Taken individually these trends, borne of industrialization and consumerism, seem to be anomalies or curiosities. But influential climatologists, including some who published an article recently in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, say the earth’s climate is now at a tipping point, or will be within a few short years.
A tipping point occurs when so many things are out of whack that one change can set off large, long-term consequences. Think of the effects of melting arctic ice on Alaska Native villages or the die-back of the Amazon rain forest on indigenous communities there.
Williams, taking the long view of Native American oral histories, said the Europeans were mistaken when they imagined that the bountiful landscapes they witnessed at first contact were natural. These were managed by Native American hands, he said. When that management was replaced with a different one, one that wanted to control water, the environment began to tip. Landscapes across America that once were naturally irrigated have been dried out for generations. And the earth has a constant thirst.
“The U.S. doesn’t know what they’ve done to themselves,” Williams said. “On the east coast, we changed the landscape dramatically. The prairies of the Midwest are almost gone.”
The shifting landscape results from one thing: the human population.
Population growth, the most pressing environmental issue in the Pacific Northwest, is only likely to expand. The population of Washington state is expected to double from 6 million to 12 in the coming years. People, Williams said, will only increasingly move toward the coast if, as some predict, the inland deserts turn to dust bowl conditions as water resources decline.
“We’re almost out of water now.”
Williams, who is from one of the Northwest tribes who call themselves salmon people, said, the management of fishing seasons can’t alone save Pacific salmon runs. Maybe, ecologically speaking, nothing can.
“Are you ready to be called the mahi mahi people?” asks Williams. He says it is a question that lingers.
Mahi Mahi, a subtropical fish with a Hawaiian name, is moving northward as Pacific salmon runs decline. Tribal fishermen say one more season, maybe two or five. It is part of a pattern, Williams said, of plants and animals moving out of their normal range.
The robin and beaver have turned up in Alaska, where these familiar species are exotic. Killer whales, the symbol of the Tulalip Tribes, were declared the most toxic animal in the world two years ago. Now they’re turning back from their normal migration down the California coast because there are no salmon to eat.
Giant cedar trees once readily available for Coast Salish canoes or totems are increasingly hard to find in the Pacific Northwestern United States. Some grasses, like cedar, that are used to make baskets may only be available north of the Canadian border now, he said.
The examples multiply across the geography of a continent, and around the world. The question that Williams posed to Native American students in the graduate class is what are you going to do?
Native peoples, who once had the choice of following their culturally important animals and plants, now are place-bound by treaties, reservations and international borders. Williams wonders how we, indigenous peoples, will adapt our life ways, our stories, our customs to an ecology changing faster than our ancestors could have imagined.
“On the Stillaguamish River we dug into the earth to a place prior to salmon, we found human remains,” Williams said of the river north of Seattle. “There are thousands of plants and animals we’ve never seen in our lifetime. In our lifetimes, we have the potential of life ending.”
And Williams wonders, what are you going to do to save the earth, and to save your people, too?
Kara Briggs is a columnist with Indian Country Today, and owner of Red Hummingbird Media Corp. Reach her by e-mail at briggskm@gmail.com, or follow her on Facebook.