A new agreement between NOAA and the American Indian Higher Education Consortium is designed to put muscle into an agency promise to bring Indigenous knowledge and practices more fully into climate resilience programming for Native American college students, the agency said Monday.
Among other things, the memorandum of understanding will identify ways to incorporate Western science practices with traditional ecological knowledge into curriculum for 35 accredited U.S. tribal colleges and universities, while building a faculty-student network to facilitate the sharing of information and identify projects of interest for native students, NOAA said.
“Indigenous Knowledge has made it possible for Indigenous Nations to persist and thrive for millennia. These knowledge systems are needed more than ever to inform NOAA and our nation’s approach to environmental stewardship,” NOAA Administrator Rick Spinrad said in a statement.
Tribal leaders and advocates have long complained that the traditional U.S. education system has left them out of the pursuit of better understanding of climate science and resilience.
