Climate rez-ilience : building transformative climate resilience in Indigenous communities

Indigenous communities in British Columbia (BC) hold deep relationships with their Lands, and are being disproportionately affected by climate change. Community climate resilience is an emergent body of work that examines select indicators to create an overall picture of climate resilience in human communities. While “resilience” is a broad term, this study is restricted to assessing resilience with respect to changes in the traditional seasonal round. This research is done using the decolonizing methodology of Storywork, and is inclusive of a two-eyed seeing approach. Through the assessment, we arrive at a redefinition of resilience, which includes the strength and spirit already demonstrated by Indigenous peoples, grounded in Indigenous understandings of relationship to the Land. The objectives of this study are to: 1) Develop a culturally appropriate framework for assessing the resilience of Indigenous communities in BC to climate change using the traditional seasonal round of activities; 2) Apply this framework to two case study Nations: the Gitxsan Nation, and Secwépemc Nation; 3) Redefine contemporary understandings of “resilience” to be inclusive of Indigenous ways of knowing, experiences, principles, and understandings. To meet these objectives, we adapt a commonly used resilience assessment framework (Assessing Resilience in Social-Ecological Systems: Workbook for Practitioners 2.0) to include an Indigenous worldview. We perform a case study of two Nations (the Gitxsan Nation, and the Secwépemc Nation) to determine the success and applicability of our adapted framework to include the seasonal round in assessing community resilience to climate change. The application of the framework to the case study Nations yielded four pillars that inform Indigenous community resilience in our context: 1) Integrity/Adaptation of the Seasonal Round; 2) Relationship to Land; 3) Strength of the People; 4) Interconnectedness. Through these pillars, we show that Indigenous community resilience is unique, complex, dynamic, and place-based. Thus, we redefine understandings of Indigenous community resilience as “Transformative Resilience” which is grounded in these four pillars. We conclude that, in contrast to Western definitions of resilience, transformative resilience is more inclusive of the previously demonstrated resilience by Indigenous peoples. This research contributes to the growing body of Indigenous specific climate resilience work, and responds to the need for more strength-based Indigenous-led research, grounded in Indigenous ways of knowing and being.Science, Irving K. Barber Faculty of (Okanagan)Biology, Department of (Okanagan)Graduat