The Tribal Coalition Fighting to Save Monarch Butterflies
Habitat loss and climate change are decimating the species. What can the U.S. learn from Oklahoma tribes’ efforts to restore their migratory path?
Butterflies winter at the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve in Michoacán, Mexico.
Seventeen years ago, Jane Breckinridge came home. A citizen of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation with a great-grandmother who was Euchee, Breckinridge had left Oklahoma after high school to attend Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, where she decided to stay after graduation. Some two decades later, she’d secured a good-paying job in publishing, working as a vice president on the business side of a magazine. She had a nice house in a pleasant neighborhood, an office in a shiny downtown Minneapolis building complete with a heated parking spot in the basement garage the works. “And then I really just sort of chucked it all away to come live at the end of a dirt road,” she said with
At the National Tribal and Indigenous Climate Conference open plenary, ITEP director Ann Marie Chischilly, joins other conference attendees via Zoom.
Last fall, the Institute for Tribal Environmental Professionals (ITEP) at Northern Arizona University hosted the United States’ first biennial National Tribal and Indigenous Climate Conference (NTICC), with support from the Bureau of Indian Affairs Tribal Resilience Program (BIA TRP). The virtual conference was open to all U.S. tribal nations and Indigenous peoples from across the world, emphasizing the inclusion of elders and youth. The NTICC brought together experts on climate change and included a balance of traditional Indigenous knowledge and Western science.