Climate Change Adaptation: Implementing Indigenous and Local Knowledge to Increase Community Resilience

Summary

Community resilience can be enhanced by engaging local and indigenous groups in the management of their cultural resources, both intangible and tangible. Many communities in developing nations were formally subjected to colonial governance, which imposed foreign architectural designs, irrigation agriculture and economic crops—and these systems vastly changed the social-cultural dynamics of these communities, often destabilizing systems that had been in place for generations. After colonial powers left, indigenous and local groups were left with trying to manage their countries/regions with systems poorly adapted to their geographic landscape. In many regions, climate change is stressing communities to the brink of failure. Millions of people are subject to starvation, social/political collapse, forced migration due to degradation of the environment, and loss of their cultural heritage and social-cultural identity. This paper presents an upper level course that helps graduate students identify ways that public/private partnerships can be implemented to help communities recall and implement indigenous and local knowledge (ILK), and in so doing make them more resilient to climate change. The course encourages graduate students to "adopt" a particular community and make it their dissertation or master's thesis and to design a "resilience through ILK" program in collaboration with local persons.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 83rd Annual Meeting, Washington, DC (2018)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 21113