“As Indigenous people we don’t say we don’t like science; we do use it [too], but we also understand that we also bring our knowledge too,” Rattling Leaf says. 

Despite the fact that we have data on climate change from the paleorecord and modern satellite observations, there are still gaps in our knowledge. Now, researchers argue that knowledge from Indigenous communities can aid Western science to help the world deal with worsening crises. Given that Indigenous communities lived on their lands long before they were colonized, their observations can fill in gaps that modern data gathering tools cannot.

Check out this new article about the importance of Indigenous knowledge and citizen science for enhancing climate knowledge.