Responding to Climate Change

Theresa Pasqual. (Photo courtesy of NMPBS)

Like many others, Theresa Pasqual, director of the Tribal Historic Preservation Office at the Pueblo of Acoma, knows that long before human-caused climate change started warming and drying the Southwest, survival in this arid landscape required care and connection.

“Back then, our people migrated from various locations to the north, from the Point of Emergence to the present, and as their journey went on, they amassed a knowledge, a sense of how to live and be and sustain themselves within these arid landscapes, as well as build a sense of community,” says Pasqual.

Before the waves of Spanish, Mexican and U.S. conquest, the people of Acoma responded to natural climatic changes by moving closer to springs, traveling to higher or lower elevations, shifting settlements with floods and droughts and seasons.

“The creation of the reservation system, which is not unique to New Mexico but occurred across the country, really was meant to restrict the movement of our Indigenous people, our Native people,” she says. “That restriction of movement also came at a cost: it meant that we no longer had the ability to respond to those different threats [in ways] that would mean the sustainability of our community.”

Now, as the world warms, tribes have to adapt to rapid climatic shifts while also living within the overlay of a foreign government and within boundaries and systems not entirely of their own choice.

“We are here to stay. … [And] because of Acoma’s relationship to the land from a cultural perspective, we cannot move this community either,” says Pasqual. “How would you move a mountain? How would you move a river? How would you move those things that are significant to our people from a traditional perspective, that are woven into this land? You can’t. So, while other people, other communities may have the ability to move in the face of climate change, many, if not all of our Indigenous communities, do not have that ability, including my own”

And so, she says, the people of Acoma, “have to find the solutions to change here in our own tribal community.”

As part of an NMPBS special, “Loving Our Changing Homelands,” Pasqual also talks about the role love plays in stewarding landscapes.

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