Natural custodians: Indigenous lessons in reconnecting with nature

The Inuit have thrived in the Arctic for millennia and have a profound understanding of climate impacts and other environmental changes that are happening here. Indigenous knowledge like theirs is finally starting to be heard.

Video by National Geographic CreativeWorks

ByJohnny Langenheim

Published January 25, 2024

As the human population swells to more than eight billion, Earth’s natural ecosystems continue to decline. Wildlife numbers have plunged by an average of 69 percent in just 50 years, while habitats from forests to wetlands to coral reefs are steadily disappearing. If we are to slow or even reverse this decline, we need to rethink our relationship with nature and deepen our understanding of our biosphere.

To do so, multilateral institutions like the UN are working with influential brands and other partners to maximize their impact and reach audiences like the young people who will inherit these challenges. One such initiative is the SEA BEYOND program, launched by the Prada Group in 2019 in collaboration with the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission of UNESCO (IOC/UNESCO), which is teaching students in secondary schools and pre-school children about the importance of ocean preservation and maritime cultures worldwide, and raising awareness about the changemakers dedicated to ocean conservation.

And when it comes to safeguarding nature, scientific research reveals that biodiversity strongholds are often sustained not just through cutting-edge conservation or the simple absence of humans, but rather by the indigenous communities that have lived in harmony with these ecosystems for hundreds, sometimes thousands of years.

In fact, the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) estimates that 21 percent of all land on Earth is currently conserved by indigenous peoples, including upward of 1.27 million square miles of forest in Latin America and the Caribbean.

What these communities share, irrespective of where they live, is a deeply nuanced understanding of their natural environment and the ways in which impacts like climate change are affecting it. At the same time, they are often living on the frontlines of the struggle to protect the planet’s biodiversity, whether they live in tropical latitudes, or in the frozen north…

Sungai Utik of Borneo

The Dayak peoples are indigenous to the Indonesian part of Borneo, known as Kalimantan. Borneo is the world’s third largest island and its 130-million-year-old rainforests are some of the oldest on Earth, home to a myriad species of flora and fauna, including 15,000 plant species, 3,000 tree species and hundreds of birds and mammals, including iconic animals such as pygmy elephants, clouded leopards and orangutans. But timber extraction and land clearing to grow cash crops, like palm oil, have seen Borneo’s forest cover halve. As recently as the mid-1980s, 75 percent of Borneo’s ancient forest was still standing.

Many forest-dwelling Dayak have been fighting to preserve their homes from the encroachment of agriculture and commercial logging. The Sungai Utik community of western Borneo are stewards of a 10,000-hectare tract of forest that is home to numerous species, including the critically endangered helmeted hornbill. All 300-plus members of the Sungai Utik live in a traditional 656-foot (200-meter) longhouse, grow crops in sustainable rotation in specially designated areas and derive both food and medicine from the living forest. At the same time, they are successfully sequestering an estimated 1.44 million tons of carbon.

For more than 40 years, the Sungai Utik have been contending with companies attempting to harvest wood on their customary land and, in November 2019, they succeeded in gaining legal protection for almost 23,500 acres of ancestral forest, in the face of intense pressures from illegal logging and palm oil interests, winning the UNEP Equator prize, which recognizes outstanding efforts by communities to protect biodiversity. The Sungai Utik’s sense of connection to the land is expressed in one simple, animistic tenet: “The forest is our father, the land is our mother, the water is our blood.”

The Inuit of Greenland

Thousands of miles away in the frozen north, the Inuit peoples of the Canadian Arctic and Greenland have thrived in some of the most extreme environments on our planet for millennia. But the Arctic is warming up to four times faster than the rest of the world and the sea ice that is integral to the traditional Inuit way of life has become dangerous and unpredictable.

Globally, perspectives on the Arctic have tended to focus on this climate change narrative, casting Arctic peoples as victims, or at best, bit part players who can provide logistical support to scientific researchers. This approach is beginning to change, however, as a new generation of Inuit scientists, activists and conservationists connect traditional knowledge systems with scientific methods.

One such scientist is Greenlandic microbiologist Aviaja Lyberth Hauptmann who lives in the capital city, Nuuk. Her research focuses on the microbiomes of Arctic species and how they connect to traditional Greenlandic food culture via the transference of microbial communities—from capelin fish, through seals to humans, for example. “In parts of the world where we’re eating an industrialized diet, we’ve actually diminished the diversity of microorganisms inside of us,” she explains. “When we are in nature, when we eat from nature, we are actually connecting ourselves with the microorganisms from our environment, and some of them can become part of our internal ecosystems.”

The traditional Inuit diet is meat-based, and big on both raw and fermented foods. In a part of the world where edible plants are scarce, to say the least, this is arguably the most sustainable way to eat. For Lyberth, hunting and fishing help sustain a meaningful relationship with the natural world.

“It’s that consciousness that when we eat something, it comes from somewhere… our behavior has consequences. The Inuk word sila is not easily translated into English—it can mean weather, climate, spirit, wind, consciousness. What that points to is that it’s all connected,” she says. “We’re not separate from nature; when our minds are well, when the sila inside of us is well, we can treat our environment well.”

Lyberth is developing a biology course that uses sila as a central tenet. “Our students can learn about climate change, but then we’re also in the program supporting their mental well-being. We tend to think of science as one thing and indigenous knowledge as another. But it can be both and you can allow for those two things to exist simultaneously,” she says.

Indigenous peoples everywhere in the world are guardians of deep knowledge systems that are often woven into customs and traditions handed down through generations and that reflect a holistic worldview quite different to the predominantly quantitative and reductionist approaches of modern science.

These knowledge systems remind us that being in nature is as important as studying nature, especially at an early age. This is one of the reasons why the educational program the ‘Kindergarten of the Lagoon’, part of the SEA BEYOND project championing ocean literacy, emphasizes fieldwork. This initiative allows preschoolers in the Venice region of Italy, to experience through outdoor education the ecosystems of the Venice Lagoon and create a connection with it.

The Kindergarten of the Lagoon was launched in January 2023 and has already reached more than 120 children. The second edition, running from November 2023 to June 2024, involves two Venetian schools and will reach a total of 80 children.

According to Francesca Santoro, Senior Program Officer with IOC/UNESCO, who helped establish the partnership with the Prada Group: “The Kindergarten of the Lagoon is ocean literacy in action; it is about bringing kids into the lagoon to sense, to feel, to explore, so that they can better connect with the water around them and become more responsible about its future.”

Find out more about understanding our oceans in order to save it here.

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