PORT ANGELES, Wash. (AP) — Jeanette Kiokun, the tribal clerk for the Qutekcak Native Tribe in Alaska, doesn’t immediately recognize the shriveled, brown plant she finds on the shore of the Salish Sea or others that were sunburned during the long, hot summer. But a fellow student at a weeklong tribal climate camp does.
They are rosehips, traditionally used in teas and baths by the Skokomish Indian Tribe in Washington state and other tribes.
“It’s getting too hot, too quick,” Alisa Smith Woodruff, a member of the Skokomish tribe, said of the sun-damaged plant.
Tribes suffer some of the most severe impacts of climate change in the U.S. but often have the fewest resources to respond, which makes the intensive camps on combatting the impact of climate change a vital training ground and community-building space.