In eastern Nigeria, as in far too many places, wildlife conservation is taking place at the expense of indigenous peoples. The Ndola people are one of the groups that have been pushed out of their traditional homes to make way for a national park. Here's how they're coping.

In 2000, an opportunity of cultural rejuvenation was presented to me: to step out of a fast-paced city life and to return to country. Just on 40 years had lapsed since I’d last walked as a child in country, in the footprints of my grandfather, Lennard George Keen, so I was really looking forward to it. When you live in your own country, there is a quiet serenity and connectedness, a feeling that is sometimes hard to express because it’s so deep. I was eager to experience that again, because, through circumstances beyond my control, I’d been robbed of it.

I want to tell you how I became a healer. I was a little boy, 10 years old, running around Rocks Side. It was mid-July, a hot summer day, no cloud in the sky. I got tired, so I went inside the house to take a nap. To this day, I’m not sure if I fell asleep and these things happened or if I really did see them. We lived in a log house, a one-room log house, and there was one big log right down the middle, all the way across, which held all the rafters. I sat down on the bed, looking out, and I think I laid down.

Indigenous peoples don’t only suffer from the effects of climate change; in some cases they suffer from the solutions to climate change.

Many news stories have sent up alerts about the imminent drowning of Pacific islands. But for people living on Kiribati the real problems are happening right now.

In living off the land and gaining knowledge through their relationship with the land, indigenous peoples have been observing the effects of global warming firsthand for decades and have been developing coping strategies. They have observed changes in temperature, changes in the amount and quality of rain and snow, and changes in seasons and natural cycles.

Just five years ago, governments, pundits, and the general public were talking about climate change—to the extent they were talking about it at all—as a vague issue that was open to question. Today it is not just accepted as a fact; it is seen as a crisis. But indigenous peoples have known for decades that climate change is happening, and they know better than most exactly what it means.

In most quarters, the US government decision to list the polar bear as a threatened species was heralded as a milestone in awareness of global warming, but the people you might expect to most rejoice in the decision—the Arctic indigenous peoples who suffer the greatest effects of global warming—are strongly opposed to it.

Edited by Waziyatawin Angela Wilson, Michael Yellow Bird, and Angela Cavender Wilson
School of American Research Press, 2007
ISBN 1930618638
Reviewed by Ramona Peters