Pacific Northwest Tribes Face Climate Change With Agricultural Ancient Practice

ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:

Now a story about a surprising solution to problems tied to climate change. Many tribes in the Puget Sound region live on low-lying reservations. They're surrounded by water, and as the oceans rise, that land is disappearing. Climate change also threatens the fish and shellfish the tribes rely on for food and income. Eilis O'Neill of member station KUOW reports from Washington state on how clam gardens can counter some of these changes.

EILIS O'NEILL, BYLINE: Whidbey Island is a densely forested island in Puget Sound. John Cayou's walking along a rocky beach there, looking for clams. Cayou's a member of the Swinomish Tribe.

JOHN CAYOU: See, they're squirting, see? Watch when the squirt. See?

O'NEILL: And then he takes what looks like a tiny pitchfork full of sand and rocks, turns it over and grabs clams to put in his bucket. Cayou's 72. He remembers a time when there were a lot more clams.

CAYOU: You'd take the bucket and the clam fork and you would go out and - believe you and me - it wouldn't take very long - maybe 10, 15 minutes max you had a bucket. That's how much clams are on end.

O'NEILL: But nowadays, native clams up and down the West Coast are not doing well. Julie Barber is a shellfish biologist for the Swinomish Tribe.

JULIE BARBER: Native littlenecks have declined so much throughout Washington's, like, inland waters that they're really difficult to find now.

O'NEILL: The likely culprit is climate change. Warming waters mean less algae for clams to eat. And more carbon in the atmosphere is also making oceans more acidic, which is bad for baby clams. That's why Barber and others are trying to build a clam garden on the Swinomish Reservation.

BARBER: What a clam garden can do is provide a place for the tribe to continue their practice of harvesting clams for subsistence.

O'NEILL: A clam garden is a rock wall built so low on a beach it's only visible at the lowest tides. The walls are designed so sand and bits of clamshell build up behind them. Those bits of shell, it can make the water around them less acidic, which creates some buffered habitat for baby clams and other species.

SKYE AUGUSTINE: And that rock wall creates a new rocky reef habitat that supports a whole different suite of marine plants and animals.

O'NEILL: Skye Augustine is an ecologist and a member of the Stz'uminus Nation from the east coast of Vancouver Island. She says clam gardens can also cut down on beach erosion and reduce wave energy as sea levels rise. That would help hold the Swinomish Reservation in place as climate change advances. Augustine says clam gardens are actually an ancient tradition.

AUGUSTINE: Clam gardens have been around on the British Columbia, Alaskan and Washington state coasts for over 3,000 years.

O'NEILL: After colonization, those gardens fell into disuse. Now Augustine is running the first project since then to restore the gardens in British Columbia. The Swinomishs would be the first revival of this tradition in the U.S.

UNIDENTIFIED CHILD: But I'm full.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: You are not full. You didn't eat nothing.

O'NEILL: At the annual Swinomish clambake, more than 100 tribal members are gathered at long tables at a beach on the reservation, eating all kinds of shellfish. Larry Campbell is a Swinomish elder.

LARRY CAMPBELL: There's the old Indian saying in this part of the world that when the tide is out, the table is set because the clams are in our tidelands.

O'NEILL: The goal of the clam garden is to keep it that way. The Swinomish Tribe hopes that its new garden will be built as soon as next summer, in time for the next clambake.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: Mmm, do you want some of these?

O'NEILL: For NPR News, I'm Eilis O'Neill on the Swinomish Reservation. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.