CSP DE student Brook Thompson, a Yurok tribe member, attended the sixth climate summit hosted by the Affiliated Tribes of Northwest Indians. She was interviewed for an article in the Seattle Times. Excerpt:
“Brook Thompson mapped out the history of her ancestors on the Klamath River on a stir stick. The whole stick represents the thousands of years the Yurok people lived in harmony with the river, and the tip, they said, represents the years since contact with colonizers. If so much of that relationship could be unraveled by settlers in just over a century, imagine what healing could come in the same amount of time.
“We can never necessarily go back to the way things were before because nothing is ever necessarily the same, but I think we could even make things better with this framework of Indigenous knowledge mixed with more modern scientific techniques and use them to benefit each other, which is something we’ve never had the opportunity to do,” said Thompson, a restoration engineer for Yurok and doctoral student. “I think if given the chance, the right people and power and enough resources we’d be able to do a lot of good within the next 150 years.””