By John Linstrom, Mellon Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in Climate and Inequality at The Climate Museum

From October through December 22, The Climate Museum Pop-Up is providing a space to gather around ideas, action, and creative expression addressing the climate crisis. Our first major event took place back on October 10, Indigenous Peoples’ Day, and I continue to think back on that program and the lessons that have continued to resonate from that day in the weeks since. We were joined by the Secretary of the Shinnecock Council of Trustees, Kelly Dennis, and the Environmental Director for the Shinnecock Nation, Shavonne Smith, who spoke with director Miranda Massie to a packed house about their work on behalf of the Shinnecock Nation on the East End of Long Island. The event was helpful on so many levels—in spotlighting a local example of frontline climate activism, in providing inspiration for taking on big interests at the grassroots level, and in fitting climate action and social justice work into a very long history. The conversation that emerged that day raised the stakes for climate action at the same time that it granted that action some critical historical perspective.

The Shinnecock have been stewards of the land and water on the East End of Long Island for about 13,000 years—meaning they have been local to the same region since before the Holocene epoch began, while the Laurentide Ice Sheet was still grinding its retreat back across what is now Canada, dumping its ponderous moraines as it went. Before it first began its slow retreat several millennia earlier, that ice sheet covered Manhattan at a thickness surpassing the height of the World Trade Center’s Freedom Tower and with such a weight that it compressed the island’s bedrock, which would later rebound by some 150 feet during the long period of glacial retreat. East of Manhattan, toward the end of Long Island, the Shinnecock Nation lies just south of the ice sheet’s terminal moraine—meaning the line of rocks and silt deposited by the glaciers’ curving southernmost edge—where it faces Shinnecock Bay and, just beyond the narrow strip of Southampton Beach, the Atlantic Ocean. (You can read a brief, fascinating geologic history of New York City, including most of these details, here.) Where the Atlantic shoreline would have been at that time is unclear—perhaps due to the compressed bedrock, the land that would later be the home of the Shinnecock Nation was underwater during the height of the ice age (some 19,000 years ago), while on the other hand so much water was stored in glaciers at the time that the sea level would have been much lower and perhaps the continent extended many miles further into the current Atlantic despite the land’s own low level. The Shinnecock name translates roughly into English as “the people of the stony shore,” and regardless of how exactly the geologic history played out, the location of that shore would have been in flux in the centuries leading up to their period of settlement, shaped in part by the ocean rising up toward the glacier’s stony moraine.

Today, after thirteen millennia, Shinnecock Nation land is under threat by sea level rise, although the cause is not related to planetary wobble or orbit but to anthropogenic climate change. That means that the land that natural climate cycles established to be habitable for human life could be destroyed by human causes. If that future were to come to pass, it would be despite the best efforts of the Shinnecock. Shavonne, as the Environmental Director for the Shinnecock Nation, is herself engaged in directing an array of efforts to mitigate the effects of sea level rise as well as to limit the Nation’s marginal contributions to fossil fuel consumption. Rising sea levels are already apparent on Shinnecock land, and ocean acidification is causing trouble for the traditional Shinnecock art of wampum making, as seashells become more brittle and harder to work into beads. Kelly, as Secretary of the Shinnecock Council of Trustees and also a member of Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland’s Tribal Advisory Committee, is deeply involved in the work not only of preserving Shinnecock land, but also of defending the sovereignty of her nation to do such work in the first place. Such sovereignty is nothing to take lightly—issues like beach access or protection of ancestral burial grounds become battle lines with neighbors like the town of Southampton, around the edges of which, as Shavonne memorably described, new developments continue to sprout mansions that sit empty most of the year on land that was once part of the Shinnecock Nation’s much larger domain. Kelly continues to work toward guaranteed protection against construction over Shinnecock graves.

It makes sense that Kelly has spoken about and advocated on behalf of the #LandBack movement, which is a broad movement focused on the intersecting issues of climate reparations, demanding but also extending beyond demands for direct transferral of stolen lands back to Indigenous communities. In a world in which Indigenous peoples protect some 80% of the planet’s biodiversity despite representing just about 5% of the global human population, Land Back is climate justice. The larger strategy and philosophy of climate reparations is one that has received a great deal of attention in recent years, and we’ll have the good fortune to learn more about it in discussion with philosopher Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò on November 27 at another special event at the pop-up, which I hope will also be well attended.

Kelly shared some additional words on behalf of fellow Shinnecock attorney Tela Troge, who had originally planned to join us but could not due to forces outside her control, about Tela’s work with the Shinnecock Kelp Farmers, who describe themselves as “a multi-generation collective of six women who are enrolled members of the Shinnecock Indian Nation, leveraging our 10,000+-year-old traditional relationship with the sea and with seaweed to capture carbon and nitrogen that has poisoned the waters of Shinnecock Bay and beyond.” Much of the work of reestablishing healthy crops of kelp in the Shinnecock Bay involves work in some of the months that most people would least want to be wading in the icy Atlantic waters, but then again, the challenges of sustaining community alongside the sometimes harsh natural systems of the Atlantic coast have been present since much icier, pre-Holocene times.

In one of the articles that first inspired this event with Kelly and Shavonne, a professor of climate change science, Scott Mandia, is quoted noting that some models predict a 100% chance that by 2040 the Shinnecock Nation region will be inundated by a storm, and that the area will likely be rendered uninhabitable by climate change sometime in the future. The thought that wampum making might become impossible along the Shinnecock Bay, or that the lands surrounding the bay might themselves be reclaimed by the sea, due to the inability of industrialized nations to abandon an addiction to the cheap calories of fossil fuels and pivot to renewable energy and to a less overconsumptive culture, is hard to stomach. Among other things, for me, it begs the question: what can a museum do in the face of all this?

Kelly and Shavonne brought helpful focus to the generalized climate anxiety that many of us carry with us in this work. Shavonne’s work directs our attention to the work of building resilience: shoring up natural systems to mitigate future storm surges, preparing community members, monitoring water quality, implementing aquaculture—critical work and a clear-eyed response to the inescapable changes ahead. And Kelly’s work emphasizes the importance of community and culture—in addition to her activist and legal work, she comes from a family of artists, and she has leveraged her leadership platform to support the arts, notably as a Diversity and Leadership Fellow of the Alliance of Artists Communities funded by the Andy Warhol Foundation. At the event, she showed us her tote bag, designed by her mother, which featured an Adbusters-style image of the Land O’ Lakes butter logo, with a restored version of the Ojibwe character “Mia” illustrated by Red Lake Ojibwe artist Patrick DesJarlait, redesigned to say “Land Back Butter.” Kelly reminded us that the arts are a critical means for us to express community and solidarity around issues that otherwise might feel overwhelming and isolating. That kind of cultural gathering and communication will be critical to the work of reclaiming and changing the narrative surrounding climate justice, from one of helplessness to one of agency, from isolation to community.

While many established museums share an explicitly exploitative history of dispossessing Indigenous communities of cultural heritage items and even bodily remains, this mission of building civic agency through community is one that more cultural institutions like museums can adopt alongside active and overdue efforts to repatriate stolen materials. As an action-focused startup organization, The Climate Museum is able to begin from that place of orientation, in addition to providing a platform for organizers like Kelly and Shavonne. People everywhere have been building community around powerful narratives for well over 13,000 years—it’s something we’re good at and wired for, and that is itself good motivation for action and hope.

If you would like to support the work of the Shinnecock Kelp Farmers, you can make a donation and get in touch with them at their website.

Indigenous Sovereignty, Sea Level Rise, and the Shinnecock Nation