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Marginalized communities, including Indigenous populations, experience climate change at a more extreme rate given where they live, despite their knowledge of and connection to the land. Due to this interconnection, there have been many negative impacts on cultural identities in correlation with climate change. For example, Indigenous communities that continue growing food, hunting and foraging on traditional lands now face increasingly limited resources due to changes in the land itself. To better understand Tribal experiences with our changing climate, this qualitative research study involved talking circles with Tribal members in the Colorado Plateau region of the United States. Specifically, our diverse research team aimed to identify and highlight Tribal perceptions of climate change, community, and education within the Colorado Plateau. This region, also known as the Four Corners, includes parts of Colorado, Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico. The land is home to many Tribes with regional ancestral ties, including, but not limited to, Hopi, Navajo (Diné), Havasupai, Hualapai, White Mountain Apache, Ute Mountain, Southern Ute, and Kaibab. We hosted four Tribal talking circles in this region to better understand Indigenous perspectives of climate change, local solutions, and lessons learned from collaborating with Indigenous communities. We partnered with the Nature Conservancy’s Native American Tribes Upholding Restoration and Education (NATURE) program based out of Bears Ears National Monument to conduct this research. Results were used to guide curriculum development for the NATURE program and can provide invaluable insight for those wishing to collaborate with Tribal members on climate resilience. 

The solutions-based design framework of permaculture exhibits transformative potential, working to holistically integrate natural and human systems toward a more just society. The term can be defined and applied in a breadth of ways, contributing to both strengths and weaknesses for its capacity toward change. To explore the tension of breadth as strength and weakness, we interviewed 25 prominent permaculture teachers and practitioners across the United States (US) regarding how they define permaculture as a concept and perceive the term’s utility. We find that permaculture casts a wide net that participants grapple with in their own work. They engaged in a negotiation process of how they associate or disassociate themselves with the term, recognizing that it can be both unifying and polarizing. Further, there was noted concern of permaculture’s failure to cite and acknowledge its rootedness in Indigenous knowledge, as well as distinguish itself from Indigenous alternatives. We contextualize these findings within the resounding call for a decolonization of modern ways of living and the science of sustainability, of which permaculture can be critically part of. We conclude with recommended best practices for how to continuously (re-)define permaculture in an embodied and dynamic way to work toward these goals.