The 3rd Northern Forum FWG Meeting:
Alkutulvat – Floods Since Time Began: Knowledge, Floods and Weather Changes from the Traditional Knowledge Viewpoint
By Tero Mustonen,
Snowchange Cooperative, Finland
www.snowchange.org
Greetings to the participants and organizers of the Northern Forum Workshop on Flood, March 2006, Yakutsk , Russia . It is an honour to share a few perspectives from the traditional point of view regarding the timely and important topic of weather changes and events, including floods in the Arctic and North with you today.
Most of the Arctic cultures, including my own, Savo-Karelian culture, have stories, songs and knowledge about the “first flood” at the beginning of time – the “Flood” if you will is a central element in the knowledge and understanding of the world and its components and relationships. Many of the small Indigenous nations here in Yakutia possess as well epic songs and knowledge about the flood at the beginning of time. The honorable scientist of the Russian Federation, mr. Vasily Robbek has explained to me the relationship between Siberian Crane and Even culture – or how the Crane got some ground from the sea bottom to make the first land. According to our current spiritual Elder, at the beginning of time Eagle was the first bird to fly above the flooded earth, before land was created. Similar accounts of loon are found in the Karelian and Finno-ugric cultural zone from West Siberia to Estonia . Flood is present as well in our song of the creation of fire when the Lake Aluejarvi was flooded.
Traditional Knowledge
The traditional knowledge (TK) developed within local communities, is grounded in the close interaction between people and their local ecosystems over periods of hundreds, or even thousands, of years. It normally reflects subtle strategies for maintaining social cohesion and for making wise use of renewable natural resources in ways that are inherently sustainable.
The diversity of knowledge embedded in local traditional knowledge is reflected in local languages and language usage, and this requires ecologists and social scientists to reach out to linguistics in order to better appreciate the cognitive map of traditional knowledge, which exists within a largely oral context. In the United States , the National Science Foundation explicitly endorsed and recognized the value of the traditional knowledge in 1999. Traditional knowledge of the Arctic cultures are based on a complex of “sacred ecology”, belief, practice and sensitive understanding of the local ecosystems.
Traditional Knowledge and Floods
The basic information of TK is that what takes place in nature, belongs there. Floods and cycles in water ecosystems that are tied to the seasonal floods in the Arctic are “positive”, essential components of the watersheds and habitats where they occur. Here we have an important qualifier: We can say that floods are “positive” from the point of view of the local culture – careful observation of changes and cycles in the water ecosystems has given the people possibilities to develop survival strategies and subsistence around floods. Our linguistic cousins, the Khanty have based their spring fishing and hunting season for millennia around the floods of Sosva and other local rivers in Jugra region.
In Finnish part of Sapmi, homeland of the Indigenous Saami people, the “proper” flooding at spring time and the rise of water levels provides for successful Atlantic salmon spawning areas of the tributaries of the Deatnu / Teno River .
My family has a close relationship with the Northern pike. It is our most important fish of harvest. In our small non-commercial fishing activity on lake Kuivasjarvi we know the places of pike spawning in early May after ice break up. When we take the pike, we remember the first kantele, our traditional musical instrument that was created from the jaw bone of a pike at the beginning of time. Pike spawning is dependent on proper flooding of the local lakes.
We have now as well enough knowledge of the disturbances and changes that humans have caused to the Arctic ecosystems. The most severe and dangerous of these impacts is human-induced climate change caused by unlimited burning of fossil fuels since 1800s which have released unsustainable levels of greenhouse gasses, such as carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. These impacts are now being felt in the Arctic . Arctic is warming quickly, according to such reports as UN IPCC 3 rd Assessment Report from 2001 and more recently Arctic Climate Impact Assessment commissioned by the Arctic Council in November 2004. This warming trend has already caused and has the potential to cause irreversible changes and impacts to local Arctic ecosystems and water bodies. The “new” and dangerous floods witnessed in the Arctic are some of the impacts of fast, rapid changes in weather systems and water bodies and their natural cycles – the Arctic is out of balance.
Traditional knowledge and Indigenous observations report new floods from Andrejuskino and Niznikolumskaja here in Yakutia, impacts to permafrost, which may cause new additional release of greenhouse gasses to atmosphere and add to the disturbance. Local cultures should be heard as well through community based documentation of their weather and flood knowledge to act as a frontline monitoring areas, provide new and cross-disciplinary context for understanding of flood dynamics and essentially provide for compensation mechanisms for Indigenous communities suffering from the impacts of the new flash floods and other climate change impacts.
In the recent memory, the tsunami of Christmas Day 2004 can be considered the most well-known and largest flood in recent global memory. Over 250000 people perished during this event in South East Asia . In closing, I would like to share reports from the small Indigenous communities of Nicobar and Andaman Islands off the coast of India . As the tsunami began, the animals and Elders urgent local Indigenous peoples to leave for higher ground – they knew that a flood wave is coming. No one of their people was killed. Similar stories persist in the local knowledge systems of the Nuu-chah-nulth people of the west coast of Vancouver Island and Haida Nation in Canada .
In addition to real knowledge and observations about nature, including floods and weather changes, the local Arctic Indigenous cultures and communities can provide guidelines, morals and ethics of a new sustainable, post colonial living in the Arctic of the 21 st Century. Thank you.
Snowchange Cooperative
The Snowchange Cooperative is a non-profit educational, scientific and environmental independent organisation, a cooperative where all members are stakeholders. The decision making procedure of the Snowchange Cooperative follows the ancient method of consensus-based " käräjäpiiri" governance of traditional Finns. This allows all members of the cooperative to have a voice.
The administrative, international and financial relations of the Snowchange Cooperative are governed by the Council of the Snowchange Cooperative. Consisting of five people, Elders, artists, fishermen, scientists and so forth, the Council prepares suggestions to the grand council once a year.
The scientific priority of Snowchange is currently in the following areas of the North:
- The Saami territories of Finland, Russia, Sweden and Norway
- Republic of Sakha-Yakutia, Russian Federation
- Savo, North Karelia and Kainuu, Finland
- Iceland and Faroe Islands
- British Columbia, Northwest Territories and Nunavut, Canada
- Alaska, USA
In addition to the operations in all Arctic countries (United States / Alaska, Canada, Iceland, Greenland and Faroe Islands (Denmark), Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russian Federation) Snowchange has partners in Bolivia, Nepal, Ghana and New Zealand. In all of our member regions there is a large network of community people to whom we owe our daily thanks for making Snowchange possible. As well, several NGOs and other organisations such as the International WWF Arctic Programme have been and are key allies with our work.
Operations of Snowchange
The Snowchange Cooperative provides a new, post-colonial scientific framework that will lead to a "new approach", attitude and interpretation of cultures of the Arctic . This new approach will be built on the traditional governance and learning structures of the local cultures. Such a unique process has few peer projects in the world.
Much of our work has to do with scientific documentation of traditional and Indigenous knowledge to do with observations of cultural, climatic and ecological changes. Our principles are the same at home and abroad - we operate on the wishes and commands of the local community. No information is shared or exposed unless ethically and morally cleared.
We use consent forms and stay in regular contact with all informants. They are co-owners of documented voices. In case of deceased informants, we work with their families to make sure that all proper steps are taken all the time. The Snowchange Cooperative researchers all have University-level training to conduct our work.
hanks to Vladimir Vasiliev, Lena Volkova, Institute of the Small Numbered Peoples of the North, Gavril Kurilov and other people who helped. |
