ClimateLore

FAIN: PN-295997-24

Southwest Folklife Alliance, Inc. (Tucson, AZ 85719-0500)
Kimi Eisele (Project Director: May 2023 to present)

Recording 20 oral history interviews to document the impacts of and adaptations to climate change on cultural heritage and folklife in two desert regions of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands.

ClimateLore, a program of Southwest Folklife Alliance (SFA) in partnership with Tohono O’odham Young Voices Podcast (Tucson, AZ) and La Semilla Food Center (Anthony, NM), aims to advance cultural and community climate resilience in the US-Mexico borderlands by documenting climate-related impacts on folk, traditional, and Indigenous communities. The project seeks to highlight practices of mitigation and adaptation within these communities, which are vulnerable to losing livelihoods, cultural practices, and spiritual sites due to heat, prolonged drought, invasive species, climate migration and other threats to food security, water availability, plant and animal species, and access to sacred sites, traditional knowledge, and traditional homelands. Documentation will take the form of oral histories to be collected by partner organizations within two specific communities: 1) Members of the Tohono O’odham Nation, living both on and off reservation land in Arizona; and 2) Residents of Pa