BEMIDJI — The impacts of climate change on local Indigenous populations was at the forefront of a powerful listening session recently held at the Sanford Bemidji Medical Center.
Hosted by Health Professionals for a Healthy Climate and the Indigenous Environmental Network, the event invited Indigenous community members to share their personal experiences of how climate change is affecting their health and way of life.
“We’re here today to hear your stories and see what you’re experiencing from your perspective,” said Dan Trujano, a retired physician and HPHC board member. He stressed the importance of hearing from frontline communities, especially Indigenous peoples, who often feel the first and worst impacts of climate change.
Charley Gilbert / Bemidji Pioneer
Many attendees shared how climate shifts are directly disrupting their cultural practices and connection to the environment. Michelle Marion, an enrolled member of the Leech Lake Band and administrative assistant with IEN, began by expressing the challenges her family faced with wild rice harvesting.
“Summer when it should be fall. … It’s overlapping for our cultural flow of life, where we’re normally getting rice that’s happening at a much different time,” she said. “This year in particular, a lot of areas were drowned out.”
She noted how these changes are fundamentally altering traditional gathering times, affecting not only her family but also communities in places like Mille Lacs and Grand Portage.
Charley Gilbert / Bemidji Pioneer
Muriel Dudley, enrolled Red Lake Nation member and IEN’s grant manager, described how air quality affects her family.
“I have a 2-year-old grandson, and I noticed just him being outside for like 10 minutes, he started struggling to breathe. He wasn’t born with asthma,” she said.
Dudley continued to explain that she believed it must be coming from the smoke from the increase in forest fires.
Jeff Harper, a Leech Lake Band member working in environmental roles, elaborated on the struggles facing hunters due to the shifting environment.
“How do we know if we’re going to catch that or not? How do we know if the deer are sick until it actually shows the signs,” Harper said, referring to the spread of chronic wasting disease and the uncertainties around hunting season.
Charley Gilbert / Bemidji Pioneer
Harper also highlighted the contamination of local fish populations, especially in places affected by superfund sites.
“They’ll catch a walleye … but they’re kind of afraid to eat it, so they throw them back,” Harper said.
He also cited a situation in 2023 where per- and polyfluoroalkyl chemicals, or PFAS,
were found in the Bug-O-Nay-Ge-Shig School’s drinking water wells.
Annette Johnson, Red Lake Nation member and finance manager for IEN, commented on the challenges rural communities face.
“I think there could be more done,” she said, noting how elders often struggle during extreme weather. “When it gets really warm, they may not have access to air conditioning. Or even vice versa in the winter, if it gets really cold, they’re dealing with their housing not warming up enough.”
Charley Gilbert / Bemidji Pioneer
She also observed that asthma seems more common now in younger people, which wasn’t the case when she was growing up.
“When we can’t go outside to hunt, fish, gather medicines, be outside, canoe, swim … it wears on my psyche,” said Simone Senogles, Red Lake Nation member and longtime coordinator with IEN. “The cycles of health, birth and death, all these cycles connect with one another.”
Charley Gilbert / Bemidji Pioneer
Rebekah Fineday, a Leech Lake Band member and Native American community advocate at Sanford Health shared some of the issues she’s seen.
“We have especially a lot of our elders or our Indigenous people who have chronic illness but need to be cared for in a higher modality that cannot be done at home. And we don’t have those options in our Native communities,” she added. “We’re finding more and more times where it’s difficult to keep them even close to our Native communities.”
Fineday continued to reflect on the challenges of sending patients far from their familiar and cultural support systems.
“Access to quality health care has always been a great need that I’ve seen,” Johnson pointed out. “I know people that live in Bemidji that don’t have insurance. They wait until ‘my teeth are falling out’, or ‘I’ve got to get in line to go see a dentist. It’s hard to attract good and quality health care providers, especially in the rural tribal communities.”
Charley Gilbert / Bemidji Pioneer
The session closed with a call for continued dialogue between health care professionals and Indigenous communities.
“We do have a Sanford Native American Patient and Family Advisory Committee,” Fineday said. “It’s open to families and patients themselves.”
She said the next meeting for the Advisory Committee will be held from 4:30 to 7:30 p.m. on Wednesday, Oct. 16, at the Northwest Indian Community Development Center.
“It’s a good opportunity for voices to be heard,” she encouraged.
Senogles reflected on the need for deeper conversations.
“In terms of how Sanford can help better serve Indigenous communities, whether it be looking at your own racism, having better transportation or understanding our connections to the land and the water,” she said, “these kinds of conversations need to continue happening on lots of different fronts.”
Charley Gilbert / Bemidji Pioneer