Maria Parazo Rose

Indigenous land dispossession in America is often told as a story of past harms committed. But, as climate change accelerates, Native people are facing another era of forced relocation. 

When it comes to health, Indigenous peoples disproportionately deal with higher rates of poverty, disability, and pollution exposure, while simultaneously facing a lack of access to medical services and clean water. Climate change is expected to worsen all that, with federal reservations at higher risk for heat waves and other climate disasters as rising sea levels, overflowing rivers, storm surges, and erosion rapidly unravel fragile ecosystems. This threatens not only Indigenous relationships to land but also place-based practices that are equally important to Indigenous communities’ culture and lifestyle, physical well-being, and mental and spiritual health. 

It’s against this backdrop that the federal government has established initiatives to support Indigenous nations as they face climate change, designed to help tribal nations implement adaptation plans or voluntarily relocate. But this support is limited and far from enough. And, while most of these programs are focused on relocation and adaptation, many of these urgent needs are more complex than infrastructure updates alone.

As a Nova Media Fellow, Maria will build out a dataset with mappable spatial information that will reveal federal climate assistance distribution patterns, while illuminating the feasibility of Indigenous relocation projects by tracking movements and risks. Once assembled, this dataset will inform a series of stories grounded in Indigenous voices and perspectives. She will integrate historical context and highlight the connections between climate and health for tribes; explore different experiences of several tribes as they prepare for or undergo the relocation process, or navigate changes to their traditional practices and ways of living; and interrogate what land back initiatives in certain places would look like and how they might impact the environment and Indigenous community health. Ultimately, this dataset will be publicly accessible and reproducible for newsrooms, researchers, and tribal leaders to access in accordance with Indigenous data sovereignty principles.