UN climate change report is no surprise to Indigenous peoples
Prickly pear cactuses used by Indigenous peoples to make the popular Mexican and Southwestern nopales are shriveling in an increasingly hot and dry southern Sonoran Desert. Ancestral lands along the California coast may soon be underwater, rendering them worthless to many Native peoples, including the Salinan, Chumash, Tongva and Ajechemem, even as other lands burn in ever-larger wildfires. Some salmon species teeter on the brink of extinction due to drought and diverted water, while elsewhere, people and homes are swept away on a brown tsunami-like wave of floodwaters.