Mitigating the Impacts of Climate Change

Mitigating the Impacts of Climate Change is a series separate workshops featuring speakers who share their insights on Indigenous environmental leadership, community action, and land-based learning. 

Ukwakhwa is a grassroots nonprofit founded by enrolled citizens of the Oneida Nation in Wisconsin, grounded in our restored 15-acre farmstead, Ukwakhwa: Tsinu Niyukwayayʌthoslu (“Our Foods: Where We Plant Things”). Our work responds to climate change through Indigenous land-based practices that center restoration, adaptation, and renewal.

Across gardens, orchards, pollinator habitats, and teaching spaces, we engage community members in planting, harvesting, seedkeeping, and traditional food preparation. These hands-on practices reflect Haudenosaunee knowledge systems and evolving strategies for climate adaptation.

This presentation highlights how restoring land relationships and cultivating traditional foodways are acts of reclamation. Indigenous food sovereignty is not only about nourishment, but about resilience, cultural continuity, and the active rebuilding of Indigenous lifeways in a changing climate.

Speaker

Rebecca M. Webster is an enrolled citizen of the Oneida Nation in Wisconsin and the Executive Director of Ukwakhwa (Our Foods), a grassroots 501(c)(3) nonprofit based on her family’s 15-acre teaching farmstead on the Oneida Reservation. She is also Director of Graduate Studies and an Associate Professor in the American Indian Studies Department at the University of Minnesota Duluth. She is a skilled artist in raised beadwork and black ash basketry, mentored by community artists and with over two decades of experience in these traditional art forms. She is a multi-published author whose scholarly works focus on the issues Haudenosaunee people face as a result of colonization, assimilation, and removal, and the impacts on traditional governing structures, language, history, and agriculture.

This event has been generously funded by the Chamandy Foundation.