Climate and Community with Mike Durglo, Jr.

A conversation with Mike Durglo, Jr., climate coordinator and head of Historic Preservation for the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes. This episode was recorded in September of 2023.

Glacier Conservancy: https://glacier.org/headwaters Frank Waln music: https://www.instagram.com/frankwaln/ Stella Nall art: https://www.instagram.com/stella.nall/

CSKT Climate Resiliency: http://csktclimate.org/

---

TRANSCRIPT:

---

Lacy Kowalski: Headwaters is supported by the Glacier National Park Conservancy.

Peri Sasnett: Welcome to Headwaters, a show from Glacier National Park, which is the traditional homelands of many Indigenous groups that still live in this area today. This episode is an interview we did with Mike Durglo Jr, who's a climate leader at the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes. We talked about how Native American tribes can lead the way through the climate crisis. This episode is part of a series of conversations we've been having with a wide variety of climate change experts. These episodes don't have to be listened to in any order; each one stands on its own. And they all focus on a particular aspect of the way the world is being altered by the burning of fossil fuels over the past century and a half, human activity has released enough greenhouse gases to warm the Earth's climate over one degree Celsius, with only more warming on the way. [subtle beat begins to play] Throughout 2023, Daniel sat down with experts to talk about how that warming is altering Glacier National Park, our lives and our futures. It's critical to remember that Glacier has been a home for people since time immemorial. This has never been an empty landscape. It has been loved and cared for by people for thousands of years. And to find our way through the next century, we'll need to have a lot more conversations like this one. [synth beat contines to play, then resolves]

Mike Durglo, Jr: I call myself a seed planter because just giving people hope.

Daniel Lombardi: Thanks for joining us, and can you introduce yourself?

Mike: Thank you. [Introduces himself in Salish] Good morning, everybody. My name is Standing Grizzly Bear. That's my given name. My English name or my [speaks Salish] name is Mike Durglo. Currently, I'm the department head for the Tribal Historic Preservation Department for the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes. Working for the tribes for, it was 40 years.

Daniel: Wow. Yeah. Congrats. That's pretty amazing. And so that's just down west, southwest of the park, so one of the park's neighbors. Yeah, well, yeah. Give. Give me an overview, then, of what are the climate change impacts that you're seeing on the Flathead reservation, what you're seeing in this area.

Mike: You know, you think about the air quality and what's what's been happening, and even even this year, earlier smoke. I mean, it was early. A few years ago I was driving to my office to work, and there was so much smoke that I couldn't even see the mountains. I live right there, you know, at the base of of the mountains at McDonald Peak, and my office was only like eight miles from my house. But I'm thinking, my grandson had doubles this morning, football practice, double practices. And I'm thinking, I hope that those kids are not outside playing, you know, practicing for football right now in this.

Daniel: Because the air is so toxic.

Mike: Right. And, you know, it was not just the kids, but the elders, and the people that are most vulnerable to the all the smoke. And so we had I don't remember if it was the the Earth Day event that you came to, but it was one of our gatherings where Dr. Lori Byron and her husband attended that. Anyway, I talked about that. I told I shared that story and I shared my concern for the people being out in that smoke. And a few months later, Dr. Byron calls me and says, Mike, would you be interested in putting up some Purple Air monitors? I said, Heck yeah. I didn't really, you know, I was like, So what do we do? And I don't know if you're familiar with them, but they're only about this big, they're inexpensive and they measure PM 2.5 air quality, and they give you real time data. So she sent me seven monitors. We're putting them up around the reservation at seven schools. They have a what's called a flag program that you can, the kids can put out a flag. So if it's a bad air day, they can put out a red flag. If it's a good day, it's the green flag. And there's all these different ones in the middle. And just this year we're putting up I don't remember how many, 14 more? We're going to put them in, inside and outside.

Daniel: So that's great. Yeah. And so that's a kind of climate adaptation, the dealing with air quality, which can be degraded by just burning fossil fuels and cars and stuff. Around here, it's often caused by wildfire, which itself is exacerbated and expanded by climate change.

Mike: Our fire seasons have shifted. So here what we've seen over the last, I don't know, several years is later wildfires burning later in the season. So we're still fighting wildfires in October and November when the fire season used to, you know, go of like from August to September maybe. So climate change isn't the only thing that that messed up there. We we did too, as human beings. I mean, you're all familiar with that one guy, what did he say? [does a silly, deep voice] "Only you can prevent wildfires."

Daniel: Smokey the Bear. [both laugh]

Mike: Yeah. Smokey the Bear is like... A hundred years of fire suppression has not helped. Mhm. To speak. I was invited to speak about historic use of fire on the land. Mm hmm. As you read in some of Lewis and Clark's journals of, you know, walking through this beautiful plains with grass up to their shoulders and it's like that didn't happen all by itself. Mhm. That happened from the tribes living on the land for those thousands of years and you know, using fire as a tool. We didn't follow the bison around, the bison followed where we burned. Mhm.

Daniel: Because the grass would grow back greener.

Mike: We burned those areas and then the bison would go back to those areas and feed. So that it made us easier to hunt. So, you know, a thousand years of that understanding how the land works, it's so, you know, you go back to fire suppression and the way it is now. Climate change plus fire suppression equals catastrophic wildfires. [synth beat marks a transition]

Mike: We were one of the first tribes, right, in the United States to develop a climate strategy. That was back in 2012. My boss and my boss's boss, you know, they were asked several times about what is the tribe's stance, what is the tribe doing about climate change? What are you guys actually doing? And at the time I was the Environmental Director, and I was also the chairman of the RTOC, the Regional Tribal Operations Committee, that's region eight tribes. There's like 17 tribes in Region Eight: North and South Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, Utah.

Daniel: Why do you think it's important to start with a plan? Like was that always automatic, you knew like, the first step is to create a climate plan?

Mike: Whatever agency it is, it don't matter if it's a tribe or the city or the county or federal agency, all of the different programs focus on a certain aspect. There's fisheries, there's wildlife. They're focused on whatever their media is there. So really, I feel like, and this might be hindsight, right? I feel like the whole process ended up bringing all of us in a in a tighter circle. When when I was asked to coordinate that effort, I wanted ours to be more comprehensive. And we had nine sectors. So air, water, fisheries, wildlife, forestry, people. And also I wanted to make sure that we included traditional knowledge. My dad was really a big support. He was actually the department head for Tribal Historic Preservation when I was the Environmental Director. So he he contributed a lot to that plan. And I always say that one of the most awesome parts of that process was interviewing my elders. So I did eight interviews, and my dad being one of those, and those are all available on that website and you can watch those. And I wanted to make sure that we we very much included traditional cultural knowledge within the planning effort.

Daniel: One of the reasons I'm super interested to talk to you about this is because Glacier National Park, we're in the process of trying to write a climate action plan. So I think what you said about how the importance of a plan early on, at least looking back, was that it brought everyone together and got everyone to kind of get on the same page. Did you find that like people were ready for that or like, was there anyone resistant to like, "Oh, this is going to add more work to me" or anything like that?

Mike: When I started doing climate change work it's like, when people saw Mike Durglo coming down the hall, they would slam their door and lock it and pull their shade because they knew that Mike was going to come and ask them to do more work. I mean, they're already busy. They're already doing their their full time work in their field. And I come along and say, "Hey, I need you to come to our meeting because we're talking about impacts of climate change on fisheries" or whatever. They were already doing climate change work without calling it climate change.

Daniel: Yeah, climate change is one of those things that so often it seems like it's adding on to... It's not even always creating new challenges, but it's also often just like a layer on top of a heavy workload that already exists.

Mike: It's more work. I've been doing, you know, my job as the Environmental Director at the time plus climate. It's really something that you have to be passiona