**5. Creatively and E**ff**ectively Addressing the Sustaining of Indigenous Communities**

In the context of climate change, Indigenous leaders are realizing that addressing basic sustainability factors, such as ensuring freshwater supplies, secure food supplies, and mediating impact on key plant and animal species, also requires attention to our practiced forms of community. It requires our re-forming of traditional eco-knowledge and the exercise of our sovereignty at every level. It requires that we plan locally and cooperate with other communities or tribes as well as educational agencies, NGOs, and governmental agencies. It requires that Indigenous Peoples create, as they once did, unique solutions to issues of physical and communal survival. Given these propensities, it is important to consider the following strategic orientations for how Indigenous science, traditional environmental knowledge, and communal ingenuity may be engaged toward the development of sustainable Indigenous education and community building at the community level.

The use of traditional ecological knowledge in a balanced relationship with other forms of knowledge to address the challenges of climate change is an essential activity. In an Indigenous context, traditional knowledge is handed down through generations, based on stories and experiences of a People through time. Empirical knowledge is gained through careful observation and practice over time. Revealed knowledge is personal and collective insights gained through vision, ritual, and ceremony. Contemporary knowledge is gained through experience, problem-solving, and applying contemporary knowledge to sustaining people and community. This form of knowledge includes contemporary forms of education including science and other skills learned in a contemporary setting. In realty all three of these forms of knowledge are needed in addressing the challenges of climate change and community building.

Today, there is a compelling need for communal action and simultaneously a lack of the communal cohesiveness necessary to address climate change issues. People today are searching for meaning. Many lack a sense of the communal good. Collectively, we struggle without recognizing the need for communal virtue and ethical action. A healthy society can only come from healthy communities comprised of self-determining individuals acting and taking responsibility for their actions for all [8]. This is the essence of the traditional Indigenous view of community. And it is this compelling need for communal action that must be energized to address the challenges of global climate change in both Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities. Community is a socially learned perception. Humans are social beings. We learn to be in community through participating and learning in community. Indeed, this process of communal renewal and action has begun to take hold among many Indigenous and non-Indigenous people worldwide.

Dee Hock, in his book, Birth of the Chaordic Age, states, "the essence of community, it very heart and soul, is the non-monetary exchange of value: things we do and share because we care for others, and for the good of the place ... It arises from a deep, intuitive, often subconscious understanding that self-interest is inseparably connected with community interest" [12].

Creating Community is an essential ongoing task that requires work and constant attention but provides us with invaluable benefits. Community provides us with a perception of belonging and supports a sense of identity. It places our identity in context. It requires participation and commitment. It requires support of individuals and in turn supports individuals. Community creates a synergy through which it attains coherence, which is to say when you are in community, you feel it in a tangible way [13]. Practiced forms of traditional community and culture have been an integral factor in enhancing the resilience of Indigenous communities through time. Yet, Indigenous communities have also been impacted by historical trauma, social change, and economic and political upheaval. Indigenous communities are an integral foundation of Indigenous life, yet they are significantly vulnerable in confronting modern forces of change. Therefore, creating community in conscious and

healthy ways must be both a practice and foundational strategy as Indigenous communities fully express their innate communality to address the challenges of climate change.

Healthy community processes reflect and reinforce ethical values which serve to preserve community cohesion and sustainable use of natural resources. Healthy community gives us a sense of purpose. In its requirements for a collective agreement on core values, participation, communication, commitment, collaboration, and trust it connects us to our humanity. To function in a healthy way requires our conscious choice, our participation in a shared responsibility, an acceptance of healthy community norms and accountability. It requires us to respect one another, to have accountability to one another, and to practice reciprocity, transparency, and efficacy. In addressing these requirements, we learn and internalize what it is to be in healthy relationship. By being in a healthy community our innate sense of human communality is awakened and guided in positive ways. Indeed, from this perspective, community is the medium and the message [13].
