Api'soomaahka (William Singer III) is 60 years old and lives in the Kainai Nation near Stand Off, Alberta. At 60-years-old, Api'soomaahka is still becoming an elder in the traditional sense, but he has been working to restore the native grassland on his home parcel, called Naapi's Garden, as a means to create eco-system resilience, food security and cultural reclamation in the face of climate change.
What has climate change done here?
We're still fracking for oil. We're still digging up the land to build things that are really unnecessary, digging up these really historic places with so many plant families, like they're just plowing them up and getting rid of them. So leaders are working backwards.
The key about this and what's being forgotten, is that connection to the land. So now we're really forgetting it. Now it's starting to be a wide valley, a huge gap. There's that lack of understanding of climate change and how it relates to yourself. But when you really look at it, and you begin to see how you're affected and how you could do something, like our project to restore native Prairie ecosystems.
It's the plants. They're the ones that educate us. They're the ones that help us. They're the ones here before us. They've helped us this long. They need our help now.
The most important thing is, do not lose the value of the land, and do not lose that connection. And when you lose that connection, then we have problems — people around on the street, people having problems with alcohol or personal problems.
What do you think world leaders have to do now to stop things from getting worse and to help us adapt?
Leaders need to step up. They need to understand they have a backbone to be able to tell others, even industry, we don't need your oil, we don't need your coal. This is what we have to do. We have got to live clean. They need to listen to the community. They really need to work for our children — those are the ones that they're forgetting. They're selling them out.
Life expectancy 2023
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