Jerry Jondreau recalls an unexpected issue during a planning process around climate change. Jondreau, a member of the Keweenaw Bay Indian Community in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, was its first tribal forester, and in 2017 and 2018, he was heavily involved in the efforts of Ⅱ Great Lakes Ojibwe tribes to create a climate adaptation plan. The group was in the midst of evaluating a preexisting template and working to apply it specifically to their needs. The template was what you might call a "Western science" document, full of terms familiar to most non-Native natural resource professionals-terms like "management" and "invasive species." Jondreau remembers the group struggling with these words. In the Ojibwe perspective, all beings, from the bugs to the plants to the moose, are on the same level. The group realized that the way the plan would talk about the environment had to change. "There were hierarchical concepts built into the word choices," remembers Jondreau. "It became apparent that one of the major barriers was language-the English language."
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