This Friday we talked about American Indian Science and Engineering Society, what it is, what it’s about, what it does and the AISES conference. AISES is a a nonprofit organization focused on sustainability increasing the representation of Indigenous peoples of North America in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) studies careers. There are more than 4,000 members, AISES has awarded over 10.3 million dollars in academic scholarships to American Indian STEM students. On Friday we also watched a video about the Seven grandfathers, and how they picked the elder who visited earth 7 times and learned about the values given to the Anishinaabeg.
On Saturday we went to the B4Warmed project which is a 9 year project on the effect of climate change on the Boreal forests. They have 8 blocks and 6 plots in each plot and there’s about 5-6 different species in each plot. They used 2 and 4 degrees celsius because that’s what the temperature will be like in 50 and 100 years. 3 heaters in the plot means +2 degrees and 4 heaters means +4 degrees.
Later Lucas Reynolds also came and talked to us about Standing Rock, how the government is trying to put new pipelines. He said many tribes who were once known as enemies, came together and united. Amy Goodman got, a reporter arrested there for getting footage of protesters getting maced and police dogs biting them.The different tribes are sharing their different talents like how the ojibwe are making wigwams for the winter and the police think if they wait long enough they won’t make it through the winter because they think it’ll get too cold.
Then we went on a phenology walk at the Cloquet Forestry Center and learned all the different trees names, scientific name, and the ojibwe name. After the walk we made leaf art where you took a piece of black or white paper and you took your leaf and made the imprint of it on your paper. We also had stencils like a wolf, bear or a dear you could use for your art work.
The last thing we did was the 4-H groups. You could decide to paint or do robotics. For painting you had to paint a self portrait we had the colors black, white, yellow, blue, red, and green. For robotics you had to make a design for a catapult you think will 6ft. Then you put that design to work and build it with the limited supplies you had like wooden skewers, popsicle sticks, straws, binder clips and rubberbands. We also talked about how we as a camp would like to give back to the community. We will be working on a community project during the remainder of our camps.