On Monday, Oct. 27, Vassar College welcomed distinguished professor and former U.S. Science Envoy Kyle Whyte as the 2025-2026 Tatlock Fellow. Whyte is a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation and offered his perspective on climate change responses in his keynote, “Kinship Ethic for Climate Action.”
Before Whyte began the keynote, Vassar Professor of English on the Ethel and Alexander Klemin Chair Molly McGlennen, provided a brief introduction with Vassar’s land acknowledgement, recognizing the College’s presence on Munsee Lenape land and the acknowledgement’s own hollowness without countering injustice against Indigenous peoples. As a segue to Whyte’s address, he explained the importance of caring for the land the College occupies and maintaining the connection to its historical past.
The Citizen Potawatomi Nation currently resides in Oklahoma, and though they were relocated from the Great Lakes in 1838 during the Trail of Death, they still hold their homelands as critically important to their legacy. In his address, Whyte spoke of the great difficulty in reorganizing their whole way of living to adapt to an entirely new environment, not once, but three times, first from the Great Lakes to Iowa, then to Kansas and finally to Oklahoma. However, Whyte affirmed their resilience and ability to reconnect as a community as well as with their new landscape. Whyte argued that it is no accident that climate change impacts affect marginalized groups such as Indigenous peoples. As a result, Native American governments, elders and organizations are most aware and directly involved in planning concrete steps to address and adapt to climate change.
Whyte emphasized that Indigenous groups have known about climate change for centuries, seeing it as a past, ongoing and future part of life. Expanding on this, he suggested that many of his tribe elders wonder when the dominant society will truly start to respond to it. Because their lives are so intertwined with the land they live on, Native groups have created pragmatic solutions that go back generations to conserve and protect their land and natural resources.
For example, Whyte spoke of the Menominee Tribe, which collectively runs a logging enterprise while maintaining a sustainable forest in Wisconsin. They plant different combinations of trees and plants to foster a biodiverse forest that can withstand warming temperatures and environmental changes. As Whyte explained, these environmental practices are ancient and show the strength of Indigenous knowledge systems built through community, careful observation of nature and a built-up understanding of ecosystem health and management over time. Though these knowledge systems are not directly scientific, Whyte said, they cultivate a deep respect for their environment through kinship.
Kinship is about restoring relationships between humans and different species—animals and plants—and creating what Whyte refers to as “a culture of abundance.” In order to care for something, he explained, management of the species must be considered in terms of how it can exist abundantly. This means considering what needs to be done to maintain a healthy, growing population of something while harvesting only what is needed for food, materials and tools. For example, Whyte spoke about wild rice, an important cultural and spiritual food, and invited the audience to think of it in terms of the “consent of wild rice.” In other words, this means focusing on what the rice needs. Since we cannot speak directly with other species, we must first learn from the rice, such as what conditions the wild rice grows best in and how to allow it to grow each year while harvesting enough. According to Whyte, personally caring for something like wild rice establishes a “reciprocity” between the human and plant.
Whyte extolled this idea of kinship as the basis for effective environmental management. By building kinship with a species, he argued that the nonhuman acts as an energizer for organizing local action and working as a community. Whyte explained one such species Indigenous organizations strived to restore was the snowshoe hare. By motivating members to connect with the hare, they were able to work together and build a giant regional initiative. According to Whyte, starting small, even by simply connecting oneself to potatoes, is kinship. Because kinship builds trust and relationships between the human and nonhuman as well as amongst communities, it is easier to organize effective concrete action.
Whyte explained that an environment absent of kinship is toxic to both humans and nature, and that there is a great difference in addressing climate change based on a kinship with a species versus with technology and large-scale, data-driven solutions. He spoke briefly about his time working with President Joe Biden’s administration, explaining that despite the plans for technological climate solutions, these projects were eventually “eviscerated.” Instead, Whyte advocated for environmental activities that can be “scalable” and easier for the general public to learn and participate in to help fight climate change.
Students who attended the talk found Whyte’s words on climate action captivating. “I was fascinated to learn that Native Americans have been studying climate change for centuries,” said Frances Pope ’26. “What stood out to me most was the lesson about kinship.” Jack Cellucci ’28 commented, “I really enjoyed the talk.” He continued, “It taught me the more local the better, and the more creative the solutions can be.”
Assistant Professor of American Studies, Leora Gansworth, who is Anishinabe-kwe, also provided her thoughts on the keynote. “Dr. Whyte’s talk reminded me of the important need to interrogate our collective framing of anthropogenic climate change.” Gansworth added, “Rethinking and reinvigorating our human and non-human relatedness provides effective meaning-making related to place, kinship relations, and personal autonomy.”
Today there are 574 sovereign Indigenous tribes in the United States, and together, as Whyte stated, they have a large conservation footprint. With their unique role alongside the U.S. government, Indigenous groups are able to legally carry out what other communities cannot, such as buying land to stop sulfide mining. However, Whyte emphasized that everyone can learn from the concept of kinship to start conservation at a local level. Reminding attendees to “unlock the power of the nonhuman” at the conclusion of his address, Whyte urged the audience to find environmental focal points at Vassar to energize community and relationships with nature which both could help restore kinship and good mental health over toxicity.