# Drunken Trees & Early Spring: Climate Change in the Subarctic ![Tilting evergreen trees in a snowy landscape with a blue sky.](/sites/g/files/omnuum8891/files/2025-05/DrunkenTrees-Opening.jpg) Drunken trees on the shores of Big Lake, Inuvik, Northwest Territories. Trees tilt during summer months when the permafrost melts. ID80952173. *Credit: © Mady Macdonald via Dreamstime*## Interview by Michelle Nicholasen Mindy Jewell Price has worked with farmers, harvesters, First Nations communities, and policy makers to learn how they anticipate the changes coming to the Northwest Territories. By tracing the lived experiences of subarctic farmers and hunters under the dual dynamics of changing climate and food systems, as well as transformations in political economy and social structures, she raises critical questions about the governance structures and strategies of development, land use, and social inequalities. *Centerpiece* sat down with Mindy Jewell Price, a William Lyon Mackenzie King Postdoctoral Fellow in the Canada Program, to ask her about her research. This interview has been edited for clarity and length. **Q: How would you describe your work and your area of interest?** **MJP**: I study agriculture in the Arctic, and I study it because there's a great deal of conversation about how climate change is affecting the region. There are two competing narratives about climate change in the Arctic. One familiar narrative is around crisis. Climate change is warming the Arctic at a rate four times the rest of the globe. It’s this “canary in the coal mine” idea of what is coming. Then there is a narrative of possibility around frontiers and new extraction opportunities. So, I just got curious about what was actually happening with agriculture in the Arctic. **Q: Which First Nations communities did you work with?** **MJP**: I researched in three communities in the Northwest Territories. They were Sambaa K’e First Nation, Ka’a’gee Tu First Nation, and Paradise Valley, a small, mostly non-Indigenous agricultural community about fifteen miles from Hay River. All three communities are in the southern part of the Northwest Territories, around 60–61 degrees north latitude. ![Mindy Jewell Price stands in a field of green holding carrots and beets in each hand.](/sites/g/files/omnuum8891/files/styles/hwp_1_1__960x960_scale/public/2025-05/DrunkenTrees-Beets.jpg?itok=eOnjalTr) Mindy working in mixed vegetable farms in Paradise valley, Northwest Territories, Summer 2021. Paradise farms were devastated by a flood in May 2022 and a wildfire in August 2023. They are still recovering. *Courtesy of Mindy Jewell Price***Q: Can you describe the impacts of a warming climate on the farms you studied?** **MJP**: I can tell you what I heard from Northerners (people from the Northwest Territories) when I was there. I did an ethnography in the region, a multi-sited ethnography. The Indigenous folks that I spoke with—many of them harvesters themselves—talked a lot about changes on the land. So, permafrost is melting and that's affecting trees. They actually call them drunken trees. The root systems change, and the trees kind of tilt, and it looks like huge swaths of the boreal forest have this tilt. Animal populations are changing and migrating. The ice conditions are becoming more challenging in the early and late winter, which is causing safety concerns. Farmers that I spoke with will tell you a different story of how climate change is impacting their crops. There’s this broad narrative that climate change is warming and creating new possibilities. Certainly there are tiny changes that farmers have observed. For example, in 2023 an earlier spring arrived, so this extended the harvest season by a couple of weeks. But they're also seeing alarming crises because of climate change: more fires, more floods. And these can be catastrophic. A flood in 2022 wiped out around 40 percent of the territory's agricultural production, and they’re still rebuilding from that. We’re also seeing more intense fires and more frequent fires over time. In 2023, the Northwest Territories saw the worst wildfire season in history. Around ten million acres of boreal forest burned. **Q: Are there other concerns?** **MJP**: A perennial challenge for farmers in the Northwest Territories is access to land. The Dehcho region has some of the best agricultural land in the Northwest Territories, but this is an area where Indigenous land claims and self-governance agreements have not been settled. So it’s difficult for farmers to get access to land to graze cattle or to farm there. The other longstanding problem is that the government of the Northwest Territories actually has very few agriculture-specific policies. For example, farmers pay the same water rates as non-farming residents. They have high property taxes. There is limited regulatory infrastructure in terms of processing, inspection, and marketing. There is not a lot of support for farmers to actually make a livelihood farming. **Q: And the more upbeat side…?** **MJP**: The more upbeat side is that there's a lot of enthusiasm—especially now—for buying local, for growing local. There's a fierce northern independence among Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples, and a real sense of working together, wanting to see what the North can produce and wanting to support farmers. I think there's a historical pride in providing for oneself and providing for each other. You can grow food in this region. The climate does allow for it. Even without these scary, warming scenarios. It's a question of can we get the supports needed: economic, land, policy, market. ![Quotation by Mindy Jewell Price.](/sites/g/files/omnuum8891/files/styles/hwp_1_1__720x720_scale/public/2025-05/DrunkenTrees-quote.png?itok=1LjgSRa0) **Q: Can you tell us what the growing season is like now, how long and what is grown?** **MJP**: The growing season is roughly late May, to mid-September. Remember, you're getting twenty-two hours of sunlight \[daily\]. The sun is very intense in the summer, so you can grow things that have a short growing season and really cut that time down—produce a lot of kale, a lot of lettuces. In Samba K’e they were even doing things like melons. You can do cucumbers. You can do tomatoes. The things that you would want to find at a farmer's market, you could probably find in most of these gardens, because either the summer growing season is very intense—you can seed and mature and harvest things pretty quickly—or you can extend the growing season with greenhouses, which a lot of people do. The main product, both in terms of popularity to eat and what is easy to grow, is potatoes. Potatoes have been a part of agriculture in the Northwest Territories since it started in the late eighteenth century, when fur traders and missionaries first made contact with Indigenous people. **Q: Are farmers noticing longer growing seasons as a pattern, or is that just something in the future?** **MJP**: This is something that is modeled. If you look at crop suitability data and you look at climate models, it suggests that a longer growing season will allow for both more production of current crops, but also new kinds of crops that can't really be produced. Right now you can't produce corn in the North; perhaps with this warming scenario, that commodity crop will come here. In the example of 2023 that I gave you before, spring started earlier, so that this farmer that I spoke with could plant peas earlier. If not for the fire that same year, she would have produced a higher yield of peas. But that's not a massive change. **Q: You mentioned corn as possibly becoming viable in the future. What would be the potential social and economic impacts of commodity crops coming to the region?** **MJP**: I think it's very unrealistic that the North would become a commodity frontier for agriculture, and by that I mean large-scale, corporate, industrial owners and operators from far away. Nobody that I spoke with in the North wants to see that happen—not Indigenous communities, not farmers, not government officials. But we have seen it happen before, right? I mean, we've converted the Amazon rainforest into huge soybean farms, and much of the forest in Indonesia has been wiped out for palm oil. It has happened. It certainly could happen here too. If we were to go down that track, I would be worried about land access and ownership, particularly for Indigenous communities who don't yet have authority over their lands. There’s a promise from the \[Canadian\] federal government that these lands are Indigenous lands, and that they should have authority over them and access to the resources. But no comprehensive land claims or self-government agreement has been reached between the Dehcho First Nations (which Sambaa K’e First Nation and Ka’a’gee Tu First Nation are part of) and the government of Canada, and so people are concerned. There is some fear that, until real governance is given to Indigenous peoples, corporations could come in for agriculture, or for other resources. It could happen, and that could be disastrous—socially, and also economically. If industrial monoculture became more the norm, then we could see the same kind of impacts that we're seeing in southern Canada and the US, including pushing out small-scale producers, which in the North are already quite fledgling and really struggling. There would be a threat to biodiversity. Right now, the gardens are mostly very diverse, and have a lot of different crops, which are both good for the land and also good for humans that are consuming them. ![Hundreds of green plants are growing in rows inside of a hydroponic farm.](/sites/g/files/omnuum8891/files/styles/hwp_1_1__960x960_scale/public/2025-05/alex%20hydroponics.jpg?itok=CbiLJTjI) Hydroponic farm in Paradise Valley. *Courtesy of Mindy Jewell Price***Q: As the climate changes, it seems like the agricultural region is going to need some sophisticated governance at the highest levels. And I wonder if you are involved in bringing stakeholders together to work on policy?** **MJP**: I've been trying to push for the creation of policy. We need to first ask: What do Northerners want agriculture to look like? There are some differing opinions between what a First Nation—who has a community agriculture project—would want versus a small-scale commercial producer, whose main priority is a livelihood versus food security or nutritional security. But collectively they look very different from what the larger scale, industrial agriculture looks like. Farmers don't want “southern style” agriculture. They want products made in the North, for the North. I absolutely think that Northerners need to be leading this charge. I have been a part of some of these conversations, and actually at times \[have been\] somewhat frustrated. As an example, when we published the [agroecology paper](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10460-022-10312-7), I was the lead author, but I worked with a number of Canadian researchers and folks from the two First Nations that I mentioned. We got a call from Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, which is the federal branch akin to the USDA in Canada, and they were really interested in the paper and working on a series of talks on food security in the North, and so they invited me and one of my coauthors to be part of this conversation. We asked if we could bring community members, and the answer was, no, we need academics now, we’ll have more conversations with community members later. It’s a longstanding problem in Arctic governance, and something I see reflected in the conversations we're seeing now, nationally and internationally, around Arctic resources. So I think this is a huge opportunity for change. **Q: How did you become interested in farming?** **MJP**: I come from a farming background. My grandparents and my uncles are farmers in Wisconsin, and I spent a lot of time with them growing up. They're large-scale corn, soybean, GMO, ethanol-producing farmers. It’s very different from the kind of agriculture I study in the Northwest Territories, but the upbringing created a lot of questions for me around food and agriculture that I’m still trying to answer today. In my earlier work, I was interested in food security and development globally. Prior to my PhD, I was working with ranchers and pastoralists in Kenya and Tanzania. Then I learned about a farm in the Northwest Territories that was producing cattle, so I went there in 2019 to learn more about what was happening, and that was around the same time that there was an explosion of media around Arctic agriculture. **Q: And you stayed for further research. What draws you to the landscape?** **MJP**: I think the high Arctic gets a lot of media attention. A melting iceberg with a polar bear on top of it is an image that we all recognize. But the subarctic, the boreal forest, is equally beautiful and striking and I think deserves attention too. --- ## More from this issue [### Spring 2025, Volume 39 Number 2 ](/publications/centerpiece/spring2025) ![Graphic of a large dark green W overlaid onto a lighter green background with the words "Centerpiece" and issue number, alongside a close-up of a world clock.](/sites/g/files/omnuum8891/files/styles/hwp_16_9__480x270/public/2025-05/Mailchimp-cover.png?itok=WcFNnBbK) [### Message from the Executive Director ](/publications/centerpiece/spring2025/executive-director) ![Erin Goodman headshot next to her name and title. ](/sites/g/files/omnuum8891/files/styles/hwp_16_9__480x270/public/2025-05/ED-message-16x9card_0.jpg?itok=bmnE7But) [### Of Note ](/publications/centerpiece/spring2025/of_note) ![Looking up at the clouds, trees, and top of a building on a sunny day.](/sites/g/files/omnuum8891/files/styles/hwp_16_9__480x270/public/2025-05/Of%20Note%20Banner%201920x825.jpg?h=b1067185&itok=zlYPjMbP) [### New Books ](/publications/centerpiece/spring2025/newbooks) ![Collage of a bunch of overlapping book covers set against beige background.](/sites/g/files/omnuum8891/files/styles/hwp_16_9__480x270/public/2025-05/NewBooksCollage.png?itok=oteuUsBN) [### American Foreign Policy in the Trump Era with Ben Rhodes ](/publications/centerpiece/spring2025/feature_manshel) ![Ben Rhodes stands at lectern and speaks to a packed room in Tsai auditorium.](/sites/g/files/omnuum8891/files/styles/hwp_16_9__480x270/public/2025-05/Manshel-Rhodes_025.jpg?itok=gMAu_gCy) [### Student Programs ](/publications/centerpiece/spring2025/prog_student) ![Group photo of the 2024-2025 Graduate Student Associates and select Weatherhead staff.](/sites/g/files/omnuum8891/files/styles/hwp_16_9__480x270/public/2025-05/ResearchGroups-Students-GSA.jpg?h=225260e9&itok=b_hQxUlp) [### The Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies 40th Reunion ](/publications/centerpiece/spring2025/prog_academy) ![Five current and former executive officers, all wearing suits, stand next to each other, and one is holding a Weatherhead Center sign.](/sites/g/files/omnuum8891/files/styles/hwp_16_9__480x270/public/2025-05/ResearchGroups-Academy-EOfficers.jpg?h=8376f7ff&itok=Ldx7kBlp) [### New Faculty Associates ](/publications/centerpiece/spring2025/new_faculty) ![Collage of 13 professionals in circular portrait frames set against a green background.](/sites/g/files/omnuum8891/files/styles/hwp_16_9__480x270/public/2025-05/NewFacultyCollage-2.jpg?itok=rBrZEYq8) [### Howard Miller World Clock ](/publications/centerpiece/spring2025/miller_clock) ![Cory Gillis next to Howard Miller world clock.](/sites/g/files/omnuum8891/files/styles/hwp_16_9__480x270/public/2025-05/Clock-FinishedwCory-plugremoved.jpg?itok=Oq4FVCHW) [### Photo Gallery for Spring 2025 Centerpiece ](/publications/centerpiece/spring2025/photo_gallery) ![A woman points to a word in her powerpoint presentation.](/sites/g/files/omnuum8891/files/styles/hwp_16_9__480x270/public/2025-05/Events-Special-SKalemli-Ozcan.jpg?h=9d82d84f&itok=BzMm-gqJ) [### In Memoriam: Mala Htun ](/publications/centerpiece/spring2025/in_memoriam_htun) ![Headshot of Mala Htun next to her name and dates of life, 1969-2025.](/sites/g/files/omnuum8891/files/styles/hwp_16_9__480x270/public/2025-05/Memoriam-Htun-16x9card.jpg?itok=HkKiiwrn) [### In Memoriam: Joseph S. 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