Warming winters bring uncertainty to Indigenous maple traditions

Owamni purchases most of its maple sap and other traditional foods from Indigenous purveyors, including some of its employees. But climate change is taking a toll on suppliers, making it more difficult to acquire foods like maple syrup, Garman said. To meet demand, the restaurant is buying sap from more suppliers and at higher prices. “Over the last year or so, I think all of our prices on maple have jumped up at least 25%,” he said.

Indigenous people have harvested tree saps for millennia to make medicines and food. The most well known use is breakfast’s liquid gold — maple syrup. There are 13 maple species native to North America, and more than 100 species worldwide. Globally, the maple syrup industry is worth approximately $1 billion annually.

For food sovereignty activists like Luke and Linda Black Elk, sugarbush is a family affair. Luke Black Elk and the couple’s three sons are enrolled in the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe. Previously from South Dakota, the Minnesota family taps maple trees as a means of connecting with their community and ancestors. “We don’t have sugar maples or silver maples in the Dakotas, we have boxelder maples,” said Luke Black Elk. “Most sugar maple people laugh at us when we say that’s where we get syrup from because it takes a lot more work, but for me that’s something that my people have gathered for millennia,” he said.

Harsher growing conditions like frequent droughts and milder winters have made thriving difficult for maple trees in some areas. The result: smaller harvests. Linda Black Elk said this has changed the way Indigenous people think about food sovereignty and their relationships to traditional foods. She said she sees fewer people trading and gifting traditional foods for fear of scarcity. Some even harvest in secret. “I think it’s even impacted the ways that people relate to each other,” she said.

Maple syrup is extremely weather dependent. Sap typically runs in spring when trees experience below-freezing temperatures at night and above-freezing temperatures during the day. This freeze-thaw cycle creates pressure, moving sap through the trees as they wake from their dormant state.

By using historical records, environmental scientists like Autumn Brunelle have tracked changes in the season across decades. Currently based in southern Indiana, Brunelle is a citizen of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa with direct ties to the White Earth Band of Ojibwe.

She said producers are seeing smaller yields because the maple tapping season across the forest system has become shorter: “In New York or even Indiana, the season has gone down to about two weeks long, versus 50-100 years ago it was almost a month long.” A shorter season means less sap collected and less syrup produced.

Josh Rapp expects this to be a challenge for smaller producers. Rapp is the senior forest ecologist at Mass Audubon, a conservation organization in Massachusetts. He said the maple tapping season overall is becoming more erratic and less predictable. “We get some years where we are earlier, some years where we’re later,” he said. “And there’s more variability. It’s more common to get earlier thaws and earlier periods of good conditions for sap flow.”

Numerous factors influence the sugaring season. Hotter summers and drought conditions may affect a tree’s sugar content, while spring warm spells allow microorganisms to proliferate and clog tap holes, abruptly ending the season. A loss of insulating snowpack coupled with deep soil freezes can damage roots and impact sap production. Consequently, Rapp predicts the ideal conditions for maple sap production will move north, making it more difficult to collect sap from sugar maples in the southern half of their current range.

While climate change has major implications for maple trees, they aren’t going anywhere, at least right now. Maples are extremely resilient, and species like red maple and boxelder maple are even expected to expand their ranges in the next century.

Brunelle believes now is a time to set intentions rather than panic. “If you don’t use it, you’re going to lose it,” she said, emphasizing the need to continue honoring the trees, even if that means tapping just a few in your backyard.

“If you are looking at it from an Indigenous perspective,” she said, “if the season is only a couple of days, then that’s your relative saying, ‘This is all I can give you,’ and you respect that.”