Active Project

Ice Worlds

A giant-screen documentary about the science and the storytellers who watch the ice

What this project is

Ice Worlds is a giant-screen documentary co-produced with Giant Screen Films under NSF Award #2116070 ($1.3M, 2021–2024). Deborah Raksany is the principal investigator; Patty is co-PI. The film pairs the international THOR expedition to Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica, one of the most consequential pieces of climate research currently underway, with Native middle-school filmmakers from partner tribes (Poarch Creek in Alabama and others) who are documenting climate change in their own home waters and forests. The throughline is Indigenous knowledge as climate science, alongside and in conversation with western glaciology.

What this page tracks

Thwaites Glacier and West Antarctic ice loss: results from THOR and the international Thwaites Glacier Collaboration, sea-level projections, ice-shelf collapse.
Indigenous climate adaptation: tribal climate plans, the federal Tribal Climate Resilience program, Native-led adaptation in coastal, Arctic, and Great Lakes communities.
Traditional Ecological Knowledge as science: TEK in peer-reviewed journals, on federal advisory bodies, and in tribal natural-resource codes.
Native youth in STEM and storytelling: filmmaking, environmental journalism, and climate-science programs that follow the Tribal Youth Media model.
Wisconsin Ojibwe climate beats: ice-out shifts on Lake Superior, sugarbush timing, manoomin under warming and sulfate stress, GLIFWC's TEK work.

Coverage in The Weekly Brief

Issue 001 · May 10, 2026

ICT's Indigenous Arts and Entertainment Column: Native Style, a 'Borders' Series, and a Buffalo Stamp

ICT's biweekly Indigenous arts and entertainment column this week covers Native fashion, a new 'Borders' documentary series, and a U.S. Postal Service buffalo stamp, offering a useful snapshot of where Indigenous creative work is landing in mainstream cultural spaces right now. The column is a reliable aggregator for this beat, and the 'Borders' series in particular sounds worth tracking as a potential model for the kind of Indigenous-produced documentary work that Ice Worlds is also doing.