The real story here seems to me to be not that people burned their clothes to stay warm but that people in a place with fragile connections to the outside world had so little in the way of supplies to weather a relatively short period without food deliveries. I'm not blaming them, I assume that many of the affected people don't have the resources to keep a buffer stock.
Put ‘em on the shittiest plots of land you can find, steal their children, ban them from speaking their languages and from passing their knowledge between generations, then we can sit and gawk at their 100% intentional and designed cultural death spiral.
Not to say that indigenous life was some suffering-free utopia, but it’s worth remembering their plight is not some emergent accident.