Defending the Sacred: Indigenous Peoples Against False Solutions and Article 6​

Question from audience member #1

So thank you for your fight. I’m Willie Del, [a valley?] doctoral student in political science. I would like to know in which extent imperialism is the concept to fight. And secondly, in the literature, it is very much criticized that indigenous voices that are represented in the international scene are still very dominant from the Americas, and in this table, they are notably from the United States and Canada. Do you find it a problem? Would it mean that we should diversify the presence also of indigenous voices? Thank you.

Eriel Deranger

Well, first off, there is a global Indigenous Peoples movement that we spoke to, so there’s a growing global caucus. So, we represent right now, obviously, folks from North America, but we work in partnership with Indigenous Peoples from all seven socio cultural regions of the world. And the statements that many of us have made echo those that are agreed upon by the entire global indigenous movement and caucus. We are calling for a moratorium on false solutions and unproven technologies. We are calling for mechanisms that uphold our rights, including free prior and informed consent. We are globally calling for this. So, this is something that is not just the voice of Indigenous Peoples from North America. And I know Ien has a long history of working with many communities from the global south and South America. And as far as should imperialism be the target?

Indigenous Climate Action and the caucus at large Indigenous Peoples Caucus has a sort of slogan colonialism causes climate change. Indigenous Peoples are the solution. And we absolutely see the fact that we have to reconcile that colonialism, including systems of patriarchy, capitalism, white supremacy, and extractivism, are the causes of the climate crisis. And until we begin to collectively remove these harmful structures, we risk replicating and maintaining these systems of harm across all of the solutions and policies that are being put forward. So this calls for a movement of decolonization that is the work of everyone.

Tom Goldtooth

Yeah. Thank you, Ariel. Like I said, we are international. We’re a global Indigenous Peoples organization. On our panel here, yes, you will see Northern Indigenous Peoples, one of the members of our Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative represents queka, the coordinating body of the indigenous organizations of the Amazon Basin, Cueka. We weren’t able to tie down a speaker of them since they’re a member of this treaty initiative, but they’re confronting a lot of the similar issues that we are. Again. We working with the Indigenous Peoples of the Pacific. We honor them and respect them. We have some representatives in our delegation from South America, from Brazil, Akri, Brazil. They’re sitting right in front of you. If you raise your hand at the Hunakwai delegation. There’s two of them there, so they are here as well.

Tom Goldtooth

And we have other initiatives that we’re speaking at the Indigenous Pavilion. We have a broad representation of voices representing the four directions, as we call it, of Mother Earth. I think we have one more question.

Question from audience member#2

Thank you. My name is I’m a human gen. Right now I am doing my research in so I do my research, but when I actually focus on my research on climate change, adaptation, what I see is that the conception of adaptation is kind of like extracting our life and living from the nature we live in. When I ask the Indigenous people, the Lenape people in Delaware, what do you see adaptation is? They see that I don’t see it as environmental change, but adapting to colonial. We think. Do you think we need to change our definition of IPCC definition of adaptation as not just adapting to environment, but also about colonial extractive systems?

Tom Goldtooth

Yeah, thank you. It’s a good question, good point. And I’ll talk to you afterwards. But when we talked about Indigenous, what just transitioned, we have already articulated and critical analysis. What does just transition to mean to us as Indigenous people? It means decolonization, confronting colonialism, and that we have our own science-based knowledge, and we have solutions around adaptation of how we survive. But we have to assert that which we have been doing in this cop sitting. But it’s a good question around that. Thank you very much, everyone.