by Lucy Diavolo
For Sofia, there are tangible ways of mitigating the impacts of environmental changes.
“We need irrigation farming,” one of many women interviewed by Teen Vogue said, expressing a common sentiment several women shared. “We need knowledge and technology.”
Despite there being a huge presence of NGOs throughout Malawi, many communities feel as though the response to climate change has been slow and reactive. While the country has implemented climate change policies, such as criminalizing the illegal cutting down of firewood and charcoal-based livelihoods, these policies have hurt the poor who need firewood to survive. Rather than providing communities with alternative strategies, many communities feel as though climate change policies further stigmatize them. Similarly, several experts that spoke to Teen Vogue expressed frustration about the lack of attention paid to climate change’s gendered implications.
Though the government and aid organizations have responded to environmental crises by providing food aid and basic shelter, many women told Teen Vogue that they feel little has been done to ensure that communities and women specifically have the skills and resources to adapt to climate change. Research for this article found that out of twelve villages visited in southern Malawi, only two had received assistance in developing adaptability strategies. In one community, an organization had started a solar energy project in 2014 that was never completed. In the other, unoccupied, half-finished “flood-proof” homes littered the landscape while community members continued to live in houses prone to collapse.
Several communities are consequently disenfranchised by aid organizations and the government, based on the assumption that they are corrupt and self-serving.
With the help of other women in her community, Sofia puts on plays and dances that bring the devastation of the flood that swept away her home and the ineffective subsequent response to dramatic forms. She believes that by raising their voices and honoring those that lost their lives to the flood, her community will always remember how environmental change has affected their lives.
“I don’t have hope that the future will be like what it was before,” reflects Sofia. “If God allows us to live like we did before, then we will. If God does not, I will continue to live this hardship.”
Climate Change Is Impacting Indigenous Peoples Around the World
MICHAEL CHARLES
March 5, 2019
On October 8, 2018, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a report on climate change. It showed the consequences of inevitable global warming and the drastic action needed to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement, which aims to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels. Headlines popped up all over news sites and Facebook feeds, and “twelve years to act” became the topic of conversation. Panic and worry spread through communities over the potential for “future” climate crisis. However, many people don’t understand how Indigenous communities are already facing this crisis—right now, today.
Although there is no universal definition for Indigenous, and Indigenous peoples are self-identified, among us we share many common characteristics. For example, most of us have Indigenous languages, land that we connect to and identify with, and stories and cultural practices that are passed down and used in our daily lives. Many of our cultures and languages are deeply tied to the way we know and interact with the natural world around us.
When I first learned the Diné word kéyah (land), it was described to me as being the connection between our feet and our Mother Earth. Similarly, when I spoke with an iTaukei, or Fijian, friend, he shared a word from their language: vanua. From my understanding, vanua is a holistic concept that describes humans, the natural world, culture, and, as a result, identity. I have learned of many similar concepts across Indigenous cultures, and it reveals a major impact that climate change has on Indigenous peoples.
Our Indigenous cultures have taught us through our languages, stories, and practices that our identity is tied to the land. So what happens to us as the climate changes? Our identity is impacted. The ways we know how to farm, fish, and hunt must also change. Our practices, languages, and stories will need to adapt to explain the new relationship or identity we experience through climate change. Most of our Indigenous knowledge systems are a result of our ancestors’ collective experience over millennia and teach us how to survive and provide for future generations. What we are experiencing now is a rapid change in climate that is unprecedented, impacting the way our existing knowledge systems can accurately teach us about the world around us.
I am fortunate to have the opportunity to work with the International Peoples’ Forum on Climate Change, a community with whom I have been able to learn about how climate change impacts my global Indigenous family from across our seven self-organized regions: Africa, Asia, the Arctic, the Pacific, North America, Latin America and the Caribbean, and Russia and Eastern Europe.
I mentioned how, recently, widespread panic and worry have occurred, thinking about the 1.5 degrees Celsius mark of global warming. According to the WWF Arctic Programme, the average temperature of the Arctic has increased 2.3 degrees Celsius since the 1970s, impacting the livelihood and safety of approximately four hundred thousand Indigenous peoples who live there, such as the Saami, Inuit, and Nenets. As temperatures warm, the ice thins and causes displacement of the people from their homelands and displacement of species that are fundamental to their diet and economies, and it has increased the number of reported ice accidents resulting in injury and death. For Indigenous peoples in the Arctic, climate change is directly impacting them today—their safety, economies, cultural practices, and Indigenous knowledge and identity.
But this story does not stop here. Remember, everything is connected.
As the ice melts, sea levels rise and impact Indigenous peoples who live on islands or coasts. One of my Maori friends from New Zealand has told me that their home will be underwater in their lifetime. Many people along coastlines have to adapt as sea levels rise and move further inland.
However, to many Indigenous peoples, it’s not just land that is submerging, it’s part of their identity. While some Indigenous peoples will worry about managing water, others will worry about managing without it. Increased drought is impacting my people across the Na-vajo Nation in the Southwest U.S. As water is becoming more scarce, farming and shepherding are being impacted, along with the survival of wild horses throughout our land. Similar issues associated with drought are impacting Indigenous communities throughout Africa.
Economics and politics associated with climate change also heavily impact Indigenous peoples, because, according to the World Bank Group, Indigenous peoples account for 15 percent of the extreme poor, relationships with colonial-nation states often violate our human rights, and treaties meant to recognize our sovereignty are frequently broken. A 2018 paper by the international Indigenous rights organization Cultural Survival reported that China hadn’t recognized the term “Indigenous” within its borders; and in Latin America, Indigenous peoples’ land rights and safety are at risk from the exploitation of the Amazon. Indigenous activists are fearing for their lives in these areas as the number of murders against Indigenous activists is rising. In 2017, 201 environmental activists were killed, according to a report by the human rights organization Global Rights.
There are many more unnamed examples of the impacts of climate change on Indigenous peoples, and even more examples of Indigenous resistance, resilience, and adaptation. We are often seen as victims in the discussion of climate change, but we have solutions. These solutions are within our cultures, our languages, our songs, our ceremonies, and our spirituality.
We are guardians of this Earth, as the World Bank Group noted in a 2008 paper acknowledging that we protect 80 percent of global biodiversity. Each of us has our own story, and we cannot be understood simply as “Indigenous peoples.” Most Indigenous peoples alive today exist because of the survival and resilience of their ance
stors through colonization. And we’re still here. I want to leave you with the same conclusion that I delivered to global leaders at the United Nations climate change conference, Climate Negotiations, in December:
“The resilience of my people has enabled my existence. Listen to Indigenous peoples’ voices and humbly accept our wisdom and knowledge as solutions moving forward, so it can also enable yours.”
The Red Deal Is an Indigenous Climate Plan That Builds on the Green New Deal
RAY LEVY-UYEDA
November 1, 2019
As the climate crisis continues and public calls for action mount, the Green New Deal has been centered as a broad proposal for an array of policies that could address the man-made impacts on the climate. But a response has arisen amid concerns that the various programs embodied in different versions of the deal could leave Native climate needs and understanding of the earth out of the conversation. That response is called the Red Deal.
The version of the Green New Deal introduced in February 2019 by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), which calls for a nationwide approach to climate change to avert a potential climate disaster, drew inspiration from the Green New Deal originally popularized by the Sunrise Movement, a youth-led grassroots organization that built upon organizing knowledge of Native, Black, and brown communities.
The Green New Deal calls for clean-energy jobs, infrastructure, decarbonization, and support of vulnerable frontline communities. Included in the list of frontline communities are Indigenous folks, the land’s first people, who only see a dedicated section to the history and destruction of community, culture, and health on the last page of the bill, H. RES. 109, 116th Congress 1st Session.
That section reads: “A Green New Deal will require the following goals and projects … [including] obtaining the free, prior, and informed consent of Indigenous peoples for all decisions that affect Indigenous peoples and their traditional territories, honoring all treaties and agreements with Indigenous peoples, and protecting and enforcing the sovereignty and land rights of Indigenous peoples.”
For Cheyenne Antonio, that’s not good enough. That’s why she and other organizers with the grassroots Native organization called the Red Nation have proposed a Red Deal, intended not to replace but to support the proposal from Ocasio-Cortez and others by centering Native leaders and the knowledge that comes with centuries of fighting back against a government that sought to destroy them.
Water protectors and land defenders who live on the front lines of environmental degradation and are often the first to protest its destruction are mentioned once in what is being heralded as the revolutionary policy our country needs right now. So what are they asking for with the Red Deal? Teen Vogue spoke with Antonio and Red Nation cofounder Dr. Melanie Yazzie to find out.
What Is the Red Deal?
The Red Deal was crafted by community members, Native people, young people, and poor people. It has four key tenets designed to build on and push forward the ideas in the Green New Deal: first, what creates crisis cannot solve it; second, change must come from below and move to the left; third, politicians can’t do what mass movements do; and fourth, the climate conversation must move from theory to action.
“We draw from Black abolitionist traditions to call for divestment away from the criminalizing, caging, and harming of human beings AND divestment away from the exploitative and extractive violence of fossil fuels,” the Red Nation writes of the first tenet on their website. “Proposed discretionary spending for national security in 2020 comes in at $750 billion…. And only $66 billion of discretionary funds are spent on healthcare each year…. This proves there is an overabundance of energy and resources that go into demonizing Indigenous water protectors and land defenders, Muslims, Black people, Mexicans, women, LGTBQIA2+, and poor people.”
In other words, it’s not enough for Red Deal proponents that the Green New Deal seeks to create jobs in renewable energy and pushes for access to clean water, food, and a livable planet.
Responding to the fact that the bill does not call to end fossil fuel consumption, Antonio said that the Green New Deal language could create potential for “normalizing fracking again [and] normalizing nuclear again, and doesn’t give an option for our people or the planet.” She explained that Red Deal proponents believe the Green New Deal should include language that explicitly bans fracking and every form of resource extraction.
The second tenet of the Red Deal, advocating for change from below and to the left, is a call to recognize the inspiration for the Green New Deal and to go further. In order to take the next step toward climate justice, the Red Deal states that a mass movement is needed: “We must throw the full weight of people power behind these demands for a dignified life. People power is the organized force of the masses; a movement to reclaim our humanity and rightful relations with our earth.”
The second tenet of the Red Deal, which claims that mass movement politics must be a catalyst for change, underlies the third tenet, which suggests that politicians cannot save our planet by attending to symptoms of the problem. Incremental political reforms do not address underlying causes, and neglect to hold to account industries that perpetuate the climate crisis.
“[Gradual reform] attempts to treat the symptoms of a crisis, rather than the structures of power that create crisis in the first place,” the Red Nation writes. “Reformists misunderstand this fundamental truth about capitalist states. States protect capital and the wealthy class, not life. Reformists who appeal to the state for change compromise our future. We refuse to compromise.”
“We actually have to build really broad, mass coalitions,” Yazzie explained, connecting tenets two and three. Yazzie noted that politics takes note of “what’s happening in the public sphere” and added, “The politicians will respond and follow our lead anyway; we’re really interested in empowering people to feel like they can own this work.”
With its first three tenets laying out that the system is broken and only a mass movement—not piecemeal political reforms—can fix it, the Red Deal’s fourth tenet is a call to apply that understanding in action.
“We must reclaim our collective power,” the Red Deal’s fourth tenet reads. “When the state invests its greatest resources to contain the threat of mass mobilization, we must already be organized in those spaces and those communities. We must be one step ahead, ready to capture the momentum of the next rebellion and catapult it into a full-blown mass movement.”
“We don’t have time for people to pretend that the problem is much further off,” Yazzie said of the fourth tenet. “We have to collapse the process and figure out ways to move forward together.” She explained that that the Red Deal is intended to empower people at the local and regional level in order to tackle the “urgent issues that they’re facing in their local context.”
“We need people as a whole to lead these conversations and move it beyond legislation,” Antonio told Teen Vogue, stressing that there is no time to wait. “At this point, we need action. At this point, we need people organizing in their communities.”
Why Does It Matter?
The Red Deal asserts that the fight for climate justice must center Native people when it comes to the issues that disproportionately impact Native communities, but it also communicates what the Green New Deal does not—namely, that public lands are stolen lands and climate change is significantly caused by just a few industries, which the government has at worst neglected to hold accountable and at best assisted in their efforts to mine the earth for resources in a move that put profits over people.
“We need to center Indigenous people who’ve been at the forefront,” Antonio told Teen Vogue. Native people have the worst health outcomes of any demographic group in the country, and their communities are at times on the front lines of places where government and private companies pollute. Antonio believes that a Native-centered climate justice approach will not only aid the environment but also address the high rates of deadly diseases a
nd cancers brought on by uranium mining and fracking, just to name a few.
“We envision [that] the Red Deal is tying the land and body violence [together],” Antonio said, speaking to the connection between ecological harm and environmental health hazards.
The land violence she’s talking about is not just the more than five hundred treaties signed and broken by the United States to build the country by usurping territory, but the attitude and actions of the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM). The BLM has continued to lease the land nearby sacred Chaco Canyon in New Mexico (some of which is a “protected” national park) despite protests by organizations like the Red Nation and Navajo government officials and environmental groups calling for the BLM’s findings on environmental assessments to be rejected.
The Red Nation has also protested the use of new extraction technology such as horizontal hydraulic fracturing, which Antonio said the BLM conducted without the consent of Native communities. (Teen Vogue has reached out to the BLM for comment.)
While the erasure of Native people and lack of consideration for sacred sites is nothing new to Native communities, the rate at which the BLM is leasing land without Native consent is concerning because once the land is destroyed, there’s no getting it back. The Trump administration has opened up a record number of protected public lands for oil and gas exploration and extraction, which has a direct impact on the health outcomes of Native people cultural and historical preservation, and which adds to a history of normalized corruption, genocide, and “ongoing behavior of colonial government trying to erase us,” Antonio explained.
Indigenous climate protection actions have been at the center of the Green New Deal presented by AOC. In a Time cover story earlier this year Ocasio-Cortez said a trip to Standing Rock was “transformational” on her way to becoming a climate policy champion. Now, Red Deal proponents hope they can push beyond the language included in her version of the Green New Deal for a version that accounts for their concerns.