Honoring Indigenous Peoples’ Day in the midst of a climate catastrophe
“Fridays For Future 3:30 p.m. protest inside COP25 in Hall 4, before marching outside to meet a protest of civil society on the outside. - December 13, 2019.” Photo by John Englart/Climate Action Network via Flickr.
Throughout U.S. history, Christopher Columbus has been lionized as the explorer who “discovered” the Americas. His legacy has even been memorialized in the U.S. (and several other countries throughout the Americas) with a federal holiday. However, in recent years, this celebration of a genocidal tyrant has become widely abhorred by the general population because of Indigenous protests against the historical figure’s positive treatment.
Instead of holding a day to remember the man who helped initiate 500 years of settler-colonialism in the western hemisphere, it is becoming more and more mainstream for people to honor Indigenous Peoples’ Day on the second Monday of October. This holiday urges us to think critically about history and how the destruction of so many Indigenous cultures and communities continues to affect our world today.
Additionally, while it is important to stand in solidarity with Indigenous peoples by remembering our shared history, solidarity can also be shown by taking action and promoting restorative justice for Indigenous communities, especially through the environmental movement.
What makes Indigenous peoples different from other groups, according to the United Nation’s loose definition, is that they are “inheritors and practitioners of unique cultures and ways of relating to people and the environment. They have retained social, cultural, economic and political characteristics that are distinct from those of the dominant societies in which they live.”
Ariel Wantanbe, who is Kānaka Maoli (Indigenous Hawaiian), explains that “to many Indigenous People, we come from the Land. The Land is seen as a Mother, a friend, our caregiver, our sustainer. Some Natives I know say the Land and Water are the things that connect all Natives around the globe. We all have a reverence for the Land and the provision that it grants us.”
The fundamental idea here is the relationship that Indigenous communities have with the land. The Earth, consisting of humans, non-humans and ecosystems, is viewed as another being to live in harmony with and to have communal responsibilities toward, not to exploit and plunder simply for its resources.
For this reason, on Indigenous Peoples’ Day, Indigenous voices must be viewed as vital to fighting climate change and protecting the environment. While there are approximately 370 million Indigenous peoples worldwide (about 5% of the human population), representing over 5,000 different cultures and occupying 20% of the Earth’s land, Indigenous communities safeguard 80% of the world’s biodiversity, demonstrating the most effective practices for environmental stewardship.
As explained by Max Ajl in the new book “A People’s Green New Deal,” Indigenous methods are best not “because of some primordial and timeless capacity of Indigenous people to live in nature in peace and harmony,” but rather because “they carry out forms of production ... based on ancestral knowledge about how to live in, on, and with the land.” In other words, other groups could learn from Indigenous knowledge when it comes to protecting the Earth, but this will require systematic change and challenging the destructive ways of living brought about by modernity and capitalism.
Currently, global politics is founded upon nation-states that primarily respond to the needs of capital. More simply put, our international political system struggles to solve peoples’ issues, like the climate catastrophe, because profit is too often prioritized by powerful interests over human lives. Therefore, solutions to the climate crisis must go beyond the answers offered by capitalists, such as investments in electric vehicles, “sustainable” mass consumption, solar-powered infrastructure, etc. Instead, an environmentally conscious global society requires a completely different world order, one where Indigenous peoples can lead the way.
The most prominent way to fight for a decolonized and decarbonized world is through the Landback movement, which advocates for returning stolen Indigenous land in the U.S. and Canada by honoring treaties made with Indigenous tribes. Landback would mean better forest management, which would lead to less harmful wildfires in the Western U.S. Landback would mean sustainable agriculture and food sovereignty instead of environmentally destructive industrial agriculture.
Landback also means stopping the use of fossil fuels. According to a new report by the Indigenous Environmental Network and Oil Change International, Indigenous resistance across the U.S. and Canada has also been responsible for delaying or stopping at least 25% of these two countries’ greenhouse gas pollution over the past 10 years.
Such results demonstrate that standing with Indigenous communities can have strong material impacts on our environment and for fighting climate change. On this Indigenous Peoples’ Day, an important lesson we must learn is that it is necessary to put our bodies on the line to protect Indigenous communities and the environment as the two are linked. Without such resistance, planetary destruction will inevitably ensue.
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