Climate talks tokenize indigenous peoples

Among a particular subset of indigenous leaders, activists and youth (the subset that comprises, I must disclose, a significant part of my professional network and social media feed), the annual United Nations Climate Change Conference has become in a more or less yearly item on the calendar.

It’s a time when we environmentally conscious natives consider packing our bags, including, most likely, some handcrafted items from our prized traditional insignia, and flying to any distant global city that houses feathers, beads. and the dreams of the ancestors in towing. If I were to fit these talks into the traditional calendar of my Secwépemc village, the end of summer and fall would look like this: picking berries, fishing for salmon, hunting deer and the occasional elk, talking about the weather, moving into the house of the pit, share stories and tell jokes, freeze our collective asses.

If this sounds a bit frivolous, it should say that climate change is deadly serious. The UN describes anthropogenic warming as a “code red for humanity.” Its environmental, political, social, economic and cultural consequences fall most heavily on indigenous peoples, whose ways of life are already threatened by the status quo. In many parts of the world, indigenous groups are marginalized and persecuted. Our lands have been invaded and what remains is under almost constant threat. Our religions and cultures have been banned and, in some places, continue to be the subject of government policies explicitly designed to end them. As droughts intensify, seas rise, forests burn into deserts, and communities move from previously habitable patches of land, creating new conflicts over resources and power, indigenous peoples face a grave and uncertain future.

We are faced with losing not only our lands and ways of life, but also our languages ​​and our own identities. When there is no sea ice left in the Arctic in the summer, what will it mean to be an Inuit, a people who still hunt marine mammals through holes in the ice? When the last salmon swims down the Fraser River, how can we remain salish, salmon people? And when the Marshall Islands are swallowed up by the Pacific, what will the people of the Marshall Islands call themselves? Can you be an islander without an island to call home? For indigenous people, climate change is a matter of life and death.

And so this year, as in years before, many of my friends, and one or two whom I would even dare to call my relatives, packed their bags for Glasgow, a Scottish port city in the UK that once played a role. outstanding. in the ignominious trade in American tobacco, cotton and sugar.

Among them was Fawn Sharp, the first female elected president of the National Congress of American Indians, the body that represents and defends American Indians and Alaska Natives in Washington, DC Sharp is the vice president of the Quinault Nation, a coastal tribe. western Washington state. The Quinaults, like many other indigenous nations, live with the metastasizing cancer of climate change at their doorstep. Their main village of Taholah is now being relocated to higher ground due to rising sea levels. Every summer, its forests are threatened by forest fires. And as the Pacific waters warm, its blueback salmon, once numbered in the millions, return in streaks of just a few thousand.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Sharp has been one of the most outspoken tribal advocates for policies to address and adapt to global warming, as well as justice for victims of climate change, especially and specifically for indigenous people. At COP26, the US State Department awarded Sharp diplomatic credentials, making her the first tribal leader to serve as part of a US delegation, giving her, and us, a literal seat. in the table. In almost all of his public engagements, Sharp wears a traditional cedar bark hat, the kind worn by members of his tribe’s ocean canoe society. I imagine this was the first time a delegate used it at a climate summit.

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At COP26, Sharp was joined by dozens of other indigenous leaders and activists. Some, like US Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland, play important policymaking roles in their national governments. Others were tribal leaders and youth activists who see their roles as defenders of their peoples, generations and countries of origin in the face of world leaders who are quickly bypassing us. And while their presence marked a welcome turn toward greater indigenous inclusion and representation at the international level, many participants expressed frustration at what they experienced as tokenize dynamic in climate talks, where world leaders, particularly those representing liberal regimes, are happy to pose for photos with traditionally dressed indigenous peoples, but also rush to Leave the room every time one gets on the mic.

Explicit racism may be outmoded among the multicultural global elite, but it is a milder prejudice: one that calls on indigenous peoples to present themselves as victims dressed in traditional costumes speaking for “Mother Earth,” a politics of representation that it smells like “noble savage”. trope – persists.

There is a fairly literal structural reason for this. The United Nations Climate Change Conference is organized a bit like a corporation, a bureaucracy or, perhaps if you are more prone to cynicism, like Dante’s Nine Circles of Hell, with concentric spheres of access, influence and sin. The innermost circle, the global equivalent of the climate C-Suite, belongs to the countries that have signed the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. President Sharp was the first tribal leader to formally participate as a diplomat in this space. The second circle belongs to NGOs, companies and other organizations interested in climate change. (Think: gray-suited technocrats, slick corporate lobbyists, and the occasional nonprofit leader.) Some particularly clumsy and connected participants at this level may even be invited into the inner circle to observe, but never to formally participate, in negotiations. The third and outermost circle is the domain of the public and often activists. Generally, as you move down into the inner circles of climate conversations, you will find more power and fewer indigenous peoples, and as you move forward, you will find less power and more indigenous peoples.

While some indigenous leaders, such as Sharp, now have marginal influence in the negotiations, most actually do not. And this has consequences in the real world. In Glasgow, indigenous peoples hoped to ensure the protection of their rights in the implementation of emissions trading markets, of the kind described in Article 6 of the Paris Agreement – which will pay governments, corporations and communities to protect forests as natural carbon sinks. Depending on how these markets are implemented, they can either empower or dispossess indigenous communities.

On the coast of British Columbia, for example, First Nations like Nuxalk They have used carbon credit proceeds from protecting forests – essential natural sinks that keep carbon in trees rather than in the atmosphere – to fund programs that empower their people as the rightful environmental stewards of their forests. traditional territories. (This, as I reported in a 2018 Article by Canadian Geographic, is a good thing for them and for the climate). However, in other places, indigenous peoples have been excluded from carbon markets or have been excluded from their own lands because of them.

In Peru, for instanceThe government has sold carbon credits created by the conservation of indigenous Kichwa forest lands to corporations such as Shell, Ben & Jerry’s and British Airways. The Kichwa say they have never been consulted on this and do not benefit from the arrangements. In California, to cite a different example, the Yurok have protected their forests in an effort to receive income from carbon credits only to find that the strict rules attached to those credits prevent them to use their ancestral lands for traditional uses. As the global fight against climate change gathers momentum, it is not hard to imagine the emergence of emissions trading schemes that closely resemble the seedier chapters of the colonial land grabbing past.

In Glasgow, indigenous peoples came up with language calling on the parties to the COP26 agreement to “respect, promote and consider their human rights obligations, the right to health and the rights of indigenous peoples” in implementing solutions. but, crucially, it failed to ensure the creation of an international forum to protect those rights in case they were violated.

At the end of the day, the inclusion of indigenous peoples in the text was not that different from the inclusion of indigenous peoples in the conversations themselves. It cannot be said that we are not there, but, again, our presence still feels more symbolic than substantive. Perhaps the textual equivalent of a photo shoot.

“Indigenous peoples had a clear vision for COP26,” wrote the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, in The Guardian. “But it has not been delivered.” It seems that this year, like many before, a host of indigenous peoples traveled to the climate talks to seek the attention of world leaders through a combination of traditional culture and social victimization, only to receive a pat on the head. There is a fine line between sitting at the table and being a lap dog.

As I write this column, the entire city of Merritt, BC, with a population of 7,000, is being evacuated after flooding overwhelmed its sewage system and filled streets with sewage. Merritt is not in the homeland of my people, but he is not far from them. It is a place where many of our community members end up looking for a job, a home, or a relationship. While a part of me wouldn’t mind if indigenous peoples turned their backs on the “climate talks” of these hypocritical world leaders, like the native of Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun’s 1990 painting, appropriately titled Red man staring at white man trying to fix a hole in the skyI know that with everything going to shit, that’s not really an option.

Next year, I’m sure many of my friends will pack their bags in their best Indian clothes for another climate summit where they will mostly be denied a seat at the table and paid little more than lip service. . There is something incredibly brave about his act, but there is also something absurd about a system that creates that imperative.