Indigenous Leadership Is Vital for Climate Solutions
As Climate Week NYC begins, global leaders in government, business, science, and philanthropy are gathering to strategize on the global fight against climate change. Since last year’s event, the world has experienced 12 consecutive months that hit or exceeded 1.5C in average warming. This grim threshold, established by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to avoid the worst impacts of climate change, highlights the urgency of the situation.
With time running out to steer Earth toward a sustainable future, it’s more crucial than ever for Indigenous Peoples to have a greater voice in decision-making.
Indigenous Peoples are the world’s most effective environmental protectors. Our lands are not just our homes but also our spiritual connection to the Earth, our ancestors, and our past, present, and future.
The territories of Indigenous Peoples are crucial for the future of our planet. Scientists say we cannot afford to lose these ecosystems, which are more effective at storing carbon than non-Indigenous lands. Our land also faces climate change, helping our global fight to reduce CO2 levels in the atmosphere.
For the Blackfoot People, our land stretches over thousands of miles across North America, from the Rocky Mountains to the Saskatchewan River. It’s a breathtaking area of environmental preservation and spiritual wisdom.
When witnessing this landscape, it can be hard to comprehend the destruction our land and people have endured. Our prairies have been exploited by natural gas pollution, our sacred buffalo nearly wiped out, and our language and cultural identity severely diminished. Our tribe and centuries-old culture have been reduced, marginalized, and assimilated to the point of near disappearance. Today, we continue to face the repercussions of this trauma, including community fragmentation, drug abuse, alcoholism, and mental health issues. This is why we are dedicated to facilitating healing processes
Yet our tribe’s struggle to preserve and restore our way of life is part of the broader global climate fight, in which greedy corporations and self-interested governments have spent decades setting the natural world on fire by prioritizing financial gain over clean air and fresh water.
As Blackfoot cultural leaders, we understand the importance of working for the greater good and long-term prosperity. Many with an individualistic mindset, focused solely on short-term monetary gain, may consider doing business with extractive companies, selling land, natural resources, water, and plants. However, as Indigenous Peoples, our ancestors taught us to always consider the long-term impact of our actions on future generations. We don’t act as individuals pursuing personal benefit, but as a collective, with the responsibility to protect our planet and ensure we leave it in the best possible condition for those who will follow.
This is because what unites Indigenous Peoples worldwide is that, even in the darkest times, we remain resilient. Despite our differences, Indigenous Peoples share experiences and trauma with colonialism, exploitation, and extraction, powerful forces that have both threatened our ways of life and laid the groundwork for the climate crisis the planet now faces. Yet we remain united in our commitment to protecting and restoring our lands, our cultures, and the natural world. This is who we are and who we have always been— a powerful collective force that thinks, feels, and acts guided by the wisdom of our ancestors, with a shared vision of leaving a lasting legacy for future generations.
Nevertheless, as Indigenous Peoples, we are often overlooked when it comes to global climate solutions. From Climate Week NYC to the United Nations Climate Change Conference, Indigenous perspectives are underrepresented in the decision-making spaces that determine the direction of our future. In discourse dominated by big money, big names, and technological innovation, we often don’t even have a seat at the table. This is a grave mistake.
Instead of selling off our land for profit and destroying our natural environment in the process, for centuries we have proactively found ways to sustain ourselves while protecting and restoring the environment around us. This includes Blackfoot’s decades-long effort to bring back free-roaming buffalo, whose population used to number in the millions but were brought to the edge of extinction. We are proud to be the first sovereign Indigenous nation in U.S. history to have released a herd of free-roaming buffalo back into their natural habitat.
At the heart of our cultural preservation is our efforts to educate the Blackfoot youth and work towards building the next generation of Indigenous peoples warriors. By teaching them our traditional knowledge, our heritage and our language, Siksikáí’powahsin, we are building eco-knowledge in the younger generations and revitalizing our environmental work.
While we have made incredible progress in restoring our land, our fight never ends. Oil and gas corporations continue to seek our land for drilling, contaminating our water and disrupting our sacred sites. Each day we must stand our ground and do all we can to ensure environmental justice and protect our land from further destruction. It’s not an easy fight, but it is one we are committed to as a people.
By putting our voices forward, and leveraging thousands of years of experience, Indigenous Peoples play a central role in navigating the climate crisis and helping the world achieve greater ecological, social, and cultural harmony. We have overcome incredible obstacles to rebuild from the ground-up. Our worldview, along with our way of thinking and acting as stewards of a legacy, prioritizing the care of our Earth over financial gain, has been essential in bringing us to where we are today. If we want to combat climate change and protect our natural world from destruction, the same must be true on a global scale: we need to choose our collective future and well-being of all life on Earth and future generations over the short-term gains and profits of a few, and we must have Indigenous leaders at the table in order to do so.