Indigenous Climate Leadership: Gatherings Report
Authors: Kelly McLay, Adrienne Young, Angele Alook
Climate Gatherings as Medicine
This project set out to explore and uplift Indigenous climate leadership. To do so, we engaged with our communities and created space to learn directly from Indigenous knowledge holders who are advancing climate solutions on their own terms. We convened two gatherings of climate leaders at 91亚色 in May and September 2022. The stories shared by nine Indigenous climate leaders during these gatherings illuminate the expansive, life-affirming, and culturally grounded ways Indigenous peoples and communities envision and enact climate solutions.
Our forthcoming publication reflects on these gatherings and the teachings we received. In it, we discuss:
- Barriers for promoting Indigenous climate leadership and elevating Indigenous climate solutions and pathways to overcome them
- How Western worldviews disrupt people鈥檚 connection to the natural world, and the connections between colonialism and the climate crisis
- Connections between living well, Indigenous culture and language revitalization, and climate solutions
- The harms of viewing ecosystems simply as 鈥渞esources鈥 that can be owned and controlled and the need for understanding Land as relationship
- Leadership of Indigenous women in protecting water, stewarding ecological knowledge, and promoting care-centered climate work
- Indigenous resistance to extractive industries and false solutions to climate change
The findings reinforce our collective responsibility to care for the Land and all living and non-living beings who share it. Climate change results from an imbalance in the environment and, more deeply, within individuals and societal values and behaviours.
Indigenous climate leaders identify the climate crisis as a symptom of ongoing colonialism, patriarchy, dispossession, and capitalism. While governments and institutions continue to make incremental changes, the transformative change needed for a just and sustainable future requires centering and prioritizing Indigenous climate leadership.
We conclude that Indigenous knowledges, rooted in reciprocity, emphasize a relationship of respect with the natural world that sharply contrasts with Eurocentric perspectives treating Land as commodity. Building relationship with Land means supporting the Indigenous Peoples whose territories we inhabit, recognizing their long-standing leadership in maintaining these relationships, and upholding the essential role Indigenous communities play in shaping comprehensive, meaningful, and effective climate solutions.
This summary is from a forthcoming journal article. Kelly McLay led the gatherings analyses working together with Adrienne Young and Angele Alook.
