I just wrapped up a week of reporting
at the United Nations where Indigenous leaders from around the world came together to sound off a warning about the Western strategy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions – and in the name of environmentalism. But such efforts, say the
dozens of tribal chiefs, chairmen, presidents, and delegates in attendance at the U.N. Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues (UNPFII) come with the exploitation of Native lands, resources and territories around the globe - a "green colonialism."
The Sámi of Norway have perhaps been the most vocal in drawing attention to the problem: How best to implement climate policy in the transition to a green economy without riding roughshod over Indigenous rights and the environment?
Sámi reindeer herding grounds are under siege by the Fosen onshore wind farm despite a supreme court ruling in Norway defending these traditional subsistence lands and animals. The case received heightened awareness last month when climate activist, Greta Thunberg, joined Sámi youth in getting arrested in protest over the renewable energy project.
Some of those youth turned up at the 12-day Forum, raising fists, and demanding that the U.N. governing bodies turn their attention to the human rights violations happening in the shift to green energy.
'RADICAL TRANSFORMATION'
The Indigenous human rights movement marked a century milestone this year following Chief Deskaheh's historic
treaty stand before the League of Nations in 1923. Since then, the movement has done a good job at convincing world leaders that Indigenous knowledge is essential to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. But such strides have also presented new obstacles.
"We are now facing a knowledge extraction," said Gunn-Britt Retter, head of the Saami Council's Arctic and Environmental Unit. "We need to be in charge of this knowledge."
For all the mention of "Indigenous Knowledge" in such human rights-based documents like the Paris Agreement, and by world leaders including most recently by U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres, there is an overwhelming sense by Indigenous Peoples that existing climate talks have, so far, failed to properly include them.
Chief Joe Alphonse, of the Tl'etinqox First Nation in Canada, addressed the contradiction in a three-minute statement presented at the Forum this week. In 2017, his tribal community, ravaged with wildfire, defied federal evacuation orders in an effort to protect their homelands.
"The biggest threat to the Tŝilhqot’in Peoples during the wildfires wasn’t the actual wildfires, it was government trying to discredit our Indigenous knowledge," Chief Alphonse said. "Every government official that walked through our doors, automatically assumed that we didn’t have a clue of what we were doing."
