Media Storm - Indigenous leadership in climate solutions

Episode Date: August 25, 2022

Indigenous peoples who live off the land are often the first affected by climate change, just as they are the last to cause it. But what is often told as a story of injustice should be a story of leadership. Indigenous communities around the world have been protecting Mother Earth for centuries. They may be the most qualified to fight climate change— yet they are systematically excluded from policymaking. In this crossover bonus episode for The Guilty Feminist and Media Storm, Mathilda Mallinson (@mathildamall) explores the importance of Indigenous leadership in climate action. She speaks to Rachel Heaton, founder of Mazaska Talks, an Indigenous-led boycott of fossil fuel financing in the US. Thimali Kodikara, producer of Mothers of Invention podcast, explains how the colonial roots of climate change indicate decolonial solutions. Media Storm is the Guilty Feminist's investigative podcast. Book tickets to see Media Storm live at the London Podcast Festival: https://www.kingsplace.co.uk/whats-on/words/media-storm/  Guests Rachel Heaton, Mazaska Talks @MazaskaTalks Thimali Kodikara IG: @oneloudbellow, TW: @apathySUCKS Production Researcher: Isabella Crispino Fact-checking: Camilla Tiana Music: Samfire @soundofsamfire Get in touch Follow us on Twitter http://twitter.com/mediastormpod or Instagram https://www.instagram.com/mediastormpod or Tiktok https://www.tiktok.com/@mediastormpod like us on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/MediaStormPod send us an email [e-mail] check out our website https://mediastormpodcast.com Become a member at https://plus.acast.com/s/media-storm. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Centuries ago, explorers set across the water in search of new worlds. Their sails were carried by imperialist ambition and bore discovery with destruction. Theirs was a mission of claiming land and colonizing or cleansing the indigenous cultures that lived off it. In the centuries since, colonies were mined and farmed for the materials and fuels of industrial manufacturing, manufacturing that would enrich colonial motherlands beyond historic measure. The Earth's temperature rose by one degree Celsius. Ice caps melted and soil dried out, bringing heat waves and heavy rainfall.

Communities that lived off the land were the first to feel its effects. The people of all gallery, we grow our crops, we drink the water from the stream. We get our protein, the fish from there. We get beef from the bushes, bush meat. That is gone. It's gone forever. The rivers are messed up. The forest is destroyed.

The value of the soil is gone. You can't even drink water. No water to drink. Today, we look at how the indigenous people feeling those effects may well be the most qualified to fight them. but they cannot do it alone. Hello, Guilty Feminists, I'm Matilda Malinson, co-host of Media Storm, the Guilty Feminist's investigative podcast,

which puts people with lived experience at the centre of reporting. In our latest episode, we investigated corporate oil spills in Nigeria. That voice you just heard was King Okpabi, ruler of O'Gali, a river state in the Niger Delta. He told me of the destruction of his people's land with the arrival of the white man in Africa. You come here to do business, we'll receive you with wholeheartedness,

you destroy everything about us. My story is very sad, and I don't think anybody's listening. Or just maybe people don't care. There are communities that live very much in sync with their environment, whose fossil fuel footprints are relatively small. And it's often those communities that pay the highest price for its production. Overnight, police held the ground where they clashed with Native American protesters.

In the U.S., indigenous activists are taking on big oil. So my name is Rachel Heaton. I am a muckle chute tribal member. My tribe is located about 21 miles south of Seattle. So my mother's native and my father's white. and I am a descendant of the Duwamish people, which is also the original people of the area of Seattle. Since the U.S. oil boom, Rachel tells me,

indigenous communities have been disproportionately affected by the industry's environmental damage. They've gone through sacred lands. Brave sites desecrated. Thousands and thousands and thousands of women missing and murdered. So-called man camps set up for industrial workers linked to unexplained rises in violent crime. sexual assault, trafficking.

Ultimately, it's about protecting seven generations in our future and protecting Mother Earth. So Rachel started a boycott, targeting not the companies that own these projects, but the banks that pay for them. Money is their thing. Money is their go-to. Money is their power.

Money speaks to money. She named the movement Mazaska Talks, translated from Lakota, money talks. Mazasca Talks was created for Indigenous people. to be leading that work. The reason why we lead this fight is because we're the first ones affected by it. We live off of the land. Part of our treaty rights is our ability to hunt and fish. It affects our ability to live, you know, to eat our fish, to harvest our plants, to collect our medicines. You know, when we can't do that, we can't exist as a people because we identify by these plants,

by these waterways. Talking about the protection of Mother Earth ultimately comes down to protecting all people on earth. It is going to show up at everyone's front door. It just happens to already be at ours. And so when we talk about native people fighting, you don't realize that we're fighting for everyone. Your boycott is targeting quite a specific issue in quite a specific way, but does it speak to a wider problem that environmental damage disproportionately affects marginalized groups? Oh, absolutely. The fossil fuel piece is just one, peace and there's various fights. We do have natives fighting food section. Global food systems account for 30% of all human greenhouse gas emissions. The fishing industry. There are signs of over

exploitation. There's no more left to fish. The deforestation industry. In a world where rainforest is being cut down at the rate of 30 football pitches a minute. Low income, bi-pot communities, native communities are the front lines because typically these communities don't have the voice and the money backings that corporations and white communities have. And so we've had to use strategies that allow everyday people to speak about these issues and not the political figures that we typically hear from is it's grassroots people that are really making these underlining changes. It's not corporations. It's not businesses. It's grassroots people that are living. and breathing these fights.

Many of the banks you target would probably respond that they invest in indigenous communities, sometimes millions of dollars. How do you respond to that? And these corporations, when you speak about greenwashing, they're pretty sneaky, you know, so when we did start addressing the issue of big banks contributing to the desecration of Mother Earth,

but also our tribal communities, then all the sudden, Wells Fargo started these donations and charitable acts to put millions back into tribal communities. Our argument to that is you'll throw 55 million at us, but you'll spend billions on a pipeline to destroy our community. It's like we threw you peanuts, but behind your back, you know, we were doing what we needed to do. It's just so that they can continue these ventures.

A lot of our communities are also stuck in contracts with big banks that they cannot get out of for decades. And they're indebted to these banks. And so these corporations have found ways to integrate themselves so deeply into the fabrics of our community that it makes it even almost impossible to break free.

I can't imagine the world that our future generations are going to see if we don't start making changes in addressing these corporations. But I do believe it is, going to be going back to native teachings, you know, our people's teachings of appreciating the land and protecting the land. Just as indigenous experiences reveal the realities of climate change, so can they bring some relief. Right. Now, shall we start the podcast? Yes, please.

Mothers of Invention is a podcast celebrating the work of marginalized communities to achieve climate justice. Welcome to Mothers of Invention, our brand new podcast where we show that all although climate change may be a man-made problem. It has a wonderfully feminist solution. Its host, Thimali Kodikara, tells me climate change is a story of colonialism, one that has yet to end. We can't be leading with this idea that human beings cause climate change. When we talk about 1.5 degrees of global temperature rise,

zero is the industrial revolution. The industrial revolution would not have occurred without colonialism and that's why we say that colonialism caused climate change. Indigenous people don't use the Industrial Revolution as zero. They talk about colonialism as being zero because when you look at Britain and other European countries that plowed into their colonies they leveled landscapes that were otherwise managed by indigenous local peoples for a long time. They knew how to take care and live in synchronicity with their landscapes. But then when you plant monocultures,

you have to destroy entire swathes of land. And with that goes the biodiversity of the landscape. That actually is known to have created shifts in the climate. When so many indigenous people were killed and when so much land was plowed down, it created these crazy climate shifts that were felt in other parts of the planet. Right. So now is it just a matter of,

of raising awareness of that injustice, or is there something we can do with that awareness? In terms of the way that climate is reported around the world, you know, we look at devastation in Bangladesh or Madagascar or any of these countries around the world. There's also this presumption, which again comes from colonial mentality for me, of these poor black and brown and people, look at them suffering all over the world, as opposed to the fact that they have adapted to climate for years and years and years and years. They have figured out how to do it without mental technology with the least resources available to them in many, many, many circumstances. That is phenomenal intelligence that we can learn from if we choose to show humility.

This presumption that people need to be saved or left to die is really bonkers when you think about how much knowledge we can gain from these communities. If you are trying to develop solutions in a homogenous environment, you are going to come up with half-baked solutions. You have to include different types of people. And ideally, people who are existing at the front lines who know what this is like. And that, again, is not co-opting their knowledge. That's what the land-back movement is about for indigenous.

communities in the US right now saying we know how to manage these landscapes we don't need you to come and take our knowledge from us colonize our knowledge and repurpose it for your own benefit we've been there and done that we're not letting you do that again we want to have autonomy over our landscapes we know what to do we know how to do it we know what level of urgency needs to happen here we just need to get on with it now humility i like that word as as the takeaway and maybe that's an uplifting spin because the solutions are out there, we're just looking in the wrong place. Exactly.

I think everything is being sort of presented or the mentality is sacrifice. Like we're going to have to sacrifice all these creature comforts that we've had and we don't want to suffer. These amazing people all over the planet who have nothing in many circumstances and doing so much with it.

The mentality is one of celebration and thriving and joy. It's colorful. It is expansive. It is all is driven by imagining beautiful futures for ourselves. Hear more from Thamali on the latest episode of Media Storm. Climate Frontlines, The Truth About Big Oil. Let's take a break. Here at the Guilty Feminist and Media Storm, we believe people with lived experience should be at the centre of reporting,

because they are the ones with real expertise. By the same logic, people with lived experience should be at the centre of policymaking. Indigenous life smarter. Yet communities fighting on the climate front lines are often left out of the boardroom. Good morning. You're watching a special dedicated channel for the UN Climate Change Summit COP. COP 26, 2021. 25,000 delegates and nearly 120 heads of state gathered in Glasgow to agree national action against climate change. They pledged $1.7 billion to help indigenous communities continue protecting forests. This built on a chain of indigenous acknowledgments, a platform established at COP21 to preserve indigenous rights,

the recognition of indigenous peoples as a formal constituency at COP 7. Yet in 26 years of COP, climate policy has continuously ignored them. Impatience, courses through the streets of Glasgow. And the COP 26 is going to be a failure like the other 25. Do you all agree? Are you agreeing? Yeah! 1.5 is what we need to survive.

Two degrees. Yes, SG, is a death sentence. We are the ones hit hardest by the climate crisis. Yet we do the least. We need climate justice in Africa. As an indigenous person from the northern part of Argentina, we know that there's policies that invisibleize indigenous community. I was invited to speak at the World Leaders Summit. But when I got to the podium, most of the leaders have walked out of the party. My world is melting. This is our warrior

cry to the world. We are not drowning. We are fighting. From America to Africa to Asia, indigenous peoples from around the world were unified in one message. We have been protecting Mother Earth for centuries. Instead of fighting us, follow us. In the US and Canada alone, Indigenous resistance has stopped or delayed greenhouse gas pollution equivalent to at least one quarter of annual emissions. What we do works. And if you aren't willing to back us or let us lead, then you're complicit in the death and destruction that is happening across the globe.

The climate crisis is not some abstract dystopia, partly because it's started, but also because it's solvable. The leadership is there. The question now is how to use it. Before we go, here's a quick announcement. Hey, media stormers, exciting news. We're going to be at London Podcast Festival on 18th of September at 7pm at King's Place.

We will be live recording two special half-hour episodes. Guests will be revealed soon and the floor will be open to audience participation so come equipped with your media grievances and then we can all drown them in the bar off. There are limited tickets available, so snap them up now. Go to kingsplace.com.uk. That's MediaStorm at the London Podcast Festival on Sunday, the 18th of September, at 7pm.