Navajo Youth in Bolivia: Climate Change Worthy Cause to Fight For
Photo: Courtesy photo Michelle Cook
Bolivian President Evo Morales is at the United Nations today in New York, presenting the results of the World Peoples Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth. President Morales invited Tom Goldtooth, executive director of the Indigenous Environmental Network, and a key organizer in Bolivia, to join the delegation at the United Nations.
Meanwhile, in New Zealand, Navajo youth Michelle Cook reflects on the World Climate Conference in Bolivia and the power of this gathering to transform the world and halt the destruction of the earth.
"I walk away realizing how great the responsibility is for youth and how blessed we are to have a cause worthy to fight for," Cook said in her reflections today.
Cook, Navajo Fulbright scholar, arrived in Bolivia for the World Climate Conference from Maori territory in New Zealand. At the conference, she was a member of a grassroots delegation of Native Americans, including Western Shoshone, Navajo, Yaqui, Mohawk, Oneida and others, who struggled to get to Bolivia at all costs. In her case, the long international flight from Auckland, New Zealand, meant an overnight in Chile. In Bolivia, she joined Native Americans from across North America, including Acoma Pueblo, Gwich'in, Lakota, Dakota and delegations of Alaskan Natives and First Nations.
Cook, a graduate of the University of Arizona in Indigenous and Women's studies, has served as a border rights activist in Arizona and in solidarity with the Zapatistas. Earlier, she served as a cultural youth ambassador to Iran. Her reflections offer a rallying call for Indigenous youths.
By Michelle Cook
The World People's Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth in Cochabamba, Bolivia, could not have come at a more desperate time. For Navajo people the impacts of climate change become more acute in every passing season through record winds, record snowfall, and drought. Shifts in weather can also be observed in desertification of Navajo territory, in dust storms and the movement of sand dunes.
Navajo people are earth peoples whose bodies and traditional ways of life tie directly to mother earth and the natural environment through medicine, song, performance, and ancestry. Therefore any climatic changes, within the environment and weather impacts not only the Navajo people's culture, and ceremonial cycles, but also our holistic health, and our future survival as an indigenous nation. Other nations and peoples are also feeling the impacts of climate change. Bolivian peoples for example rely on glaciers as their main source of water. The melting of glacier ice, which is directly tied to climate change and the warming of the atmosphere, threatens their access to water, their life, impacting their very ability to exist and survive.
The conference in Cochabamba provided a space where the harsh realities of climate change could be discussed; a place to hear the testimonies of peoples impacted by climate change and a place to envision change, mobilization, and action.
It was beautiful to see the youth working on behalf of their people and the earth; carrying the responsibility, the weight of the world, with gratitude and smiles. For me, the silver lining on the dark clouds of climate change and uncertainty were the youth. The silver lining was their hope and potential, and their determination to combat climate change and fight for our collective survival and well being.
The stand taken by the North American delegation to speak against ineffective state and corporate remedies to climate change such as the carbon credit market, bio-fuels such as ethanol and oil palm plantations, nuclear power, hydro-electric dams, and specifically the REDD platform (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation) should also be acknowledged.
I left Cochabamba wondering what role tribal nations and peoples in the global North in "developed nations" play in mitigating and preventing climate change, particularly, for developing tribal nations of the north and elsewhere who have become dependent on a fossil fuel economy.
The Navajo Nation government and economy is tied up in natural resource extraction and has been since its inception. How will indigenous nations and peoples be accountable for carbon emissions within a potential climate justice tribunal? Will indigenous nations of the north be equally tried and accountable for their carbon debt and harmful ecological acts or omissions like other states and non-state actors? Ultimately, indigenous peoples like all peoples have the rights to development, however it has yet to be determined or concluded to what extent this power can or should be exercised in the context of indigenous peoples right to development.
I walk away with knowledge and affirmed intuition that it is a time of great change and a great responsibility for all people. I walk away realizing how great the responsibility is for youth and how blessed we are to have a cause worthy to fight for.
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