When she was first elected as a tribal leader in 2006, Fawn Sharp, now the vice president of the Quinault Indian Nation in Washington state, confronted an ecological catastrophe: the virtual end of the sockeye salmon run.
“We used to have millions of sockeye salmon returning,” Sharp said. “The year I got elected, we only had 3,000.”
Sharp later learned that issues like warming ocean temperatures and rising acidity in the seawater, along with the shrinking glaciers that feed the river that bears her tribe’s name, all contributed to the near-extinction of a resource that is central to subsistence and to the identity of the Quinault people.
The tribe is also dealing with sea level rise, which has already inundated the place where the Quinault’s treaty with the U.S. was signed.
“We’re having to relocate our main headquarters as well as a village to the north to higher ground,” Sharp said.
Sharp grew frustrated during meetings with state and federal officials when her questions about how they planned to address climate change were met with silence or changed subjects. She said that lack of response propelled her into a 15-year-long quest to study and gain expertise on climate change and its effects on Indigenous peoples.
The Quinault tribe’s experience isn’t singular: Indigenous peoples in the U.S. and all over the world are among the first to bear the effects of a warming planet from fire, flood, drought, sea level rise and devastated food sources. Yet their calls for help to deal with a looming ecological disaster in their lands and waters go mostly unheeded.
In 2020, five tribes in Louisiana and Alaska formally requested the United Nations to investigate what they called the failure of the U.S. “to protect the human rights of Tribal Nations in Louisiana and Alaska, who are being forcibly displaced from their ancestral lands.”
These tribes are losing ancestral lands to sea level rise, catastrophic storms and in some cases, levees, dredging and other actions to facilitate access to fossil fuel drilling sites.
Sharp and other Indigenous peoples across the globe are preparing to travel to Scotland beginning Oct. 31 for the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference, known as COP26. The conference will bring together the signatories of the UN’s climate change agreement and Indigenous peoples say they will call for a greater voice in whatever plans emerge.
The Paris Agreement and Indigenous peoples
The Paris Agreement of the U.N. Framework Convention of Climate Change included language calling for nations to respect the rights of Indigenous peoples in climate change actions. In that accord, adopted in 2015 by nearly 200 countries, nations pledged to tackle global warming by limiting average temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius and cut greenhouse gas emissions that cause climate change.
The agreement also said that climate adaptation actions should be guided by science and “as appropriate, traditional knowledge, knowledge of indigenous peoples and local knowledge systems.”
The United States signed onto the agreement, withdrew under the Trump administration and, in 2021, rejoined after the election of President Joe Biden.
During a webinar hosted by the University of Boulder Oct. 20, Native law and rights experts said persuading the accord’s parties to recognize Indigenous peoples’ rights, participation and knowledge has been a real challenge. Indigenous peoples marched at the COP conferences in 2009 and 2010 demanding a voice at the table.
“We called for our rights and knowledge to be respected, not just because of the impacts we were experiencing,” said Andrea Carmen, a member of the Pascua Yaqui Tribe, “but also we are convinced that our knowledge, our ancestral knowledge and practices had a lot to contribute to these discussions.”
Climate change: New report wasn’t surprising to Indigenous peoples, who see change up close
Carmen said despite her efforts and those of other Indigenous rights activists, the two references on Indigenous rights and inclusion were added to the final Paris Agreement without any Indigenous people in the rooms where the agreement was negotiated. Carmen is the executive director of the International Indian Treaty Council and the former co-chair of the UN’s Local Communities and Indigenous Peoples Platform Facilitative Working Group.
Other Indigenous people have also sounded concerns over the international “30 by 30” initiative, which aims to place 30% of land under conservation by 2030 by creating new protected areas like national parks and wilderness areas.
The actions are promoted by environmentalists as a way to mitigate climate change and preserve biodiversity, but Carmen said Indigenous peoples are concerned that their rights to hunt, fish, gather or even live in these new protected areas are in question.
Tribal rights groups like Survival International have launched campaigns to stop what they called “the world’s largest land grab.” Indigenous peoples, who are about 5% of the global population, preserve 80% of the world’s biodiversity and they are gravely worried that they’ll be removed from those lands, as has been the case when nations established national parks and forests, wilderness areas or land trusts.
Indigenous peoples worry that being barred from living in or managing any new conservation areas would not only deprive them of their ancestral lands and means to sustain themselves, but would result in the opposite effect, reducing biodiversity by preventing effective land and water stewardship.
Frustrated Indigenous activists take to the D.C. streets
Indigenous water and land protectors and their allies have grown frustrated with what they say are continued efforts by the U.S. government to bar them from continuing a “relationship to the sacred knowledge of Mother Earth and all who depend on her.” That includes continuing to allow oil and gas drilling, approving oil pipelines and what they say is failure to protect natural resources.
These frustrations led to a week of protests in Washington, D.C. the week of Oct. 10 in partnership with environmentalists speaking out about “People Vs. Fossil Fuels.” The protests included the first occupation of the Bureau of Indian Affairs headquarters building since a six-day occupation in 1972.
The activists handed out a statement and list of demands for Biden, including the abolishment of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, a return to treaty-making with tribes, restoration of 100 million acres taken from Native peoples and the institution of free, prior and informed consent in place of the current policy of tribal consultation.
One Native woman knelt on the black-and-white marble floor to make a clay pot. Others sat in circles singing and praying.
The 1972 sit-in ended with the Nixon administration providing travel expenses home for the hundreds of Native people holed up in the building.
In contrast, the 2021 occupation on Oct. 14 lasted just a few hours and resulted in the arrest of more than 50 people, according to tweets from Jennifer Falcon, communications coordinator with the Indigenous Environmental Network.
Falcon, a member of the Fort Peck Assiniboine Sioux Nation, said some people outside the building had been hit with stun guns, and some journalists threatened with arrest.
Melissa Schwartz, communications director for the Interior Department, released a statement that said several officers had been injured, and one taken to a hospital for treatment.
The Department of Homeland Security, which provides law enforcement and other protection for federal buildings and employees, declined to provide specifics to The Arizona Republic about how many arrests were made, if stun guns were used to subdue protestors, the condition of the officer taken to the hospital or if credentialed journalists were threatened.
“President Biden came out strong,” said Joye Braun, a frontline community organizer for the Indigenous Environmental Network. “He stopped (issuing oil and gas drilling permits) for a little while and then opened it all up.”
Braun, a member of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe, was in the midst of the protests. She said the government has issued 2,500 permits on Bureau of Land Management parcels in the first half of 2021 — “that’s more than Trump did,” she said.
An Associated Press analysis found the Biden administration approved more than 2,100 of those permits.
“We went to the Department of the Interior today because there are so many fights and they all come under that umbrella of DOI,” Braun said.
Although Native peoples say they love Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, or “Aunty Deb,” as she’s called, “she has her hands virtually tied by Biden and his policies,” Braun said. The protest was not directed at Haaland and other Native federal staffers, she said, but at Biden administration officials, who “have to do what the president tells them to do.”
Indigenous activists and protectors need to change the agenda, Braun said, “and get Biden to declare a climate emergency for all people.”
Indigenous presence at COP26
Carmen and Sharp, who also serves as president of the National Council of American Indians, are among the hundreds of Indigenous people planning to be at COP26, even if they’re not fully credentialed to be in discussions.
The UN and other agencies and organizations have been holding discussions and webinars leading up to COP26 for Indigenous peoples. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations has held at least one online conference featuring Indigenous youth around the world discussing climate issues.
Carmen said her working group will hold a virtual consultation between Indigenous peoples and the U.N. Special Rapporteur on the right to safe drinking water to discuss impacts of climate change around the world and Indigenous peoples’ ways of life.
Sharp said she’s looking forward to coordinating some joint sessions with Haaland, who is planning to attend COP26.
“It’s my hope and my goal to secure resources, price carbon and have a seat at the table and to know we have an Indigenous woman on the inside,” she said.
Sharp also hopes the climate conference will lead to more action from the U.S. Fifteen years after first encountering how climate change affected her own community, she said the situation hasn’t changed much, even after John Kerry, the special presidential envoy for climate, declared during a speech at NCAI’s recent conference that the Earth’s future is “inextricably tied to having the leadership of Indigenous peoples in our voice.”
The NCAI board received reports on climate change during the conference from the Great Lakes, Alaska and the Gulf Coast, where tribes are still struggling to recover from Hurricane Ida.
“I engaged in August with the FEMA administrator about the $3.5 billion that was going to be deployed for climate mitigation fund through FEMA,” Sharp said. She learned that 59 entities would receive funding, including the 50 states and six territories, but only three tribal nations.
“So, 93% of Indian Country has been excluded from one of the largest deployments of federal resources to address climate change,” she said.
PennElys Droz isn’t going to this year’s COP. She is the author of a white paper published on the “Indigenous Green New Deal” by NDN Collective, an Indigenous rights and organizing nonprofit that is sending representatives to COP26.
“The ideas in the paper underpin our work,” said Droz, who’s an Anishinaabe descendent and head of her own organization, Sustainable Nations. “It’s important for Indigenous peoples to take a space at these meetings. People who make decisions have shielded themselves from the impacts of those decisions. But the folks who are very impacted need to be the leaders in decision making moving forward.
“We need to have a strong presence at COP.”
Sharp said the COP and other such conferences should work toward the goal of giving Indigenous peoples not only a seat at the table, but to create a policy of free, prior and informed consent.
When that happens, she said, “There would be no other sovereign that can take unilateral action without our consent and its precious resources that we seek to advance and to protect now for this generation, but for seven generations.”
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