How We Can Learn from Indigenous Communities in Our Fight for Climate Justice
“Innovation isn’t always about creating new things. Innovation sometimes involves looking back to our old ways and bringing them forward to this new situation.” — The Honourable Murray Sinclair, 2015 Indigenous Innovation Summit
Through generations of close interaction with the earth’s resources, indigenous peoples across the world carry a deep history of skill, innovation, and knowledge with regard to how we can move forward in the fight for climate and environmental justice. However, despite this knowledge, their survival continues to be the most affected and threatened by climate change, even though they contribute the least to greenhouse gas emissions worldwide. They are not only necessary but absolutely essential for the survival and resilience of their local ecosystems (though accounting for just over 6% of the world’s population, they are vital protectors of an estimated 80% of the world’s remaining biodiversity), and their traditional techniques and innovations can be looked to when creating wide-scale solutions in reducing the harmful effects of climate change moving forward.
Luis Alberto Moreno, president of the Inter-Development Bank, writes that for carbon emissions to be tackled appropriately, indigenous communities should be allowed to own and manage their local forests and land. A study of 80 forest areas in south Asia, east Africa, and Latin America found that community-owned and managed forests were less vulnerable to deforestation and delivered greater carbon storage. With proper knowledge of the biodiversity and behaviour around them, indigenous communities can provide adequate care and protection. With legal rights, they are able to provide appropriate advice to external owners and organisations. Since Moreno’s 2016 article, there have been significant advances: most recently in 2022, more than 500 acres of ancient redwoods in Northern California were returned to 10 sovereign tribes who will serve as “guardians to ‘protect and heal’ the land. This was made possible through the Save the Redwoods League, which purchased the land from an independent California logging family who owned the land for generations. However, this could not have been made possible without the donation of the Pacific Gas & Electric Company as part of its plan to mitigate its own environmental damage and give reparations to the local indigenous communities.
We have seen the impacts of this in recent years through the influx of wildfires and bushfires throughout the world due to drought and global warming. In Australia, the driest inhabited continent on earth, aboriginal tribes were managing and mitigating fire risk for over 40,000 years before European colonization. Their specific knowledge of local ecosystems and innovative controlled burning techniques not only protected their land but also the people around them. Though controlled burnings are often used in forests throughout the world for burning out old trees, leaves, and other litter in what’s called “hazard reduction burning”, indigenous communities begin with a traditional, holistic approach. These cultural burnings are timed to coordinate with the seasons, animal breeding times, and the life cycle of plants, encouraging the growth of native vegetation and the revival of local wildlife, and in doing so significantly reducing the risk of large-scale bushfires. Due to the rising rates of bushfires in recent years, the general public has seen an “upswing in interest” in indigenous collaboration. Local organisations in New South Wales focused on fire management have employed local indigenous people and work closely with them — this not only is a win regarding employment for the often impoverished and neglected indigenous communities of Australia but also a step in the right direction in terms of respect and acknowledgement of their traditional ecological knowledge. However, this impact hasn’t been nationally recognised — one in eight Indigenous people was affected by the 2019–2020 Australian bushfires. Bhiamie Eckford-Williamson, an indigenous academic, says that around that time there was an “‘extraordinary absence of Aboriginal people’ from post-fire inquiries and a lack of recommendations or policies specifically geared to acknowledging or reducing the impact on Aboriginal people”. Yet, it is clear that their knowledge is valuable, and for this knowledge to be utilised to its fullest potential, corporations and people in power must be willing to listen, before it’s too late.
Shores of Princetown, Australia (by Victor G via Unsplash)
However, there are also several examples of ways indigenous people incorporate modern technology into their innovative practices. Such examples, sourced by ITU, include:
In the Arctic, specialised sensors called SmartICE are inserted into ice and fed into an app called SIKU (“sea ice” in traditional Inuit languages) and their data is blended with satellite imagery and community knowledge to guide local Inuit people on their trails.
In Brazil’s Amazon rainforests, the Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau indigenous tribe uses drones to monitor and report local deforestation and fires, as well as other illegal activities without monitoring on foot.
In the southwestern United States, the Tribal Digital Village project connects underserved tribal and rural communities with an independent wireless broadband service, now serving about 108 tribal municipalities to encourage up-to-date communication, all powered by solar energy.
From these examples, we can see that Indigenous innovation, while clearly having been sustainable on its own for thousands of years, can work in tandem with Western innovation and not against it. There is no “us” vs. “them” for Indigenous people — the work they do is always centred around community, collaboration, and sustainability in the long term. Susie Jones, an Elder from Walpole Island First Nation, explains how the indigenous and aboriginal worldview encompasses a “balanced, healthy, and sensitive way for people to coexist with everything on earth”, rejecting any sense of superiority and promoting constant negotiation. In order to move forward and tackle the challenges that face our earth today, society must adopt a new way of thinking, and we can go about this by simply looking at what has worked for other people in the past, and even in the present: research shows that Indigenous entrepreneurship is on the rise, and the top 500 indigenous corporations in Australia alone contribute $1.6 billion to its economy. It’s important to ensure that those who are looking to adopt this mindset adequately include the voices that created it. The voices of native, indigenous, and aboriginal people are key in the fight against climate change and global warming: in order to move forward, sometimes we need to look into the past.
