“What’s your strategy? I know you didn’t come all this way with so many folks without a strategy.”
– Tom Goldtooth, 5 hours after I got off the plane in Paris France.
Tom Goldtooth, the director of the Indigenous Environmental Network, started to charade a tv camera asking me to give the 30 second pitch right there in the conference hall for the civil society. When movement elders throw down a challenge, I do my best to respond.
“I am here with a delegation of 34 people on the Gulf South Rising delegation. Our strategy is to make sure that frontline community members have knowledge, access, and experience in these international spaces. We intend to amplify the voices of people who are directly impacted by climate disasters and to connect Gulf South members with our counterparts in the Global South. This delegation is the culmination of the Gulf South Rising initiative – a year of actions, assemblies, and trainings to build capacity in communities that have been resisting environmental injustice for generations.”
Three of the Gulf South Rising delegates obtained badges and are representing inside the official space, the rest of us participated in the Climate Generations space, a conference-style space adjacent to the official negotiations. Designed to appear interactive and multilingual, the space was like a “greened up” Ikea. We could charge up our phones by biking, there were booths and spaces to learn about many different climate organizations, and a broad expanse of hard to find workshops. It was close to impossible to know the full schedule, but I luckily wandered into a serious panel of African indigenous movement leaders.
The leaders from East Africa, including Kenya and Tanzania, spoke to the comprehensive human rights strategies they are using to resist colonial practices in Africa. They discussed strategies to ensure that the pastoral practices of the indigenous Africans are understood and protected as important economic contributions, especially in a time of climate crisis. They discussed indigenous governance, culture, knowledge systems, and community-based environmental monitoring. Countering Western statistics and faulty racist analysis, they stressed that collective ownership of land and resources is actually required in order to monitor and adjust to environmental changes and to utilize the resources most effectively. They presented elements of the African Union Agenda 2063, a fifty-year vision document.
“Our ways are the future.”
The primary strategy to address climate change was clear – the need (and commitment) to produce policy and legal frameworks to protect land rights as essential to the protection of indigenous life.
The overall experience of the space was a sense of containment. We were neither in the official delegations nor in public space taking to the streets. From my vantage point there seemed to be four streams of people at Le Bourget, the location of the official Climate Talks: 1) the state officials and power brokers working the negotiations; 2) the global NGOs and environmental reform types; 3) the conference hoppers and non-profit staffers working the civil society space; and 4) the authentic community members and movement actors who are in Paris to converge and intervene on the talks.
Our delegation made some strong interventions and connections in both spaces. Chief Thomas Dardar of the United Houma Nation and Mary Gutierrez of Florida represented the Gulf South Rising delegation in the official space and made connections with representatives from Saudi Arabia working on many of the same issues that emerge from living in an oil-rich place on a coastline. “So much of the dialogue that is happening and what the countries are planning to implement is relevant to the Gulf Coast,” reported Mary. They learned about practices they are using in the Red Sea and ways to implement them in the Gulf of Mexico. Chief Dardar made new connections to the importance of coastlines, as a particular site of study distinct from land or ocean carbon studies. Many of our delegation were able to meet and have meaningful exchanges with folks participating in the COP21 from all over the world, Suriname, Chad, Mauritania, and other parts of Europe. Over Creole Houma beef stew A common theme at the delegation debrief that night was the realization of the similarity of the issues we are all facing and that we can all name the same culprits: the extraction industries, the oil companies, and the displacement practices.
Eating the stew prepared for us by the expert hands of Noreen Dardar and Mary Battle after such a long day of travel prepared us for the week ahead, and the French wine sure didn’t hurt our efforts to build with one another as a powerful delegation of committed leaders on the move.
