That was the message of Chief Arvol Looking Horse, the spiritual leader of the Lakota, Dakota, and Nakota peoples, who on Sunday welcomed hundreds of attendees to the 12th World Wilderness Congress convening this week in the Black Hills, or He Sapa in the Lakota language. Though these gatherings, dedicated to assessing and often resetting global conservation work, date back to the 1970s, this is the first such congress being convened by a tribal authority. The agenda is dedicated heavily to centering Indigenous perspectives in the global struggle to protect wild lands and waters.
Indigenous peoples articulate alternative environmental perspectives and relationships to the natural world. Indigenous mythologies and oral traditions express a non-anthropocentric environmental ethic. Indigenous groups offer ancient tried-and-tested knowledge and wisdom based on their own locally developed practices of resource use. And, as Native peoples themselves have insisted for centuries, they often understand and exhibit a holistic, interconnected and interdependent relationship to particular landscapes and all of the life forms found there. Despite making up a tiny fraction of the world's population, Indigenous peoples hold ancestral rights to some 65 percent of the planet. This poignant fact conveys the enormous role that Native peoples play not only as environmental stewards, but as political actors on the global stage.
All over the world, Native peoples are engaged in battles with hostile corporations and governments that claim the right to set aside small reserves for Native people, and then to seize the rest of their traditional territory. They are confronting the destructive practices of industry and leading the charge against climate change while defending the rivers, forests and food systems that we all depend on. At the same time, they are blocking governments from eroding basic rights and freedoms and turning to the courts of the world to remedy 500 years of historical wrongs. Native peoples are putting their lives on the line and fighting back for political autonomy and land rights. And all the while, they are breathing new life into the biocultural heritage that has the potential to sustain the entire human race.
Looking Horse, the 19th Keeper of the Sacred White Buffalo Calf Pipe and Bundle, is as revered among the original people of this land as the Dalai Lama is by the people of Tibet or the Pope for Catholics around the world.
"We warned that some day you would not be able to control what you had created. And that day is here. Mother Earth is sick and has a fever," Looking Horse told the group assembled from nations, tribes, and communities across the world.
The chills of that "fever"--the accelerating shocks of climate destabilization caused by centuries of colonial extraction, fossil fuel combustion, and ecological destruction--rocked communities around the world in 2023, with 2024 continuing to break heat records. A "State of the Climate" report that drew on the work of nearly 600 scientists pointed to unprecedented levels of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere as the cause of Earth's overheating. Records were similarly broken for ocean heat, sea-ice loss, and sea-level rise. In all, industrially-driven global warming exposed nearly 80 percent of the people on the planet to at least 31 days of extreme heat, another study found. This level of heat was virtually impossible if not for the burning of fossil fuels and development-driven deforestation, Climate Central researchers have reminded us.
But organizers and attendees at WILD12 aren't there to haggle over carbon credits or debate the benefits and risks of carbon capture technologies and blue hydrogen, the substance of so many climate gatherings and debates. Instead, The WILD Foundation, through decades of international gatherings, aims to interrupt one driver of climate crisis that gets far less air time than carbon emissions: the global loss of the planet's wild spaces, which for millions of years have served as the planet's lungs and carbon sinks.
Yet even conservation spaces and agendas have offered a shallow understanding of problems and solutions, overlooking the deeper cultural--and thus colonial--roots of ecological collapse. What makes this year's congress so significant is its aim to reformulate the global conservation agenda not only by placing Indigenous leadership at the forefront of conservation action, but more foundationally, by centering Indigenous knowledge and worldviews in understandings of what Western cultures call wilderness.
In other words, the cultural roots of the collapse of our shared biosphere lies not in the make, model, or brand of the tools we use to clearcut forests or fuel plastics production. Rather, it lies in a fundamental misunderstanding that goes all the way to the bottom of Western thought: the hierarchical dualism that imagines the "human" as both separate from and superior to "nature".
Perhaps the most important aspect of Indigenous cosmology is the conception of creation as a living process resulting in a living universe in which a kinship exists between all things. Thus the Mother Earth is a living being, as are the Sun, Stars and the Moon. Hence the Creators are our family, our Grandparents or Parents, and all of their creations are children who are also our relations.
What needs to be understood and challenged, then, is the very basic conceptual groundings of Western culture itself, which gave birth to capitalism as a global economic system for extracting profit both from the bodies of people racialized and gendered as "others" and from land, treated as a dead thing or "resource" to extract from. For it is these philosophical and economic assumptions that--especially from an Indigenous perspective--facilitated colonization and enabled the genocides, slavery, and racial capitalism that followed.
The industrialized West is largely unaware of how Indigenous societies have functioned and the strengths they possess that industrial cultures have lacked. Our notions of progress are based on the idea that high tech means better, and that industrial cultures are somehow more advanced socially. The current state of our threatened environment demands that communication channels be opened for dialogue and engagement with Native environmental ethics. Native people are not only trying to protect water sources, clean up uranium tailings and mount opposition to fossil fuel extraction, they are also continuing their spiritual ways of seeking to celebrate and support all life by means of ceremonies and prayers.
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