Indigenous People Lead the Way in the Fight for Climate Justice

Indigenous People Lead the Way in the Fight for Climate Justice

Many believe the fight to combat climate change hinges on the aligned interests of capital and state. Give the Elon Musks of the world enough time and resources and they will innovate us out of impending climate catastrophe. Get the G20 in a room and they will hammer out a deal and create regulations to enforce it. Or so the thinking in some circles goes. Yet throughout history, the interests of the state have slid into alignment with big oil and big profits rather than lining up with our rivers, our air, our wildlife and our people. But the first people of this land, who often live on the frontlines of our metastasizing climate disaster, remain resolute. It is our sacred responsibility to protect and preserve this planet for future generations.

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‘This Is My Land’: The Indigenous Women Chiefs Protecting the Amazon

For decades, Brazil’s Kayapo tribe has battled deforestation of their home. Now women are at the frontlines of the fight to save the rainforest. Concealed among dense Amazonian rainforest and grassy savannas are the simple palm-thatched dwellings of the Kayapo, one of Brazil’s best-known indigenous groups. Their scattered villages along the banks of the Xingu River are so remote that until the 1950s, the Kayapo people had virtually no contact with or knowledge of the outside world. Over the past three decades, Kayapo communities have been increasingly exposed to the outside world, bringing major shifts in the tribe’s social structure. One of the more recent and unexpected changes has been the emergence of three women chiefs, who are now in charge of villages spread across a vast swath of Amazonian rainforest.

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