EP 9: The Power of Indigenous Youth Environmental Movements

Breaking Green Ceilings

English - March 31, 2020 13:37 - 1 hour - 69.1 MB
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Previous Episode: EP 8: 29 years of Insights at California State Parks

Next Episode: EP 10: There's Something In The Water

Michael has developed a love for the world through many years of exploring Mother Earth’s beauty, respecting her gifts, and interacting with cultures across the globe. Hailing from the Southwest, Michael’s family is from both the Navajo reservation in northeast Arizona and also northern Colorado. Michael identifies as Dine’ or Navajo and describes himself as an “Urban Indian”, Michael spent all his vacations on the reservation with his grandmother, aunts, and other close family members. This changed after he graduated high school.

Out of high school, Michael moved to Ithaca, New York to attend Cornell University, studying chemical engineering with a minor in music. At Cornell, he developed a strong sense of his own cultural identity, a passion for serving underrepresented students in the STEM fields, and began questioning how sustainability issues affect different communities. Currently, Michael is a chemical engineering Ph.D. student at The Ohio State University in Columbus, OH.

Indigenous Culture and the Environmental Movement

As Michael progressed through his PhD, he began to question what his role was in giving back to his community. With a desire to use his education to help his community and future generations of indigenous youth, the Standing Rock protest was a pivotal moment in time. Although the movement was uplifted and greatly supported by environmental NGOs all over the nation, the conversation was derailed from a focus on Native American injustices to the war between oil and renewable energy. Michael encourages these protests to “highlight the humanity” of a movement, so the voices who are being directly affected can have the loudest say.

According to the World Wildlife Foundation, areas managed by indigenous peoples and local communities hold as much as 80% of the Earth's biodiversity. Further, recent studies have shown that when the rights of indigenous communities to their land and natural resources are respected, deforestation rates are lower and that local participation in conservation management can improve biodiversity outcomes. It is essential to protect human rights and in turn, indigenous communities can continue to protect the environment.

Inclusion of Indigenous Culture

Indigenous communities are often left out of large scale decision making processes. Although the United Nations has a Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, the inclusion of indigenous voices across all UN Conventions is scarce. Very few indigenous individuals represent the voices of hundreds of millions of indigenous peoples from communities across the globe. At the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, the indigenous representatives have the difficult task of bringing voices and specific issues from different geographic regions to the broader convention as one global indigenous voice, diluting the many sovereign indigenous identities and experiences.

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