Hair extensions used primarily by Black women contain a “shocking” range of dangerous chemicals, including breast carcinogens, new research shows.

By Liza Gross

Elissia Franklin is an analytical chemist with an infectious laugh, a penchant for braided hair extensions and a fierce commitment to reducing health disparities for Black women. Growing up on Chicago’s South Side, she saw firsthand the systemic barriers Black women face and resolved to help her community benefit from all she learned as she pursued her career as a chemist.

Toxic Beauty: Black Women Most at Risk From Harmful Chemicals in Unregulated Hair Products

Across these lands, First Nations are not simply responding to climate change; they are expressing a profound act of self-determination. Investing in resilience is not just about reducing risk or protecting infrastructure; it is about renewing relationships with land, water, plants, animals, and elements as the primary teachers of how to live, adapt, and thrive in a rapidly changing world.

For Indigenous communities, resilience is inseparable from identity, language, law, and governance. It is a way of saying: We will define our own adaptation, guided by the natural laws that have sustained life here for millennia.

Learning from Nature’s Long History of Change

Climate change is often described as novel or purely human-made. While industrial activity has unquestionably accelerated, the Earth’s climate has always been in motion. Over millennia, warming, cooling, flooding, and fire have continuously reshaped life. In these cycles, nature teaches a hard truth: some species perish, others adapt. Those that survive don’t just endure; they reorganize, forge new relationships, and sometimes emerge more resilient and diverse than before.

Indigenous Peoples have observed and lived within these adaptive processes for thousands of years. By watching how plants root deeper, how animals shift migration patterns, and how waters carve new paths, communities learn what authentic adaptation means. Adaptation is not an optional add-on; it is a law of life.

More-than-Human Teachers of Autonomy

Indigenous law and lifeways are rooted in the more-than-human world. Languages carry the verbs and metaphors of specific territories, while hunting, fishing, harvesting, and ceremony express ecological kinship.

From this perspective:

• Plants teach patience, rootedness, and collective defence.

• Animals show mobility, alertness, and cooperation.

• Waters’ model persistence and the quiet strength of flow.

• Fire and wind remind us of transformation and the limits of control.

These beings are not “resources.” They are teachers. They show that autonomy is not isolation but the capacity to respond to change while remaining in right relationship with the web of life. For many First Nations, this is where self-determination begins in the school of the land, long before it is written into policy.

Climate Change as a Crucible for Renewal

When communities design resilient housing, energy systems, food networks, or water infrastructure, they do more than install technology; they realign human systems with the teachings of their territories. This can mean:

• Designing community layouts that follow local contours, winds, and wildlife corridors.

• Adjusting hunting and fishing practices to track shifting species while maintaining reciprocity.

• Reclaiming fire stewardship to protect habitats and renew ecosystems.

• Localizing food and energy to reduce reliance on fossil-fuel-heavy supply chains.

Each of these is a form of climate self-determination. The more space, resources, and authority First Nations must shape such models, the more deeply adaptation can take root in long-term relationships with land and water. These shifts are not only technical but also cultural, linguistic, and spiritual. They create the conditions for communities to renew their institutions, habits, and values at the pace the Earth now demands.

Knowledge That Evolves with the Climate

As First Nations engage closely with their territories, monitoring ice, tracking plant cycles, observing wildlife, and watching shorelines, a living record of change emerges. Each project produces two transformations:

• Infrastructure evolves through new buildings, systems, and practices.

• Knowledge evolves, deepening understanding of place, risk, and interdependence.

This co-evolution is crucial. Static plans soon fail in a world of accelerating climate disruptions. True resilience relies on the capacity to read the land, interpret signals, and adjust course. When governance is grounded in the agency of the land itself, Indigenous Nations are uniquely positioned to lead this kind of adaptive practice.

From Self-Determination to Shared Sovereignty

When First Nations lead adaptation, they are not only strengthening their own communities, but they are also modelling shared sovereignty rooted in place. Shared sovereignty does not erase difference; it anchors relationships in mutual responsibility.

It rests on three recognitions:

• Natural laws, those governing water, soil, species, and climate, are the highest laws.

• Human governance must fit within them, not above them.

• Nation-to-nation relationships are strongest when grounded in shared duties to land and water.

As First Nations are supported to listen to and act from the authority of land, new possibilities for collaboration and climate justice open. Non-Indigenous societies have much to learn from these approaches, not just techniques, but humility: accepting that humans must adapt to the Earth, not the other way around.

A Path Forward for Climate Justice

Climate change is revealing the brittleness of systems built on extraction and the denial of limits. In contrast, Indigenous climate leadership offers another path, one grounded in relationship with morethanhuman relatives and exercised through responsibility rather than domination.

For readers of the Indigenous Climate Hub, this is an invitation to see resilience not as a technical challenge but as a renewal of connection:

• Supporting First Nations’ leadership strengthens teachers’ adaptation to lands, waters, and living beings.

• Investing in Indigenous self-determination invests in knowledge systems that can guide all communities through uncertainty.

• Embracing shared sovereignty honours natural law and the hope that, by learning from the Earth, humanity can move beyond survival into a state of balance.

In this light, climate change becomes more than a threat; it becomes the crucible through which deeper self-determination, wiser stewardship, and more just relationships among nations are forged.

Blog by Rye Karonhiowanen Barberstock

Image Credit : Kenzie Broad, Unsplash

The post Climate Resilience as an Act of Self-Determination appeared first on Indigenous Climate Hub.

Climate Resilience as an Act of Self-Determination

Federal climate funding for Indigenous communities remains crucial. Yet it is still built on a colonial budgetary logic: Ottawa decides priorities, timelines, and reporting cycles, while lands and waters wait for approvals. Programs that support Indigenous-led monitoring, natural climate solutions, and clean energy are vital lifelines, but they do not yet form a new system. They leave power in the same hands and retain a logic of serving human interests over ecological well-being.

What if the land itself were treated as a primary financial actor?

Imagine an economy where a river, forest, or entire watershed is recognized as a rights-bearing entity with its own ongoing claim to revenue, care, and decision-making. Governments, markets, and communities would relate to ecosystems as partners and “shareholders,” not as resources to be managed or used up. Indigenous Nations whose governance systems have always understood the land as a living relative would guide these relationships and decide how value flows across generations.

This is the foundation of ecological finance: a shift from temporary project grants toward Indigenous-governed, land-anchored systems where ecosystems and Indigenous Peoples are co-beneficiaries with enforceable rights to long-term returns.

From Social to Ecological Finance

Social finance seeks to align capital with social outcomes, such as housing, health, and education, through tools like impact investing and community bonds. Ecological finance goes further: under Indigenous jurisdiction, it treats ecosystems as active participants in the circulation and reinvestment of money.

Core ideas include:

• · Ecosystems as rights-holders. Territories, forests, and waterways are recognized as having an inherent right to restoration and ongoing support, with a portion of revenues dedicated to them in perpetuity.
• · Indigenous-governed ecological endowments. Permanent, Indigenous-controlled funds draw from public, philanthropic, and aligned private capital. Earnings sustain guardianship, land planning, youth training, and climate adaptation.
• · Ecological performance as return. Returns are linked to indicators such as species recovery, water quality, and soil health. Investors “earn” only when ecosystems thrive.

Rather than asking how nature can serve finance, ecological finance asks how finance can serve the land.

How This Touches Daily Life

For ecological finance to matter, it must become part of everyday economic practice, a routine way households and communities contribute to the care of their territories. Examples include:

• · Community ecological dividends. A share of energy bills, transit fares, or tourism fees automatically supports Indigenous-governed ecosystem funds tied to the territories that sustain that infrastructure.
• · Indigenous equity in green infrastructure. Renewable projects and conservation areas are co-owned by Indigenous Nations, with dividends flowing first to ecosystem restoration and community well-being.
• · Every day regenerative consumption. Consumers opt into “ecological tithe” pricing, where a small portion of each purchase supports Indigenous-led restoration where goods originate or are consumed.

In each case, transactions become acts of relationship with specific lands and waters, guided by Indigenous laws and responsibilities.

Financial Models from a New Paradigm

Emerging mechanisms already hint at what ecological finance could become:

• · Indigenous Project Finance for Permanence (PFP). One-time capital raises create enduring funds for Indigenous-led conservation, releasing earnings as long-term governance conditions are met.
• · Indigenous Impact Bonds. Investors provide capital for restoration or adaptation; repayment occurs only when Indigenous-defined ecological outcomes are achieved, with a share flowing to permanent ecosystem care.
• · Ecological Sovereign Wealth Funds. Resource revenues and settlements seed Indigenous-governed endowments. Only sustainable returns are drawn each year, turning extractive flows into intergenerational wealth.
• · Shared-prosperity cooperatives. Clean energy and other green assets are co-owned by Indigenous Nations and communities, prioritizing restoration, local livelihoods, and equitable returns.

These approaches don’t abolish finance but redesign who holds value claims, moving ecosystems and Indigenous Nations from the margins of the balance sheet to its center.

Shared Prosperity Beyond Capitalism as Usual

In this context, prosperity is not defined by GDP or job counts but by clean water, thriving territories, revived languages, and lower climate vulnerability. The integrity of relationships within the web of life measures wealth.

By design, ecological finance redistributes capital toward damaged ecosystems and historically marginalized communities. Indigenous laws of reciprocity and responsibility offer ethical guidance for that redistribution grounded in consent and obligations to more-than-human kin.

Global Participation Without Extraction

This vision welcomes global participation but on non-extractive terms. Philanthropy, public institutions, and investors can contribute to Indigenous-governed funds under capped returns and long horizons, recognizing that decisions about lands, benefits, and stewardship belong to Indigenous Nations. Financial institutions can embed Indigenous rights and co-governance into climate strategies, treating Indigenous Peoples as co-architects of just transition pathways rather than peripheral stakeholders.

A New Form of Stewardship

Ecological finance is not a utopia. It acknowledges deep inequities while working to rebalance them through redesigned financial systems. For Indigenous communities and Nations, the invitation is to keep designing models grounded in Indigenous law and ecological ethics.

For governments, institutions, and everyday Canadians, it is time to move beyond line-item funding and support Indigenous-centered, land-governed finance that gives nature a voice and a share. If the

environment is to shape its own future, then finance must learn to listen, and ecological finance is one way of turning that listening into sustained, intergenerational action.

Blog by Rye Karonhiowanen Barberstock

Image Credit : Ardian Pranomo, Unsplash

The post An Ecological Finance Future for Indigenous Climate Action appeared first on Indigenous Climate Hub.

An Ecological Finance Future for Indigenous Climate Action