The landscape that my ancestors thrived on was once a sprawling prairie that provided plenty and allowed for more than just human convenience, but life and health for all creatures and non-living relatives. Throughout generations, we’ve carried the impact of colonization on our backs and see the many changes that have already been made through our grandparents’ eyes. Traumatizing doesn’t even begin to describe the absolute apocalypse that our grandmothers and grandfathers went through in their lives.
A landscape that was once full of nourishing, clean food and buffalo that roamed for thousands of miles across the land without fences is no longer a reality for anybody.
Now, I see climate change further threatening what’s left of the landscape; plant species are going extinct, confused, or having a harder time, water is polluted beyond belief, and seasonal weather patterns have become unpredictable.
Our traditional 13-moon calendar used to tell us when certain foods were ripe, animal behaviors, and what weather patterns were to be expected; but now we can’t rely on this cycle as much due to climate change. Reality struck me when I realized that what we have left of traditional knowledge – how to survive and practice our culture – could all be lost once again due to climate change. If the Earth continues to heat up and change patterns we will lose so many precious aspects of our way of life. For my culture, we need the land to be healthy to learn our language and our culture, and practice our overall way of life.
What my ancestors went through before was their own form of a massive and traumatic change, but they remembered what they were taught for us so that we wouldn’t be lost. The traditional knowledge was never lost, it has just been waiting to be found again. What we could lose permanently due to climate change is immeasurable.
Lessons from my ancestors are my way of life.
We’re told from a young age to always think of the future generations, and how our actions today will impact them. We are meant to think ahead to the next seven generations that come after us, and if a decision we make today will impact the 5th, 6th, or even 7th generation negatively, then we’re not meant to do it. When I see that we as a society continue to rely heavily on a finite resource such as fossil fuels, we know that this is not sustainable, that it is harmful, and that it will not last. I’ve asked myself from a very young age what can we do to make things better for them?
After my family lost my Ina (mother) to an extremely rare cancer that usually only affects uranium miner’s hands, I realized it was because of where she grew up on the Pine Ridge reservation and how the uranium mining in the Black Hills polluted the water she grew up with. I realized that environmental harm and the further threat of climate change are very real.
My mother always loved our culture. After her passing, it became a reality for me that only trying to stop the damage of fossil fuels, water pollution, and treating all things on Earth as a commodity is not sustainable unless we continue to dream, reimagine, and completely change ourselves as well. Indigenous people have been dealt an unfortunate hand, that is true, but we have our culture to rely on, we have our language, our values, and our way of life, and it is beautiful. Without building and revitalizing our culture while also protecting Unci Maka (Grandmother Earth) we will forget the next generations.
Jen is a Climate Generation Window Into COP delegate for COP29. To learn more, we encourage you to meet the full delegation, support our delegates, and subscribe to the Window Into COP digest.
Jen (Nape Mato Win) is an enrolled member of the Oglala Lakota Sioux Tribe of South Dakota. Since the KXL pipeline threatened treaty territory of the Dakotas, Jenna has been passionate about a world beyond fossil fuels and centering Indigenous voices, culture, and history. Jen is also a beadwork artist, Indigenous gardener, and received a B.A. in Environmental Studies from Augsburg University. She believes that positive cultural and ancestral based knowledge are vital components to Indigenous resiliency. Currently, Jenna is the Environmental Justice and Stewardship Programs Manager at Wakan Tipi Awanyankapi, an East Side St. Paul, Minnesota – Indigenous led environmental nonprofit that stewards the sacred site known as Wakan Tipi.
The post Čaŋtewasake – Fortitude appeared first on Climate Generation.
Climate Change
The Farming Industry Has Embraced ‘Precision Agriculture’ and AI, but Critics Question Its Environmental Benefits
Why have tech heavyweights, including Google and Microsoft, become so deeply integrated in agriculture? And who benefits from their involvement?
Picture an American farm in your mind.
I fell flat on my backside one afternoon this January and, weirdly, it made me think of you. Okay, I know that takes a bit of unpacking—so let me go back and start at the beginning.
For the last six years, our family has joined with half a dozen others to spend a week or so up at Wangat Lodge, located on a 50-acre subtropical rainforest property around three hours north of Sydney. The accommodation is pretty basic, with no wifi coverage—so time in Wangat really revolves around the bush. You live by the rhythm of the sun and the rain, with the days punctuated by swimming in the river and walking through the forest.
An intrinsic part of Wangat is Dan, the owner and custodian of the place, and the guide on our walks. He talks about time, place, and care with great enthusiasm, but always tenderly and never with sanctimony. “There is no such thing as ‘the same walk’”, is one of Dan’s refrains, because the way he sees it “every day, there is change in the world around you” of plants, animals, water and weather. Dan speaks of Wangat with such evident love, but not covetousness; it is a lightness which includes gentle consciousness that his own obligations arise only because of the historic dispossession of others. He inspires because of how he is.
One of the highlights this year was a river walk with Dan, during which we paddled or waded through most of the route, with only occasional scrambles up the bank. Sometimes the only sensible option is to swim. Among the life around us, we notice large numbers of tadpoles in the water, which is clean enough to drink. Our own tadpoles, the kids in the group, delight in the expedition. I overhear one of the youngest children declaring that she’s having ‘one of the best days ever’. Dan looks content. Part of his mission is to reintroduce children to nature, so that the soles of their feet may learn from the uneven ground, and their muscles from the cool of the water.
These moments are for thankfulness in the life that lives.
It is at the very end of the walk when I overbalance and fall on my arse—and am reminded of the eternal truth that rocks are hard. As I gingerly get up, my youngest daughter looks at me, caught between amusement and concern, and asks me if I’m okay.
I have to think before answering, because yes, physically I’m fine. But I feel too, an underlying sense of discomfort; it is that omnipresent pressure of existential awareness about the scale of suffering and ecological damage now at large in the world, made so much more immediately acute after Bondi; the dissonance that such horrors can somehow exist simultaneously with this small group being alive and happy in this place, on this earth-kissed afternoon.
How is it okay, to be “okay”? What is it to live with conscience in Wangat? Those of us who still have access to time, space, safety and high levels of volition on this planet carry this duality all the time, as our gift and obligation. It is not an easy thing to make sense of; but for me, it speaks to the question of ‘why Greenpeace’? Because the moral and strategic mission-focus of campaigning provides a principled basis for how each of us can bridge that interminable gulf.
The essence of campaigning is to make the world’s state of crisis legible and actionable, by isolating systemic threats to which we can rise and respond credibly, with resources allocated to activity in accordance with strategy. To be part of Greenpeace, whether as an activist, volunteer supporter or staff member, is to find a home for your worries for the world in confidence and faith that together we have the power to do something about it. Together we meet the confusion of the moment with the light of shared purpose and the confidence of direction.
So, it was as I was getting back up again from my tumble and considering my daughter’s question that I thought of you—with gratitude, and with love–-because we cross this bridge all the time, together, everyday; to face the present and the future.
‘Yes, my love’, I say to my daughter, smiling as I get to my feet, “I’m okay”. And I close my eyes and think of a world in which the fires are out, and everywhere, all tadpoles have the conditions of flourishing to be able to grow peacefully into frogs.
Thank you for being a part of Greenpeace.
With love,
David
Climate Change
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