In this episode, ICA’s Executive Director, Eriel, speaks to the first meeting that led to the formation of Indigenous Climate Action.
—- Eriel Tchekwie Deranger is a Dënesųłiné woman (ts’ékui), member of the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation and mother of two, coming from a family of Indigenous rights advocates fighting for the recognition, sovereignty and autonomy of their Indigenous lands and territory in what is now known as Treaty 8, Canada.
In 2015, Deranger worked with local Indigenous organisers to help build out the foundations of Indigenous Climate Action, becoming one of the core co-founders of the organisation. She formally stepped into the role of Executive Director in July of 2017.
Instagram: @tchekwie Twitter: @ErielTD —- Follow ICA on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook IndigenousClimateAction.com The ICA Pod team is made up of Lindsey Bacigal, Morningstar Derosier, and Brina Romanek.
[PODCAST INTRO – includes music from Round Dance (feat. Northern Voice) by Cris Derksen]
Lindsey
Hello, everyone, and welcome to the first episode of the Indigenous Climate Action Podcast. I’m Lindsey and I’m your host.
We’re so excited as an organisation to have this platform and for you to join us on this journey. We want to use this podcast to amplify voices of Indigenous Peoples and our stories and knowledges. ICA is a climate organisation, but in all of our work we go beyond facts and science and bring in relationships and the connections between all that is going on in our world. When we talk about climate change, we can’t not talk about justice, biodiversity, or Indigenous rights and sovereignty. It’s all connected.
Today, I’m joined by Eriel Deranger, the Executive Director of Indigenous Climate Action and one of the co-founders and we’re going to do a deep dive into the founding of ICA.
Hi Eriel, and thanks for joining us.
Eriel
Thanks so much for having me, I’m really excited to be here.
Lindsey
For many of us at ICA when we think of the beginning of this organisation we think back to one very key meeting, which is the first ever conference organised by ICA in January of 2016. And, I mean that was a pretty impressive feat, because not only was it the first organised meeting by ICA, but it was really the first of its kind, it was the first ever Indigenous-led climate conference to happen in Canada.
So, I’m wondering if you can take us back to the build-up of that meeting. How did ICA get there?
Eriel
Yeah. I think, you know, the story of how ICA really started, really starts, at the meeting that was held in January of 2016, which was right after the COP in Paris. So, the big COP, the big Conference of the Parties, the big UNFCCC meeting. But it started before that obviously, you don’t just have a meeting without a lot of planning. So in the years, in fact years leading up to this meeting in January, myself, as well as other indigenous women and peoples had been a part of the environmental and climate justice movement for some time, but working underneath or alongside leading organisations that were dominated and led by middle-class white folks. And there was really only like a handful, or two handfuls, of indigenous peoples within these groups that were really creating and driving the discourse on climate and climate justice. And indigenous peoples, while we were there and participants in this movement, we were sort of not given any real power, power positions and it was getting really challenging to constantly be in these spaces and having to only have like a handful of indigenous folks being like, “okay, but we still need to talk about the issues within our indigenous communities.”
Lindsey
Do you remember a specific time when you thought enough was enough?
Eriel
Yeah, I remember being at these, we used to have these annual gatherings. The white sort of NGO world would host these big gatherings. They called them the Tar Sands Retreats, it wasn’t the formal name, it was what we ended up calling them though. And at these retreats, they would bring together like 80-100 different organisations and individuals working on challenging the expansion of the tar sands. Again, dominated by white folks with a handful of indigenous folks in the space where the context and the justification for these campaigns came from the desecration of indigenous lands and territories and peoples.
And it became very clear that there was no investment from these groups in actually empowering indigenous communities to sit together, to determine the discourse, and the strategies for our own communities. And I remember proposing, we should have a meeting with just the indigenous folks to talk about strategies for climate action, for our communities without Whitey NGOs. Um, how do we get funding? Where do we start this? And, you know, there was a lot of like, “Oh, that sounds really interesting. And that’s really interesting” but not a lot of, like, support to make it happen.
Lindsey
So, a great seed of an idea, but you weren’t really sure how to make it happen. So what was it that encouraged you to push ahead with this idea?
Eriel
So this went on for a few years and then started talking with a lot of my allies and my colleagues and brothers and sisters from the indigenous movement to just be like, “this is crazy. We can’t continue this way. We’re being tokenised. And we’re being utilised to propagate these campaigns and organisations that actually aren’t really working with our communities.” And it was just like, nah, “this has got to stop.” We put together some proposals for bringing together indigenous peoples to discuss climate justice in Canada.
Lindsey
So okay walk me through – you’ve got the meeting organised, it’s January 2016 and people started arriving – what did the conference look like?
Eriel
We brought together over 150 indigenous peoples from different walks of life. From, like the leadership’s technical staff, to frontline community folks, to just people that were involved in or interested in climate change and climate justice. And what was really amazing is that our speakers, I think, except for one were all indigenous presenters to discuss and present climate, climate justice, climate change, climate solutions. And we had all these breakout sessions and beautiful conversations that really allowed indigenous peoples to be in a space led by and created for indigenous peoples to discuss climate change. It was the first time something like that had happened in this country.
Lindsey
Yeah. For you, what was one of the biggest differences in this space in comparison to other environmental spaces you have been in? What were the most important things you wanted to bring to this conference?
Eriel
I think one of the most important things about that first meeting beyond like, oh the outcomes and the deep discussions, is that the structure was so different. We started with ceremony and we ended with ceremony. We made sure that we supported anyone who wanted to come for their travel needs, their childcare needs, their food needs. We supported and recognised the fact that this isn’t just about opening a chair at the table for someone, it’s about addressing the inequities that our communities face in being able to come to these types of gatherings. There were even a few people that were like, “I can only come, I’m like, I’m going to miss a couple of days of work”. And we worked really hard to make sure that if they really wanted to be there, that we compensated them for their time. And that was a really important part of the structure, that really sort of set that guideline and that guiding post for what is now ICA.
Lindsey
Yeah, that definitely sounds like a big undertaking. I’m wondering if as well, you can touch on, you’ve mentioned how Paris, you know, COP was right beforehand, the big UN climate conference. And so I’m wondering if you can touch a little bit more on how the experience at COP, at Paris led to seeing a big indigenous peoples meeting in Canada as a need.
Eriel
Yeah. Oh, wow. Yeah. Paris had huge impacts on our first meeting because you know, Paris was, for many reasons, a historic climate conference. One, the Paris agreement came out of it, but secondarily it was one of the biggest presence of indigenous peoples for a UN climate conference. Like we had been there had been indigenous peoples participating in UN forums for years, but like 2015 was the year that indigenous peoples just stormed the UN climate conference, like really started organizing strategically across international borders and being very sophisticated in how we were intervening in the prescribed policies and recommendations that were being put forward for the Paris agreement. And one of the biggest things is that we fought to have the inclusion of indigenous rights and indigenous knowledge within the UN Paris agreement.
And that was no easy feat. And what’s interesting is that within that we saw very few of our environmental allies, really seeing the importance and reasons why indigenous rights, language needed to be included. They felt that having human rights referenced in the UN Paris agreement was enough. And we said, it’s not enough because indigenous peoples have unique rights as recognised and defined within the UN declaration of the rights of indigenous peoples. And they have to absolutely have their own space and recognition within this document because not only do we have unique rights at the international level, but we have rights at the state level. And if these countries and governments don’t understand the importance and validate indigenous rights as critical to climate stabilisation and climate solutions, then we’re going to continue to have the battle of having our lands being appropriated and extracted from our people for fossil fuel development and false solutions, and we will have no recourse for doing anything.
And so the UN, or UNDRIP, really what it did was allow our communities to see themselves as leaders.
Lindsey
I wonder if you have any like specific memories, just like very like salient kind of memories during that period of time that really stick out to you either in terms of like the formation that kind of led up to that meeting or even just during the meeting itself, if there was any point in term where you were just like “wow, we’re really doing this”
Eriel
So I think one of the really, really big moments for that first initial meeting where I was just like, “wow, this is different,” was that we weren’t looking for the champion from an indigenous community. Like, a lot of the environmental NGOs, they look for like the champion, they look for the star, who’s going to go out there and like, get on the stage and say the prophetic words and, you know, bring really, I guess really validating their campaigns. But for this meeting we just wanted people to show up because we wanted to see who were the people in the communities, who were the people on the ground that cared about these issues and how could we bring them into this circle to create strength? Because it’s not about having that one voice that’s prophetic on the stage. It’s about creating community. And we had people show up that I’d never heard of before. And I remember being in that meeting and being like, I don’t know, half the people in this room. And that is so amazing.
Lindsey
So you have this three day conference, with individuals coming from all over the country, what were some key take-aways that came out of these discussions?
Eriel
I think a really big salient thing that came out of that first meeting was that most of our communities didn’t have basic understanding of what was happening within the development of Canadian climate policy or international climate policy or how they could even participate in these conversations. And they didn’t even know where to begin. And so when we were asking them for “what are climate solutions for you?” like all this, you know, standard questions that you have with these types of conferences, when you’re trying to generate stuff to fill your reports, is that I realised that we were duplicating some of those same systems, or modalities, that the environmental movement had is which just go ask them, and then they’ll tell you, and then you just write about it in a report, but we didn’t want to do that. The reality was that we saw this information and what the people were asking for, was they needed more. And it really identified a huge deficit and identified a huge failing on the Canadian government side, but also on the environmental movement side, they talk a big game about wanting to support and advocate for indigenous communities, but there’s been no investment on empowering those communities to be leaders for themselves.
Lindsey
Very much agree. One thing I’ve always appreciated about ICA is the climate justice lens and also the lens of intersectionality. So recognizing the different ways that people exist in the world, and how so many different aspects of identity, gender income, ability, sexuality, et cetera, how they have all of these compounding effects and ways that they affect people’s being. And so there’s a short clip that I want to play as well from Danica Little Child who spoke on one of the panels from the meeting.
[“There’s a lot of issues of gender that continue to be hugely problematic. I don’t know what it was like at this last COP, but I remember talking to a woman who went to UNFCCC a bunch of years ago and she was telling me how she went to the indigenous caucus and she wanted to put women, like have gender in the caucus statement, and the indigenous caucus was like “yeah we’ll put you guys in a sentence or something like mention indigenous women” and then they were like “but you should really go to the gender caucus” and so she went to the gender caucus and the gender caucus was like “um, you know, you’re indigenous so you should really be at the indigenous caucus” Ok, so where do indigenous women go? You know, so these are the kinds of crazy issues of having a voice and having representation, and appropriate meaningful participation, but that’s a real challenge within the UN system. And I think it behooves us to take a critical eye to these processes. You know, we don’t just have to be two dimensional indigenous person within the UN, like we can actually be an indigenous women”]
Eriel
First off. I just have to say, Danica was one of the people that I looked to quite a bit in the first beginning phases of Indigenous Climate Action. And it was really important for me to have her as part of those panels, because colonisation didn’t just come with this, you know, taking away our relationships with the natural world and taking our land and developing resources. It also came with the imposition of patriarchy and heteronormativity and hyperindividualism and notoriety and the accumulation of wealth and all of these systems that really are rooted on the structures of white supremacy. And even within the UN systems, even those systems were created and developed through the lens of a colonial framework and system. And, you know, our own communities are dealing with how we unpack those systems of de-colonisation and how we move towards that intersectionality of recognizing just how much damage colonisation has done to our communities. It’s not just about losing our languages or some of our culture. It’s about the fact that we lost aspects of our values. And I think that was actually one of the things from that first meeting. It was very much no settlers allowed.
But we had a non white folks come in and support our meeting. We welcomed them to come into our meeting and we wanted to begin even those conversations in that first meeting, like how do we work within the migrant justice conversation? We talk about Land Back. How do we work within that conversation with Black Lives Matter? How do we work within the conversation that there is like deeply entrenched homophobia within our own communities?
How do we work with the fact that for the last like 50, 60, 70 years, the leaders of indigenous movements have been dominated by men when it’s been women who have been doing a lot of the work. Like these are real deep deep intersectional conversations where you can’t just say it’s just indigenous issues, because if we talk about equity and equality and climate justice, it’s not just about making sure indigenous peoples are recognised and that our voices are heard. It’s about moving towards a future that embodies what it means for justice for everyone.
Lindsey
So basically you have this massive meeting with over 150 folks from all over the country, for the course of a few days. So where, how did ICA kind of become what it is today? What were the next steps that kind of snowballed into the organisation that ICA now is?
Eriel
Yeah, so, you know, that first meeting, it was so powerful. It was so beautiful, but that whole sort of realisation on day two, that we were asking people to have a conversation that they weren’t ready for, was eye opening. And it led us and some of the core founders of the organisation into some deep reflection, “what do we do now? What do we do now with all these people that are activated and want to be a part of a conversation, but there’s no one advocating or developing resources to foster that conversation.”
And from there you realise that we needed to bring people back together, but in a smaller group to discuss “what do we do with these requests that have come from the communities?” And in January of 2017, so a year later, we brought together and built the first national steering committee meeting. And it was a really emotional time to be honest, because our first steering committee was made up of people from all walks of life. We had elected officials, we had youth, we had, you know, two-spirited, we had like frontline community folks, we had folks from organisations and we discussed what was happening in the context of Canadian climate, climate policy, making international climate policy making and what it is we do.
And it really came forward that we needed to create resources. We didn’t need to be building campaigns and taking on corporations, or even the government for that matter. The direction of that first iteration of the steering committee was we need to build up our communities to understand the power that they have. And we need to showcase to the world that our communities are leaders in climate change and climate solutions. But most importantly, beyond all of that was really to make sure that we’re training folks up and utilizing that same framework from that first initial meeting. We don’t want to just create resources that go on a website and die. We want to create resources that we make accessible.
And so with that, you know, ICA just, at the time they asked me if I would step up and be the executive director and build this ship that they had sort of built the blueprints for. And I said, okay. And I had been working for my first nation for about six years at the time. And I said, okay, I think I can do this. I think I can do this. And I even talked with my nation, like, that’s the beautiful thing. It wasn’t like, I was just like, “Oh, I’m going to abandon my first nation. Cause I’ve got this beautiful opportunity.” I talked with my leadership. I talked with the people in my community that I had been working with for years. And I asked them if they thought this was a good idea or not. And they said, “yeah, you should do it. This is, this feels like it’s the right thing at the right time. And you should, you should run with this and you should go.” And it was a huge leap of faith for me, but I really couldn’t have done it without that community. I couldn’t have done it without the steering committee and I couldn’t have done it without the support of those initial advisors to that first meeting and all the knowledge that was shared from, you know, those founders. They’re the ones that filled my cup so that I could move forward and bring this vision to light.
And since then, I have been so blessed to find so many incredible people, to be a part of this journey, all of the staff and the different iterations of staff that have come through ICA that are helping to build these resources, amplify our voices, create safe spaces for our communities and really focus on changing the discourse of what sovereignty and self-determination look like for indigenous peoples within the climate justice movement.
Lindsey
And thank you for all your work for this movement. My final question for you as we wrap up, is just simply why? Why is it so important that we work to empower Indigenous peoples to be able to do this work for climate justice?
Eriel
I think when we talk about climate policy and our lands and territory, we absolutely as indigenous peoples must be leading those conversations. It has been proven time and time again, that indigenous peoples and our cultures and our languages and our ways of knowing and being, are deeply interconnected with our relationships with the land and with all of the species that live on mother earth. And the planet right now is on the brink of ecological collapse. And what we need more than technological fixes, is we need to learn how to relate to the natural world and restore our balance and bring forward solutions that are rooted in a millennia of knowledge, rather than a few hundred years of Western science.
Lindsey
And with that, thank you Eriel for being here with us and for being such a great leader.
And for all of our listeners, thank you again for tuning in. Please share and give us a rating. You can also follow ICA on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook for more content on Indigenous knowledge and rights. And we’ll see you next time.
[OUTRO – Round Dance (feat. Northern Voice) by Cris Derksen]
Sources
