An Interview with Tom Goldtooth, By Kim Ridley

Tom Goldtooth is executive director of the Indigenous Environmental Network, which includes a vast network of indigenous communities in North America and increasingly, around the world. Based in Minnesota near the Canadian border, IEN was established in 1990 by grassroots indigenous communities and individuals to address environmental and economic justice issues. IEN’s activities include building the capacities of indigenous communities and leaders to develop mechanisms to protect sacred sites, land, water, air, natural resources, the health of people and all living things, and to build economically sustainable communities. He talks about IEN’s work with Kim Ridley.

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Kim Ridley: You have described climate change as a human rights issue that is particularly devastating to indigenous communities. Can you talk about this?

Tom Goldtooth: Climate change affects everyone, but it has a disproportionate impact on indigenous communities, especially on our rights to practice our culture and to access our traditional food systems. Our national offices are located in northern Minnesota within the rich cultural heritage of the Anishinaabe Nation. During the past couple of seasons, we have witnessed climatic warming trends and weather changes that have affected the berry and wild rice harvests. These wild foods have traditionally nourished and sustained many of our local tribes for thousands of years. The ponds and bogs have been drying up, affecting our aquatic medicinal plants. In the Southwest, long periods of drought conditions have caused the Dine’ (Navajo) to sell their livestock, which has been the main source of income for families living in remote rural areas of the reservation.

People in the Arctic region are literally seeing their land melt before their eyes. Climate change in the Arctic is a fact not a theory. Because of unpredictable weather conditions, there have been reports of Alaska Native hunters and fishermen falling through thin ice and some of them have died.

Some of these Arctic villages are literally sinking as the permafrost melts and serious erosion threatens coastal villages. As houses start to sink, windows and doors don’t close anymore. We’re hearing more stories of indigenous peoples in Alaska and Canada making plans to move their whole villages, creating economic hardships and deep loss of their traditional homelands. These climate impacts are becoming human rights issues.

With our specialization in environmental and ecosystems impact to indigenous peoples, our organization has built a global network with indigenous peoples and organizations throughout the world linking human rights and the protection of the environment. I have heard similar stories from indigenous peoples from every corner of the world, who are very concerned about the life-and-death consequences of global warming and climate change. Rising sea levels threaten to flood and destroy the homelands of Pacific Islanders in the small island states. The indigenous Berbers of Morocco, the Masaai tribal people of Africa, and the Mapuche of South America, are all experiencing serious droughts. Climactic change affects our rights to gather traditional foods and to practice our ceremonies. It disrupts our cultural practices.

KR: What are the consequences of this displacement and loss of culture and life ways?

TG: The consequences are going to be devastating. Within the Arctic region, worst-case scenarios predict massive depletion of ice cover by the middle of the century. This will cause severe difficulties for the Inuit, a hunting based culture. What will happen to the culture of these people when walrus, whales and seals that sustain them are no longer to be found?

Here in the Great Lakes region, our indigenous peoples are witnessing the water levels within the wild rice beds of the lakes dwindling so low that they cannot use canoes to harvest the rice that has sustained tribal people for thousands of years. In some areas, they are adapting by using snowshoes to walk on the muddy lakebed. Of course this means a smaller harvest and using more human energy to process a pound of rice.

Our people are closely tied to the land; we are the land and the land is us. The rich biodiversity of this planet is our Circle of Life and if that biodiversity is negatively impacted, then we, as indigenous peoples of the land, are equally affected. I once [READ?] in a United Nations report that over 80 percent of the world’s remaining biodiversity is found within Indigenous peoples’ lands and territories and that Indigenous peoples represent approximately 350 million individuals in the world and make up approximately 90 percent of the world’s cultural diversity. Some of our elders have told me that we are also an endangered species.

KR: What is the heart of IEN’s mission?

TG: We’re working not only towards environmental and economic justice, but also for the rights of indigenous peoples to be able to practice our traditional knowledge and life ways. Elders often tell me that our work is spiritual work because when we talk about protection of the air, the water, the soil and also the protection of our sacred fires, these are the sacred elements that were given to us by the Creator.

Our network advocates to non-indigenous peoples as well as to our own communities to re-evaluate our relationship to the sacredness of our Mother Earth. There is a need for all humans to understand our relationship to Mother Earth. There is a need to understand the concepts of the female creative principle of the Earth but also understand and balance that with the concepts of Father Sky. This is the balance that has been given to all humans from the beginning of time. That’s how we look at life as indigenous peoples, that’s how we do our work.

KR: What kinds of issues is IEN working on?

TG: We work on various organizing campaigns. Toxics and environmental health is an issue that has always been the basis of our work. This work involves policy advocacy to change public health and environmental laws to address the fact that chemicals are biomagnifying and bioaccumulating in the bodies of our women, elders and children.

Another program area is mineral extraction. Our mining program strengthens the capacity of our communities that are affected by mining and oil development to address environmental justice issues. Large dams, oil and natural gas drilling, uranium, coal bed methane and coal extraction are found within our traditional territories. Many of these developments have been found not to be sustainable and in violation of our indigenous traditional beliefs.

A third key issue we are working on is energy policy. Currently, energy policy in North America and globally has been operating on the backs of our indigenous peoples. Related to a fossil fuel dependent society are the problems with climate changes and global warming. IEN has been very effective at bringing to the forefront how our communities are disproportionately affected by climate, energy policies, mining and toxics policies.

We are also involved with issues ranging from protection of biodiversity and intellectual property rights, including the protection of our medicinal plant knowledge, to the protection of water. To indigenous communities, water is sacred. But in this modern economic system, water has become a commodity and a property interest that is being bought, sold and traded.

IEN and our indigenous communities are confronting many challenges. Changes in the environment, globalization and rapid economic development threaten our communities on both a local and global level. The survival of indigenous culture, language and community continues to be attacked by a modern industrialized worldview that doesn’t view nature in the same light as our people do. To the modern world, the elements of life, like water, are viewed in unit costs and monetary value. Because of severe drought conditions, aquifers and groundwater are not being replenished, which means water will become scarce in certain regions. Water scarcity in certain areas of the United States has already caused local water wars, especially in the Southwest.

Even though our people are disproportionately affected and bear higher health risks from these challenges, these same issues confront all people and all Life. That is why our organization embraces our responsibility given to us by the elders we work with to educate all people and all cultures to reevaluate their relationship to the sacredness of Mother Earth.

KR: Where do we start?

TG: The issues are complex, but one thing that a person could do involves reflection. It involves people who are the descendants and beneficiaries of an industrialized society stepping back to reflect on their relationship to themselves, to their families, to their household, and to the land that they live on.

I wish it were easy to do. I wish there were a ten-step program for people to do that. But in my opinion, all human beings have a tribal genetic memory that is trying to come out that causes a person to ponder the question of what their true relationship is to the land, to nature. There has to be a mechanism for people to resolve the answer to that question. That’s why our network is looking at different partners and initiatives like Bioneers. We looked at Bioneers as one of those initiatives bringing people together to be able to reflect and reevaluate what their relationship is to self, to biology and the ecosystem, and that’s why we started to work with them.

KR: What larger shifts do we need to make as a society to restore a healthy balance?

TG: Our network feels there is a need for the assertion of national and global environmental ethics that guide decision makers. It’s just not there. The Western European economic system that was introduced in this country hundred of years ago has created a paradigm that caused a social, economic and political conflict that hasn’t been resolved to this day. By this I mean we now have political and corporate leaders within the industrialized world who are asking civil society to be patient and to allow the economic market to provide solutions to poverty, climate change and industrial pollutants and contamination.

That’s where we think there’s an imbalance. There needs to be an elevation of the importance of protecting the environment over economics, not in place of economics, but the need for each to work hand-in-hand. In contrast to market-driven “solutions,” IEN and many other non-governmental organizations and community groups are advocating addressing these issues by using a human rights based approach that recognizes the social, cultural and environmental impact of industrial development and political decision-making.

KR: The Precautionary Principle, which emphasizes making decisions based on preventing harm, also seems connected to the approach you’re describing.

TG: IEN has been part of a U.S. movement of organizations and groups from many sectors promoting precautionary approaches. The Precautionary Principle is a simple but profound idea that when an activity raises threats of harm to human health or the environment, precautionary measures should be taken even if some cause-and-effect relationships have not been fully established scientifically.

The Precautionary Principle relates to the way many of our tribes make decisions. Traditionally, many indigenous peoples made decisions based upon looking at the potential effect of that decision on their future generations. An example of this is the Seventh Generation law of the Haudenosaunee, a confederacy of the Six Nations of eastern North America. The Seventh Generation is a precept of the Great Law of Peace, which requires the chiefs to consider the impact of their decisions on the seventh generation.

IEN, along with some organizational friends such as the Alaska Community Action on Toxics and the Science and Environmental Health Network, have been working on a document called the Bemidji Statement on the Guardianship of Future Generations. This statement incorporates some elements from the concepts of “Protection of the Commons” and the Precautionary Principle, but it goes beyond most other principles by explicitly assigning guardianship and responsibility for protecting the Seventh Generation of Humanity that is yet to be born. Equally important, it assigns the same guardianship and responsibility to the current generations to protect and restore the intricate web of life that sustains us all, for the Seventh Generation to come. We will soon be launching this statement as part of a national campaign for tribal leaders, the public and all decision-makers to utilize.

This approach respects our traditional knowledge. This isn’t new to our people, but through colonization and its symptoms of assimilation, acculturation, and federalism, many of our tribal decision-makers have steered away from use of traditional knowledge. Many indigenous peoples now value western forms of development and western knowledge over our traditional knowledge. This is why one of the things we integrate into our organizing work with communities is the promotion of indigenous traditional knowledge and the understanding of the concepts of internalized oppression, as one of the symptoms of colonization. Environmental justice isn’t just about the environment—it involves rebuilding the psychology and the sociology of our communities as well.

KR: What sustains your sense of hope?

TG: I recognize there is a great deal of hope in this world. Maintaining a close link to the land and participating in ceremony provides me with the strength, perseverance and peace of mind there will be a better tomorrow. My teacher, my elder once told me that the Road of Life is not easy and is very difficult at times. I am finding there are many non-indigenous peoples who are very interested in what we’re talking about when we raise the question of re-evaluating our relationship to the sacredness of Mother Earth. This is an issue that doesn’t just affect indigenous peoples, it affects all people.