Listening to Indigenous People in a Time of Climate Crisis

Tara Houska is Couchiching First Nation Ojibwe, a tribal attorney, founder of frontlines collective Ginew, and former Native advisor to Bernie Sanders. She writes movingly in this short essay about the need to listen to Indigenous people, and to the earth, in this time of climate crisis. She alludes to the interconnectedness of things in the Indigenous world: the manoomin—or wild rice—that is intrinsic to the identity of Anishinabe people, the stories of elders, the necessity of watching and listening to changes happening around us. 

If we can hear, Houska suggests, we understand that the world is changing quite rapidly, maybe more rapidly than we can understand. Western conceptions of what to do about these changes focus on statistics, on mobilizing conventional political action, finding the political or economic action that will “fix it.” 

But the vast majority of the planet’s remaining biodiversity is managed by Indigenous people; those are the voices that must be central as we grope toward reimagined ways of living on the globe that are not inherently destructive. Houska is well aware of these difficulties, writing that “developing personal accountability is often the hardest task of all—reducing one’s own individual carbon footprint is one aspect, but so too is coming to terms with privilege, bias, ego, hurt, and self-interest.”