Following the Leadership of Native Peoples
As soon as I heard about the People’s Climate March in New York City (New York, USA),1 I knew I wanted to be there. For many years I’ve been learning about, writing about, mourning and raging about, and taking leadership on what is happening to the life support systems of our home, this earth—with its brilliant people struggling to feed and care for their families and communities under increasingly difficult and unpredictable conditions, and the many amazing plant and animal beings threatened by rapidly changing air, soil, and waters.
What is needed now is a multitude of good minds coming together in resilience, resistance, courage, innovation, re-evaluation, and brilliance. And there we were, about four hundred thousand of us, including many RCers. The organizers of the march were smart. Leading the way were people of the global majority, especially Indigenous people and those most threatened by the changing climate; young people; and people living in low-lying areas vulnerable to flooding. They were up front and visible.
Because I had worked for many years as an ally to the Native community near where I live, I was invited to travel overnight to New York with them. The tiny sovereign Onondaga Nation filled two buses with elders, young people, families, and friends who traveled through the night to get to the front of the march. And they were proud, dressed in full regalia. They seemed so pleased that the organizers were recognizing and honoring people who had been warning others of us about our destructive patterns for over four hundred years. Facing attempted genocide, theft of their land, destruction of their crops and forests, their children being stolen and taken to boarding schools, they had been resisting colonialism and capitalism, generation after generation, always warning us about what was being lost because of our inability to listen to, learn from, and respect the earth.
At the march were Indigenous people from many parts of the world. One was a Co-Counseling leader of Mohawk heritage, Alison Ehara-Brown, who had traveled on the People’s Climate Train for over three thousand miles to get to New York. I was so happy to see her. Her face beamed with determination, enthusiasm, and joy in being part of Native resurgence. I loved marching with her and others under the Bay Area (California, USA) Idle No More2 banner. She and I couldn’t find space in the surging crowd for a real Co-Counseling session, but we communicated with each other with smiles, tears, laughter, and shouts of joy. She kept a persistent beat with her traditional Haudenosaunee3 rattle, and drums played by neighbors in the Indigenous contingent kept the beat with her.
It has been a dream of mine that throngs of people would someday listen to what Native peoples have to say and remember their own Indigenous ancestors of the distant past, who lived respectfully, in reciprocity, with the gifts of the earth (or they would never have had living descendants). It’s the right and necessary thing for all of us to walk together, following the leadership of Native peoples, to free the earth from the patterns of capitalism, greed, racism, and entitlement that have so long confused and damaged us.
We RCers can make a profound difference as we support this rapidly growing movement for environmental and economic justice. Our new goal for care of the environment4 has clarified our task and coaxed us to be bold. Thanks to Wytske Wisser, Barbara Love, Diane Shisk, Beth Cruise,5 and the many others at the Care of the Environment Conference last year in Vancouver (British Columbia, Canada) for leading the way forward. We are on our way.
Jack Manno
Syracuse, New York, USA
Reprinted from the e-mail discussion
list for RC Community members
1 The march took place on September 21, 2014.
2 Idle No More is an ongoing protest movement that started among the Indigenous peoples in Canada and their non-Indigenous supporters and has spread internationally. It calls on all people to join in a peaceful revolution to honor Indigenous sovereignty and protect the land and water.
3 Haudenosaunee means “People of the Long House” and is what the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca, and Tuscarora call themselves. The confederacy was named the “Iroquois” by the French and the “Six Nations” by the British.
4 A goal adopted by the 2013 World Conference of the Re-evaluation Counseling Communities:
5 Wytske Wisser is the International Commonality Reference Person for Care of the Environment, Barbara Love is the International Liberation Reference Person for African-Heritage People, Diane Shisk is the Alternate International Reference Person, and Beth Cruise is the editor of Sustaining All Life, the RC journal for people interested in care of the environment.