Can you be shocked and not surprised at the same time?
It’s one thing to hear the term “climate colonialism” and it’s another to see and feel it up close. It oozes out of every plenary, every action room, nearly every side event at this COP – and is propagated by governments, corporations, and I’m sorry to say, sometimes CAN-I alike.
The tragedy is not just the continued violence against Australian First Nations Peoples at this COP – the continuation of the colonial project reinforced by the almost complete marginalisation of our voices, as bad as that is. It’s seeing so many people working so hard to find a global solution to this existential problem, when we hold the wisdom and solutions if only others would lower their voices, step back, and give us a seat at the Australian Federal Government’s table, and lead.
My First Nations brothers and sisters from around the world occupy a crowded pavilion – a space so tiny and cramped it is emblematic of the marginalisation and disrespect awarded to First Nations voices. In this tiny room, harrowing story after story of dispossession, colonisation and desecration of Country is told. The stories are the same all over the world.
Climate change and its impacts on our Mother Earth is genocide for our people. Our ancestors are in the water we drink, the mountains, the animals, the trees. To destroy them is to destroy the memory of our ancestors. Our creation stories tell us how to look after Country as caretakers, and our creator has a way of waking us up when we are doing wrong.
This has been the case since time began. We are still crying out to be heard, and non-Indigenous people wonder why more progress hasn’t been made.
For my people – the oldest continuous living culture in the world, 100,000 years of caring for Country is being destroyed in less than 250 years. The Australia pavilion showcases mining giants Fortescue and Santos. Not a single Aboriginal voice is seen or heard. Terra Nulius – the lie that Australia was uninhabited when invaded, is alive and well and undermines our self-determination just as it works to undermine the success of this COP.
For Australia, this COP is first and foremost a failure of Indigenous participation. Our issues, concerns and solutions have been sidelined and ignored. Until this is fixed, a safe climate won’t be achieved. No new data, better science, more deft negotiations will achieve in time what we have learnt about the protection of our Country and passed to generation after generation since the beginning of time.
Australian First Nations demand a seat at the table. Climate action starts with climate justice – a Peace Treaty between First Nations and the coloniser also ends the war perpetuated against Mother Earth.
This is not about being anti-development. It’s about the application of the principles of Free, Prior and Informed Consent underpinned by the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. It’s multinational corporations that must justify a seat at the table, not us.
The same international governance and legal system that invaded and colonised Australia is playing out right here at this COP. The solutions won’t be found if the foundations for these negotiations are based on dispossession, colonisation and violence.
In Australian Indigenous philosophy, we walk backwards into the future on the footprints of our ancestors, who have shown and taught us, so we do the same things they have done for millennia. They show and teach us how to look after Country. We are in harmony with the earth and each other. Western science is crucial, but has a fundamental flaw because it is rooted in a system that works to recreate the future based upon profit, greed and competition – the causes of the trouble we are in now.
I came here, so I know what must be done at COP27. I plan to organise not an Indigenous Pavilion in a small corner of a huge venue, but a First Nations Embassy so that, finally, and in the nick of time, First Nations wisdom and solutions cannot be ignored.
Pastor Ray Minniecon is a Kabi Kabi and Gureng Gureng Senior Traditional Owner from Australia and is here with the Indigenous Peoples Organisation and CAN Australia.