As we push forth in the final hours of COP26, there is a feeling in the air of “what now? What have we accomplished? Where have we compromised? And most importantly, how do we take this story of COP26 back home?
Sometimes it feels like you need a law degree just to follow a single negotiation item here, and the rigid structures and inaccessibility of this space are a harsh reminder that this colonial system was never designed with our participation in mind. As we follow negotiation updates under harsh fluorescent lighting, with little to no sleep, it’s easy to get caught up in the versions, the paragraph numbers, and the square brackets, soon perpetuating the same exclusive “in club” jargon we felt so excluded by on arrival. Our moods synchronise with the negotiation outcomes, and it can be hard to see beyond the disappointment of important language and references being stripped from texts.
But for Indigenous Peoples, COP26 doesn’t end on Saturday or Sunday.
We can’t lose sight of the bigger picture, because we are here for our people back home. We have both the privilege and the pressure of representing communities who will never see the inside of a plenary hall, and so for many of us, a different kind of COP26 work begins when we leave Glasgow.
We have to stand up in our community gatherings and share “This is what was on the line, this is what we did about it, and this is where we can go from here.”
While others can put COP26 behind them, for us, it’s our aunties, our elders, and our babies that we are accountable to. It’s up to us to take this messy, complex, jargon-filled beast, and make sense of it with them. We have to share the incremental progress that never happens fast enough for our communities, but which represents critical bottom lines that give our frontliners the space and safety to do real climate action back home.
We have to sit with duality that the COPs are often an abysmal failure and a resounding success at the same time.
While we would all like to return to our communities with international standards like Free, Prior, and Informed Consent, and our rights throughout 6.2, 6.4, and 6.8, we must also acknowledge the victories that Indigenous folks in this space have long strived and struggled for.
Do we celebrate the bread crumbs, or do we shout from the roof that it’s not enough?
We do both. That’s the duality of the COP that we must now take home.
We must celebrate the LCIPP Work Plan, and get our communities excited about the opportunities it entails for them to share their knowledge under the safety of Indigenous leadership and protocols. We must mourn the gutting of human rights from ACE, and how our rights are dropped so easily in favour of a timely decision. The stories we will tell our communities back home about Article 6 remain to be seen.
Whatever the final outcome, the space we have been able to take up at this COP has been carved out by the elders who have gone before us, and those who work beside us, guiding us along the way. This is all fuelled by the passion, love, and support of our communities back home.
The effort that Indigenous Peoples have brought forward to this COP, in the middle of a pandemic no less, must be celebrated as a victory in itself.
Mauri ora.