A Climate Policy That Works With the Land

This article is part of a Women and Leadership special report highlighting the work by women around the world addressing climate change.

The daughter of activists in the American Indian Movement and a member of the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation in Canada, Eriel Tchekwie Deranger grew up immersed in her community’s fight to protect their lands and the animals they consider kin — caribou, bison, moose, water birds and fish. Her family camped in the boreal forest near the Peace-Athabasca Delta in Alberta.

One day, her father pointed out oil slicks on the road and explained that when white men arrived, they destroyed and polluted the land because their minds were consumed with greed and money. They don’t know how to take care of the land, he said, because they don’t know the land loves them. A few years later, Ms. Deranger returned after oil sands companies demolished the area and poisoned it with toxic waste. She was galvanized to become an activist.

Today, Ms. Deranger, 45, is the executive director and co-founder of Indigenous Climate Action and a member of the International Indigenous Peoples’ Forum on Climate Change. Her organization works to empower Indigenous peoples to lead the way on climate justice and decolonize environmental policy. She recently spoke in a video interview about the effect Indigenous peoples can have on climate policy. The following conversation has been edited and condensed.

What would Indigenous climate policy look like?

Climate policy from Indigenous peoples comes from a different value set that looks at power with, as opposed to power over. It’s not consumed by money but by the health and wealth of our communities’ spirituality, our connections to our culture, our languages, our capacities to harvest from the land and not take more than you need. It’s about learning to listen to the land, because the land tells us how to govern ourselves and our territories and create systems based on reconnection to place.

It looks at a broad spectrum of questions. Not just “Can we make enough money to pay people to have a roof over their head?” But secondarily: “How are we ensuring having a roof over our head isn’t destroying the land? How are we ensuring that if we’re getting resources from somewhere else, that’s not contributing to the destruction of someone else? How do we coexist with nature and ensure our kin also have the capacities to thrive?”