Keyra Espinoza says that there are no words to describe her experience visiting Ingapirca, the ancient ruins of her Indigenous Cañari ancestors, in the summer of 2020. Located in the Southern Andes mountains of Ecuador, Ingapirca is a landscape Espinoza cherishes both for its wildlife and its deep spiritual meaning for her ancestral community.
“[Ingapirca] has a lot of historic meaning for me…that is the closest I’ve ever been to the homeland of my grandfather,” she said. Espinoza was raised on the stories of her Cañari people and the centuries they spent nurturing a relationship with their environment.
Espinoza is an Afro-Indigenous climate activist and environmental policy major at the University of Miami. Born in New York City to an Afro-Indigenous Ecuadorian family, the history and values of this community guide her climate and Indigenous activism. Espinoza has seen the changes to her ancestral community wrought by climate change and focuses on the intersection of climate and Indigenous justice.. She believes that climate activism should highlight the effects of climate change on Indigenous communities and increase awareness of her ancestral community’s vulnerabilities.
Delicately perched high atop the hills of the province of Cañar, the ruins are ringed by lush forest greenery. Walking toward an ancient religious center located near the ruins, used for various community festivities to this day, she felt welcomed and at home. With each step, she felt “the imprints of [her] footsteps align with the imprints of [her] ancestors.” As Espinoza made the journey back from her ancestral home to her University of Miami classrooms, however, she could only think about what the community might look like when she returned. Climate change fundamentally threatens the Cañari nation and her people by disrupting patterns of food production and contributing to the erasure of Indigenous culture.
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Environmental researchers from across the world have concluded that climate change will disproportionately affect Indigenous communities. How governments should respond to climate change — and sometimes the very fact of its existence — is a contested topic in contemporary politics. The United States has recognized both the urgency of this global issue and its direct impact on historically marginalized groups, directing national resources toward the study of climate change’s impact on Indigenous communities.
One study conducted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture asserts that climate change “threatens the continuance of many Indigenous cultural systems that are based on reciprocal relationships with local plants, animals, and ecosystems.” These findings support the idea that Indigenous people should be centered in future climate change policy. While everyone may be affected by changes in the climate, including increased severe weather or rising sea levels, Indigenous communities face the additional risk of losing their culture.
Climate change threatens Cañari culture, livelihood, food sustenance, historical connection, and mental and physical health. It presents a fundamental threat to the culture of Native communities by increasing the frequency of natural disasters and the presence of diseases that existing healthcare structures are already inadequately equipped to combat. It also disrupts weather patterns, impacting traditional food production and consumption. Indigenous peoples’ history of connection to Indigenous lands renders the global issue more personal. Climate change increases the likelihood of Indigenous people succumbing to physical ailments, disease, and mental health difficulties.
The potential disappearance of Cañari culture is a major concern exacerbated by climate change, as the nation has already faced lengthy legal battles to prevent the mining of natural resources and the contamination of local water reservoirs. “Most of our ancestral culture depends on the land, and without it, we will lose our identity and traditions,” Espinoza said. Religious conceptions of nature remain vital to the beliefs and practices of modern-day Indigenous communities around the world and forge intimate connections between Indigenous people and nature.
Daniel Wildcat, a member of the Muscogee Nation of Oklahoma and director of the Haskell Environmental Research Studies Center (HERS), knows these connections well. In his book Climate Change and Indigenous Peoples of the United States, Haskell notes that “Indigenous peoples are concerned deeply with relationships between humans and the natural world…Species interactions [and] social-ecological system interactions are often at the core of Indigenous identity and underpin their beliefs and practices.” Indigenous people typically have a strong connection to their natural surroundings and derive many religious aspects of their cultures from these connections. Their deep respect of nature and land also engenders strong beliefs among communities concerning their nature’s continued protection.
For Espinoza, the enmeshing of nature and religion within Indigenous culture has manifested through the Ecuadorian tradition of making and drinking of chicha. Chicha is a popular fermented corn beverage that has existed in the region for millennia and is drunk in religious festivals and social gatherings. Espinoza finds it extremely “significant to [her] nation because it reinforces tradition and is used to allow the community to celebrate in a unified way.” But with climate systems changing, the world has seen increases in both the severity and likelihood of natural disasters such as forest fires, droughts, and tropical storms, which threaten cultural practices like chicha by disrupting natural cycles critical to food production. Espinoza and others in the Cañari community are worried that they “won’t have access to growing the traditional food that has sustained [their] ancestors for many generations and is currently sustaining [them].” When cultural practices are deeply linked to the production of traditional food, as is often the case with Indigenous communities, loss of access to basic sustenance translates to a loss of culture.
Chicha is only one example of the broader cultural erasure Indigenous communities will face. The impact of climate change will only become more severe if world leaders fail to act with the expediency the climate crisis necessitates. Indigenous people already feel these effects tangibly. “What we once used to know about the land is being altered — we can’t even read climate patterns anymore,” Espinoza said.
For Indigenous communities like Espinoza’s that rely on traditional methods of agriculture, climate change is a fundamental threat to Indigenous people’s livelihood. Indigenous communities across the world depend on their own sovereign food ‘ecosystems’ for year-round sustenance, where communities completely control their food production and supply. For example, the majority of Alaskan Natives’ diets are composed of traditional foods ranging from muktuk (layers of whale fat) to local berries. Communities like these may not be able to adapt their food systems to climate change in the same way that wealthier Western countries, whose agricultural methods are based on modern technology, may be able to adapt.
Wealthier countries are primarily responsible for the climate crisis in the first place. This is reflected in the fact that the countries with the highest greenhouse gas emissions, which fuels climate change by increasing global temperatures, are among the most developed and wealthy. The climate crisis has been guided by the effects of colonialism; wealthy countries have historically invaded and stolen resources from Indigenous communities to make profits. Vestiges of colonialism, from the endless miles of mining tunnels to still-contaminated water sources, are littered across the planet. The desire to acquire newly found resources, paired with imperialism, resulted in the seizure and pollution of Native lands that were rarely ever returned to their rightful owners. Native peoples, however, have nonetheless been using preexisting knowledge about the environment to ensure adaptation to climate change.
Indigenous people’s connection to nature and land can also be viewed through a historic perspective, as Native land has rich historic meaning to Indigenous people. Hannah White, an honors fellow at the University of Oklahoma School of Law, emphasizes this connection in her research project Indigenous Peoples, the International Trend Towards Legal Personhood, and the United States. White observes that the United States, for example, “continues to be inhabited by Native peoples with spiritual and cultural connections to the land — land that colonists methodically acquired and used to build their empire.” Modern Indigenous peoples have to grapple with these circumstances throughout their day-to-day lives.
Indigenous peoples’ historical connection to their land and nature also further exemplifies how climate change has produced and will produce hardship. For instance, the land on which Indigenous people reside has more than proprietary value. The property represents the struggle of their ancestors for security and basic wellbeing. This symbolism makes the tainting of their land by the effects of climate change all the more personal, especially given the historically uneven allocation of land to Native peoples and their frequent dispossession.
White added that Indigenous peoples in the U.S. face additional adversity because they primarily “live on reservations or exclusively Native-controlled lands [and]…likely not those they historically occupied.” Indigenous people truly cannot afford to lose more of the little land they have left. And they shouldn’t have to do so, considering that they possess only a fraction of the land they did before the start of colonization and globalization. Their connection to the remaining land they have left should be all the more respected and must be accounted for as the global community attempts to resolve the climate crisis. The people who stand to lose the most have already lost enough.
The impacts of climate change on mental and physical health can manifest in myriad ways. The loss of community and culture has been, and will continue to be, mentally debilitating. And that is on top of the physical harm climate change often inflicts. For instance, researchers have concluded that climate change will dramatically increase the presence of food and water-borne illnesses. As a result, humans will inevitably contract and subsequently succumb to more illnesses as climate change worsens. Though everyone is at increased risk of disease, Indigenous people have to combat their susceptibility to disease with healthcare systems that are typically inadequate in providing sufficient healthcare services. The preservation of Indigenous land must be recognized as a basic goal of climate change policy, especially in light of the differences in preparedness for climate change between Indigenous communities and wealthier countries.
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Though dire, climate change is not something that Indigenous communities are wholly unprepared for. The threats climate change brings to Indigenous communities could be curtailed by the same deep connection to their land that shapes their religions and cultures. Some researchers propose that the extensive knowledge of local environments held by Indigenous communities may help them cope with climate change. Indigenous communities should be looked at as models for how to adapt to the climate crisis, and supported in their adaptation efforts by their wealthy counterparts.
For instance, White also points to the fact that, “traditional knowledge embodied in technologies, practices and cultivated species facilitate coping with climate change.” She has observed, for example, Indigenous coping mechanisms for dealing with drought, a natural phenomenon that could become more frequent. Indigenous communities in affected areas harnessed both their traditional knowledge about the ecosystem and traditional water storage tactics to survive. This explains how, comprising less than 5% of the world’s population, Indigenous people protect 80% of global biodiversity. Though this example hints that we should not think Indigenous communities are completely ill-equipped to grapple with impending climate changes, the global diversity of natural resources and ecosystems across Indigenous communities makes these kinds of coping mechanisms localized. Each Indigenous community would have to adapt using their own strategies based on the kinds of climate change driven catastrophes individual to them, which makes it difficult to identify an overarching coping strategy that could be universally applicable.
Though increased environmental knowledge augurs a promising future for Indigenous communities faced with adapting to climate change, the diminishment of their surrounding environment will inevitably still disrupt their spirituality and religion.
“Climate change is real and it’s impacting Indigenous communities at the frontline of the [climate] movement at a more rapid pace than people in city and urban areas,” Espinoza said. Espinoza’s solution: amplifying Indigenous voices in climate change discussions, especially on the political level. “When governments and world leaders reunite to make up climate change solutions, we need to include Indigenous people in the decision-making process…we need to intersect and have Indigenous communities speak for themselves,” she said.
According to Espinoza and many other climate activists, the recent COP26, the 26th United Nations Climate Change conference, excluded Indigenous voices when discussing the future of climate change. Espinoza mentioned that though Indigenous people were present at these talks, they were relegated to speaker stands and not included in major discussions with world leaders. These sentiments are not confined to Indigenous activists, however, and extend into academia as well. “When it comes to the decision makers, they often ignore activists or write off their claims, which I completely disagree with,” Justin Farrell, a professor at the Yale School of Forestry, said in an interview with The Politic. Professor Farrell led a first-of-its-kind study at Yale where researchers were able to quantify exactly how much land has been seized from Indigenous hands since colonization. In the United States, this figure lies at nearly 98.9%.
Professor Farrell believes that placing greater emphasis on Indigenous communities in science will pave the way towards the inclusion of Indigenous voices in government; his study is a first step in this process. For instance, upon the study’s publication, Professor Farrell notes that “tribes already knew” how much land had been taken from them, so the study’s findings “aren’t surprising” to them. Professor Farrell’s intentions when creating the study were to “provide a piece of scholarship that is rigorous as it pertains to policy,” which he believes Indigenous people can use to their advantage.
According to Professor Farrell, placing a greater emphasis on Indigenous people in the realm of scientific study can cause lobbyists and policymakers to give more consideration to Indigenous struggles. For instance, if there was a greater focus on studying the customary agricultural methods of Indigenous societies, policymakers should be able to orient their policy to include them. In Professor Farrell’s words, placing “ecological knowledge into the frameworks that dole out funds for climate adaptation, funding that would begin to be allocated to what they might see as non-traditional techniques” is a requisite step towards including Indigenous voices in climate change conversations. Simply put, policymakers have to start reenvisioning who their policy is geared towards. This begins with conducting more studies such as Professor Farrell’s that disseminate valuable, empirically gathered information that can paint a comprehensive picture of the struggles of Indigenous people.
However multifaceted the issue of combating climate change may be, it should be the focus of future study and policy to aid the communities that face the most harm as a result of this human-induced phenomenon. Though Espinoza’s experience with Indigeneity is specific to Ecuador, climate change is not. We must recognize why climate change is more than a physical threat — it is inherently a threat to Native peoples’ identities and lives across the world.