October 12th marks Indigenous Peoples’ Day in the Americas, commemorating the more than 500-year legacy of Indigenous resistance to colonialism and genocide. Since the arrival of Europeans to the continent in 1492, Indigenous peoples have been fighting to preserve their culture, autonomy, and way of life in the face of cultural and physical annihilation. The process of colonization continues to manifest itself today in the form of extractivism and the commodification of the environment from Canada to Patagonia, and Indigenous peoples remain on the front lines of resistance.
Rainforest Action Network recognizes the need to support Indigenous organizing through direct trust-based grants to Indigenous organizations fighting to preserve their culture, worldview, and autonomy against corporate extractivism through RAN’s Community Action Grants (CAG) Program. The grants provide a key resource to organizations in the Global South and the periphery of the Global North that are often excluded from funding networks, serving as a mechanism of reparation for the long-standing inequalities in resource distribution.
The XII Pan-Amazonian Social Forum
In August, RAN’s CAG program supported the XII Pan-Amazonian Social Forum (FOSPA) in Puyo, Ecuador, with additional events held in Kichwa de Sarayaku territory. The forum, organized by Indigenous peoples and civil society organizations alongside regional and international allies, brought together Indigenous organizations from throughout the Amazon to share experiences of how they are organizing to protect the environment and preserve Indigenous autonomy and self-government in their territories.
The gathering ended in a tribunal that declared the Amazon a legal subject and a total exclusion zone, stating that the impacts of oil extractivism in the region constitute an ecocide and ethnocide. The tribunal demanded the immediate fulfillment of popular consultations and legal obligations to stop extraction in Indigenous territory and called for protections for land defenders from repression and criminalization.
At the gathering, the Kichwa people of Saryaku highlighted their struggle to free their territories from extractivism after the community won a landmark ruling at the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in 2012, which found the government of Ecuador guilty of violating their rights by permitting that oil be extracted from their territory without their consent. Even though the government has not complied with the ruling, the community’s successful efforts to stop oil activities have kept an estimated 100 million barrels of oil in the ground, a de facto no-go zone beneath 330,000 acres of standing primary, roadless rainforest.
RAN’s CAG program also supported a delegation of the Sarayaku Kichwa People to attend Climate Week in New York in late September. At Climate Week, the delegation was able to publicize their history of struggle to an international audience and present the concept of Kawsak Sacha, or ‘Living Forest’, a new category for the permanent protection of native land free from natural resource extraction that is based in the interconnected relationship Indigenous peoples have with their forests, water, and spirits.
The Intertribal Rights of Rivers Alliance
In September, through the CAG program, RAN supported the Intertribal Rights of Rivers (IROR) Gathering on Ponca Indigenous Land in Oklahoma. Movement Rights, a women- and Indigenous-led civil society organization, and the Ponca Indigenous Nation of Oklahoma hosted the gathering as a space to bring together 70 Indigenous water protectors from 40 tribal nations across North America to defend the rights of rivers and nature.
The gathering was part of ongoing collaboration between Movement Rights and the Ponca Nation after the drafting of the historic Rights of Nature Tribal Law in 2017, which officially recognized nature as a legal subject with rights. This recognition gave Ponca Tribal courts the ability to prosecute those who violated the rights of nature through degradation, pollution, and extractive industries; the law has since been adopted by more than 20 tribes in the United States and Canada.
As the current U.S. government rolls back many climate protections and enables those looking to exploit fossil fuels in the Plains region, the gathering served as a way to reassert the rights of nature and the role of Indigenous peoples as frontline defenders of their territories and rivers to stop what the Ponca Nation refers to as “environmental genocide”. RAN’s Community Action Grant contributed to providing the resources needed to hold the gathering and formally launch the Intertribal Rights of Rivers Alliance at a ceremony at New York Climate Week last month.
Community Action Grants and Indigenous Sovereignty
While the Ponca and Kichwa nations are thousands of kilometers apart, they show how Indigenous peoples are working to ensure that their territories remain free of extractive industries, that the rights of nature are recognized by the state, and that those violating Indigenous sovereignty are held accountable. Their struggles show how Indigenous peoples continue to be at the frontlines of the fight against climate chaos and the lasting impacts of colonialism. By supporting RAN’s Community Action Grants program, you can show your solidarity with frontline communities and provide much-needed organizing support to those who are most directly impacted by climate change.