Back in January, I was asked to present on the topic of food sovereignty and climate change for the International Funders for Indigenous Peoples conference. As I was mulling over what to say, it dawned on me that most issues and threats that indigenous communities are facing today are quite similar, regardless of where they live. Indigenous peoples all over the world have to deal with the fallout from climate change, land grabbing, pollution, and encroaching industrialization.

The regions where I work – Siberia, the Russian Far East, and the Russian Arctic – are areas where people live in very harsh climate conditions and their food systems are perfectly adapted to their environment. Native peoples in the North have access to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods. They obtain their food from nature by foraging, collecting roots and berries, catching fish, and harvesting animals.

Indigenous children take part in the process of fishing and drying large Salmon catches.

A couple of years ago I learned an important lesson about the connection between food and indigenous cultures when I was invited to have dinner with an Inupiat family in Nome, Alaska. That evening I tried my first walrus, whale, and caribou, and I listened to stories about the lives and history of the Inupiat people.

The Pacific Walrus is an important part of Inupiat diet and culture.

Most importantly, though, I was reminded that for many Native communities in the North food is not just energy in the form of calories, but an integral part of a system of beliefs that connects the individual to the community and to nature. There is a saying, “If you take away our food, you take away our soul.” If you take away walrus from Inupiat people, there will be no Inupiat people – physically, culturally, and spiritually.

The Pacific walrus, along with many other food sources, is threatened by increasing Arctic development and climate change, which is melting  Arctic ice and destroying walrus habitat. Sadly, the loss of traditional food sources is already a reality for indigenous communities in the Arctic. That’s why we work to raise awareness that the Arctic is not just a treasure trove of natural resources waiting to be exploited by corporations like Shell Oil. It’s a region where indigenous peoples have created thriving subsistence lifestyles that depend on intact local ecosystems and healthy wildlife.

I believe that indigenous communities deserve to thrive, not just barely survive as melting Arctic ice and resource extraction projects destroy their homes and local food systems. That’s why Pacific Environment works closely with Native communities in the Russian and Alaskan Arctic to protect Native food sources and cultural traditions from the threats of climate change and industrial development.

Rodion Sulyandziga was able to breathe a sigh of relief last week when Russia’s Ministry of Justice announced that the country’s leading indigenous organization would be allowed to operate again. For Rodion, an indigenous Udege from the Russian Far East, the Association of Indigenous Peoples of the North, or RAIPON, represents a life’s work fighting for the rights of Russia’s indigenous communities.

RAIPON’s reinstatement is the result of a four-month struggle against Russia’s legal bureaucracy, in which Pacific Environment, and our supporters, played a key role. “On behalf of RAIPON,” says Rodion, “I would like to express my deepest gratitude to all those who have been with us during these difficult days and months, who have expressed solidarity, who did not keep silent, and who did not turn their backs. Thank you for your involvement and solidarity. This is a collective achievement.”

Within hours of RAIPON’s suspension by Russian authorities in November 2012, Rodion and Pacific Environment strategized outreach to key stakeholders and decision makers. For example, Pacific Environment engaged a broad network of environmental and indigenous rights NGOs for a joint appeal to Senior Arctic Officials, which called on the Russian Government to reinstate RAIPON’s status within Russia so it could continue to fulfill its critical role as a permanent participant of the Arctic Council. We also mobilized over 1,500 of our supporters to write to President Putin and ask him to stop the silencing of indigenous voices in Russia.

RAIPON’s suspension belongs in the broader context of increasing government pressure on civil society organizations. And it was only the latest in a series of governmental measures designed to gain greater control over the vast, fossil fuel-rich territories of the Far North. These areas are mainly populated by indigenous peoples and federal and regional actions are increasingly targeting traditional forms of economic activity like subsistence hunting and fishing to weaken local cultures and traditions and undermine indigenous opposition to the government’s Arctic development plans.

RAIPON is not only the most influential organization defending Russia’s indigenous communities, but also the only organization advocating for indigenous rights at international organizations, including, besides the Arctic Council, the United Nations Environment Program and the Norwegian Barents Secretariat.

RAIPON vocally opposes the government’s grab for fossil fuels in the Far North, which is mainly populated by indigenous peoples.

Now that RAIPON is reinstated, Rodion and his team will continue their fight to protect Russia’s indigenous communities from irresponsible and illegal resource development and destructive corporate practices. And at Pacific Environment, we will continue collaborating with one of our most important allies in our battle to protect both the Alaskan and Russian Arctic from resource extraction projects, oil spills, and industrial pollution.

Yu Chao is an organizer with Green Camel Bell, one of Pacific Environment’s partners in China.

At the stage of Flower Theater in Lanzhou City, Gansu Province, a group of environmental volunteers engaged in a strange but wonderful rehearsal. Each of them took a deep breath, and then…well, if you closed your eyes you might hear breezes whispering in your ears, or the symphony of a lush virgin forest, a variety of birds flying around you. Or it might sound like a farm, bustling with happy cattle and sheep. The volunteers were playing and experiencing nature using their own voices.

Environmental advocacy on river pollution is a critical issue in China, but advocacy efforts often fall flat. In my experience, part of the challenge is that touting slogans about environmental protection does little to change peoples’ consciousness. If you want more people to engage in protecting the environment, you have to first help them develop a relationship with nature, and a love of the environment. This year our organization wanted to try something a little different: we wanted to make the concept of environmental protection root in peoples’ hearts. We hoped that through community theater we could help foster this kind of real awareness of the environment.

Environmental volunteers dancing in Lanzhou.

With the help from American Allegra Fonda-Bonardi, who graduated from Oberlin College and came to Lanzhou with the support of a Compton Mentor Fellowshop, Green Camel Bell explored how to use community theater in Lanzhou as a new way of doing environmental education. Green Camel Bell recruited about 30 local children and their parents as volunteers and actors for our first community theater event. Allegra taught us a series of theater games, based on the work of Hector Aristizabal, which helped participants create their own environmental stories and act them out. Rehearsals continued for a month while the participants created their own scripts and stage props. “This is our own story, and we like playing games together with Teacher Allegra,” one young participant told me. The children performed their final piece during the Chinese New Year Celebration at the Lanzhou Environmental Protection Agency.

Later, Green Camel Bell recruited 20 new volunteers from different backgrounds to form a community theater education team called “Bean Sprouts.” The first piece highlighted the reality of water pollution in the Yellow River, showing how and why the river has become so polluted. But the end result was a drama that was in my opinion a bit boring and did little to arouse peoples’ sympathy. So we then tried to encourage more innovative ideas and performances that would do more to wake up peoples’ hearts.

Allegra helped us play interesting games to inspire new ideas. For example, we had actors perform nature – which resulted in the loud scene I described. In this game participants took a deep breath, and then let out a long a continuous call, until their breath ran out. Then another breath and call, then another. At first, everyone sounded kind of mechanical, but gradually magical things happened as we tuned into each other and the environment around us. We realized we could change our sound to harmonize with each other and our surroundings. As one volunteer described, “Sometimes we feel like being the ocean, sometimes we are flying across forests and grasslands. When someone cries like a bird, a variety of other animal sounds follow, and we are suddenly transported into a vibrant jungle.” Weeks after these exercises, the volunteers were still reflecting on the feeling of man and nature combined—something they rarely get to experience in their everyday lives.

After three months of practice, Allegra, the Bean Sprouts, and Green Camel Bell organized a forum in Lanzhou on environment education through community theate,  the first event of its kind in mainland China. Hector Aristizaba, as well as Spanish community drama education expert Alessia Cartoni and other experts from Hong Kong came to carry out a week of workshops and trainings.

Brother Mao was walking along the Xiangtan River near his home of Xiangtan, Hunan Province, when he noticed thick red sewage streaming into the river from a nearby chemical plant. He quickly whipped out his cell phone and snapped a picture of the chemical assault on his town’s water supply. Then he uploaded it to Weibo—China’s Twitter— where it was immediately re-tweeted 4,000 times with 2,000 personal replies.

Brother Mao tweeted this picture of red sewage spilling into the Xiangtan River, creating a local media storm and eventually shutting down the polluting factory.

Local news outlets quickly picked up on the flurry of social media activity. Reporters wrote several stories about people’s passionate response to Brother Mao’s tweet and about the polluters responsible for dumping toxic waste into the Xiang River. The public outcry soon prompted an investigation by Xiangtan’s local Environmental Protection Bureau, which shut down the polluting factory, followed by an unprecedented public apology from the company chairman.

Brother Mao’s tweet led to testing of the chemical sewage overflow into the Xiangtan River in Hunan Province.

Brother Mao is a leader in the Xiangtan Environmental Volunteers Association, which is a core member of the “Mother Xiang River Network,” created by Green Hunan, an environmental group fighting water pollution in Hunan Province. Green Hunan recruits ordinary citizens to become active watchdogs and trains them to identify water pollution, take samples, and use modern mapping technology and social media to force polluters to clean up their act.

In China, over 70 percent of lakes and rivers are polluted and pollution accidents happen almost daily. Pacific Environment works with a robust network of community-based environmental groups to address the country’s water pollution crisis. We provide grants, programmatic guidance, and technical support to help grassroots activists grow struggling volunteer and student groups into professional organizations that win major environmental victories.

Once a year in September, we host an annual coalition meeting. This year we brought together 15 partner groups in the city of Hangzhou on China’s central coast to amplify the impact of our water pollution work. During a water monitoring field trip around Hangzhou, our partners tested innovative data collection technologies that will help them increase people power on the ground by engaging ordinary citizens in grassroots activism. Using smart phones, participants learned to enter pollution data directly onto an online water pollution map and tested Crowdmap, an online platform for simple data and map sharing.

Local grassroots activists learning the latest techniques to test water and collect and share pollution data.

With more and more water monitoring techniques becoming easily accessible to ordinary citizens, many of our partners are stepping up their efforts to adopt our successful volunteer network model. They are reaching out to local volunteer associations, college student groups, and neighbors to help them monitor local water pollution, focus media attention on polluters, and work with local government regulators to curb water pollution and hold polluters accountable for the damage they cause. The bigger the network, the greater the chance that one day every Chinese citizen will be able to enjoy clean and healthy rivers.

The State of Grassroots Environmental Activism in China: An Interview with Zhao Zhong.

The Hawaiian culture places great emphasis on the word “Aloha,” which means love, peace, compassion, and charity. Hawaiians greet and bid farewell to their guests with Aloha. Unfortunately, there was no Aloha at this year’s APEC Summit (Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation) in Honolulu, Hawaii.  Sadly, a local Hawaiian youth was killed on the first day of the summit after scuffling with a U.S. federal agent who was hired as a security guard for the multi-day event. This caused bewilderment and a wave of protests from locals.

Honolulu, normally a peaceful vacation town, was not very friendly during the week of the summit and seemed to escalate into chaos. Roads were closed for world leaders and their entourages, causing massive traffic jams. According to witnesses, just the Chinese delegation alone, arrived with 1,000 members and that was only one of the 21 delegations in attendance. Thousands of armed soldiers and federal agents patrolled the perimeter of the tourist part of Honolulu-Waikiki, where the summit took place. Displaying weapons to cause fear in peaceful people is, unfortunately, a common practice in many countries. The meeting was held on Hawaii, far from the US mainland, where large-scale protests were unlikely. Yet, authorities and the APEC planning committee apparently decided to take special measures in light of recent Occupy Movement Protests in most large US cities.  To give you a sense of how much security was there, the US government spent $44 million to prepare for the summit, including $18 million for police and $10 million for “contingency expenses” such as 700 thousand units of non-lethal weapons, including 25 thousand pepper sprays, and even 3 thousand tasers, all purchased by American taxpayers.

(more…)

I think I am one of the luckiest people out there to be doing the work I am very passionate about, being able to travel, meeting some of the most wonderful people around the globe and being able to connect those people in order to make positive change.

I recently traveled to Nome, Alaska for the Beringia Days Conference organized by the Shared Beringian Heritage Program of National Park Service (NPS). The conference was first held in 1997 and since then it alternated between both sides of the Bering Strait. This year it was Alaska’s turn to host the conference. Nome welcomed more than 130 people.  Among them were native people of Alaska and Chukotka, Russian and American scholars, researchers, environmentalists, and representatives of government and non-governmental organizations.

The goal of the conference was to bring together various stakeholders for discussions around issues affecting communities both in Chukotka and Alaska. Some of the major topics covered during the conference were international cooperation, creation of the Shared Beringia Heritage Trans-boundary Protected Area, preservation of culture and language, youth programs, environmental issues including resource extraction, increased shipping, and pollution. Special attention was paid to marine mammal research and impacts of climate change on subsistence resources of indigenous peoples.

(more…)

By Rosemary Ahtuangaruak

As an Inupiat who lives on the coast of the Arctic Ocean, I live a traditional lifestyle — hunting, fishing, whaling, gathering, and sharing our traditional way of life as our elders taught me. It is my duty to ensure the lifestyle that was passed down throughout generations continues in the face of multiple threats, including increased shipping.

As sea ice continues to recede in the Arctic, we are seeing an increase in the vessels that travel through our ocean. These ships can harm the marine environment with increased noise and pollution. Currently, the International Maritime Organization (IMO) is developing a mandatory set of regulations for vessels traveling in Arctic waters. However, they are doing it with little input from the people who will be most impacted by increased shipping.

Indigenous peoples who live a traditional way of life have an inherent right to make decisions about regulations that will impact us. I am calling on the U.S. delegation to the IMO, who has an obligation to consult with Tribes, to guarantee our concerns are addressed.

Last week, Pacific Environment successfully concluded one of three annual exchanges that support our programmatic efforts and provide opportunities for our partner organizations from Russia to gain new perspectives and build organizational capacity. The purpose of the exchange was to bring 4 -5 indigenous leaders and scholars working on indigenous issues from Kamchatka and Yakutia to North America to learn about sacred sites protection in the United States. We invited two of our longtime partners from Kamchatka, native Itelmen women Nina Zaporotskaya and Nastya Chukhman, along with Venera Sukhareva, an indigenous Koryak and the chair of the local Indigenous Association. Joining them were two indigenous Sakha peoples; Valentina Dmitrieva, a 20-year veteran of the environmental movement, and Viliam Yakovlev, an ethnographer and a cultural expert.

Our participants met with Native American tribal and NGO leaders in New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, and South Lake Tahoe to learn about of the methodology of protecting sacred sites and indigenous lands. During the exchange, our Russian participants convened with their peers from the Navajo, Acoma, Washoe, Paiute, and Hopi nations to share experiences and learn from each other.  Our Russian guests gained first-hand knowledge of how sacred sites and indigenous lands are protected  and managed in the United States.  Participants learned the tools needed to educate members of their local communities about sacred sites protection, how to lead efforts to protect sacred sites in Russia, and how to facilitate intercultural exchanges between native communities in the United States and indigenous communities in Russia.

(more…)

This year I had the opportunity to attend the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues which was held in New York City from May 16th – 27th. In addition, my name was put forward by Chickaloon Village Tribal Council members to the Tribal Link Foundation who sponsored their annual three day Project Access Permanent Forum training. I had the honor of attending both the training as well as the first few days of the Permanent Forum.

The Permanent Forum is one of three UN bodies that are mandated to deal specifically with indigenous peoples’ issues. The others are the Expert Mechanism on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights and fundamental freedoms of indigenous Peoples.

The Permanent Forum is an advisory body to the Economic and Social Council with a mandate to discuss indigenous issues related to economic and social development, culture, the environment, education, health and human rights.  According to its mandate, the Permanent Forum will:

1)  Provide expert advice and recommendations on indigenous issues to the Council, as well as to programs, funds and agencies of the United Nations, through the Council.

2) Raise awareness and promote the integration and coordination of activities related to indigenous issues within the UN system.

3) Prepare and disseminate information on indigenous issues. (more…)

Nearly 300 years ago, one of the first researchers of the Kamchatka Peninsula, George Stelleronce wrote:

“Kamchatka lives almost solely on fish. If you hit the water with a spear you rarely miss a fish.  Fishing nets or seines are useless in Kamchatka for that reason.  It’s impossible to drag them ashore, they tear because ofthe abundance of fish.”

Many years ago, it seemed that the salmon would last forever.  However, today we know that all natural resources are limited, and Kamchatka’s salmon need protection.  So what is the current state of Kamchatka salmon?  The Kamchatka Branch of the Pacific Institute of Geography has published extensively on the topic. (more…)