Climate Week took place in New York City this year from Sept. 21-28, just before the annual meeting of the United Nations General Assembly. Just like at the annual international climate meetings known as the Conference of Parties, or COP, Climate Week has been infiltrated by the corporations that are largely responsible for creating the climate crisis that these global gatherings are meant to address. There, fossil fuel companies make side deals with governments and multinational corporations like Coca Cola and Nestle, that siphon huge amounts of water from the neediest populations, are also on hand seeking endorsements for what they say are their sustainable operations. But Climate Week still offers grassroots organizations a platform to raise the visibility of issues such as climate justice and indigenous rights.
One of those groups is 7 Directions of Service, an indigenous-led organization rooted in environmental justice and grassroots power, operating on the ancestral homelands of the Occaneechi-Saponi in rural North Carolina. Its mission is to protect Sacred Places, advocate for the legal recognition of Rights of Nature and establish a land, language and cultural center grounded in traditional Yesah teachings. The group is committed to serving as a powerful voice for the lands and waters beyond a solely human-centered view of the world.
Between The Lines’ Melinda Tuhus spoke with Dr. Crystal Cavalier-Keck, co-founder with her husband Jason Crazy Bear, of 7 Directions of Service. She made four presentations during Climate Week at the U.N. and summarizes the information shared here.
And I’m just like, this is who we have representing us. And it’s embarrassing.
The second one was talking about moving towards a rights of nature based in our legal way. So just changing the way we think legally. We are looking at these things as not as resources, but as responsibilities, right? So change the way you look at a dandelion or change the way you look at water because these are gifts that were given to us; you can’t exist without these things. And that’s what I keep saying about people are not looking at the bigger picture. If Bayer owns Monsanto, and those are two things, like they have a pharmaceutical company and then you have a toxin company. The toxin company is killing off herbs that get rid of cancers versus buy all of these cancer drugs that people can’t afford anymore. If you incorporate those dandelion leaves into your salad, it helps your body release the toxins because it’s a bitter leaf.
But when you have things like this fighting against each other, it just cancels out the everyday people. I just think back that we have elected these leaders to speak on our behalf and make the big decisions. That’s why we’re able to live our life. But now we’re getting in this because he’s not representing us. We talked about that, how we’re going to bring control back to our communities and how we’re going to have to live it in a different way so all of our communities together can unite and work together when we’re trying to fight about issues. Because if we bring it back to a responsibility to protect what’s sacred, like the earth and the water and the air that we breathe, then we will be able to understand that all of these things are a gift.
The next one, we talked about the Gulf South to Appalachia, all of these pipelines, oil refineries, the petrochemicals, all of these environmental harms that’s happening. We have to come together and fight back because it takes the fracked gas to fuel these petrochemical plants that makes everything that’s in some type of plastic bottle and saying that we have to work together.
And then the last one, at the UN Climate Week, we worked with movement rights and they’re our partners when we talk about the rights of nature. And we talked about how we really needed to dismantle and get off this fossil fuel because when you extract so much from the earth, not only are you doing a disservice below the surface, you will deplete whatever is in the earth. And so we were talking about that and how we need to bring in traditional ecological knowledge and elders from the community and just really think about this in a common sense way, in a sustainable way that’s going to sustain us to live on this earth before we destroy it.
For more information on 7 Directions of Service, visit 7directionsofservice.com.
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