Solutions Driven Content

The programming content, themes, and strategies highlighted during OUR VILLAGE are based on the intersecting demands from indigenous communities and communities of color for community-driven solutions to climate change, injustice, and inequality.

The co-convening organizations of OUR VILLAGE, organised by If Not Us Then Who and in partnership with the Guardians of the Forest & the Hip Hop Caucus, are centering the programming on an intersectional framework by indigenous peoples, often fighting for rural lands and territories, and communities of color, often fighting for clean air and water in the neighborhoods and cities where they live. These fights transcend protecting land, air and water, and are part of holistic demands for safe, healthy, just, and prosperous communities on a sustainable planet.

The growing coalition of partners joining OUR VILLAGE are committed to contributing to the space via this framework.

Themes

1. Ending Violence
2. Direct Funding & Finance
3. Consent & Community Driven Decision Making
4. Ancestral Knowledge and Cultural Leadership
5. Ownership & Recognition

5 Demands Framework

This framework is based on the 5 demands that have been developed since 2013 by a coalition of Indigenous and local community partners, the Guardians of the Forest.

1. Ending Violence & Criminalization

Climate change is violent – the over 4,000 deaths in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria; the over 6 million deaths a year globally from air pollution; the hundreds of environmental defenders murdered every year for taking stands against environmental destruction. The violence of climate change and environmental injustice intersects with the structural violence of poverty and the daily violence in communities that comes with fighting for survival. Ending violence is not well integrated into the climate movement, yet it is the daily reality of our communities, and no solution is complete without ending violence. A sustainable planet means life is valued and protected, where Black lives, indigenous lives, women’s lives matter; where death from lung disease caused by air pollution, or death from climate disaster, or death from the bullet of an oil company’s paramilitary, or death from the bullet of an untrained police officer, are all unacceptable and are all met with powerful movements for justice.

2. Ownership & Recognition

Communities of color and indigenous communities need ownership in the the clean energy economy to participate in building the vast wealth from which they have long been excluded. Communities need ownership over their ancestral land to protect it. There is clear and undeniable evidence that where indigenous people have strong rights – recognition to land, territories, and resources – there are standing forests. We need to advocate for overcoming the past and present extraction and theft of natural resources from our communities by creating the right policy environments, the access to capital, and the transfers of knowledge necessary for our communities to realize ownership of resources, land, and clean energy business.

3. Consent & Community Driven Decision Making

When decisions are made about their forests and ancestral lands, communities have the right to free, prior, and informed consent. They should also be allowed to say no when governments and corporations threaten their livelihoods. Indigenous peoples are the best guardians of the natural world, but they are under siege from a great and growing hunger for new sources of food, fuel, mineral wealth, and water. When democracy is undermined and voters of color are disenfranchised and deterred from the polls, when the fossil fuel industry’s money in our political process wields undue influence over elected officials, communities’ voices and interests are subjugated or ignored. Communities are the best at solving their own problems, but they cannot realize solutions without real access to all stages of decision making processes.

4. Respect Ancestral Knowledge & Cultural Leadership

To build a movement big enough and broad enough to change our cycle of over consumption – to transition our world off of fossil fuels onto clean energy – we need everyone. People join movements in which they can see themselves, movements that touch their hearts and move their spirits, movements that speak their languages and reflect their experiences. Culture is the driver of bringing people together, it is the shorthand we use to know that we are part of the same group and that we are connected. Culture is the carrier of wisdom and knowledge across generations. Respecting cultures, uplifting cultures, and centering cultures is the same as respecting, uplifting and centering communities. And what history tells us is that in successful social and political movements the leaders who create, shape, share, and carry culture in all its forms – language, art, music, entertainment, tradition, dance, storytelling, film, fashion, sports, expression – are more than spokespeople, they are strategists and organizers. Respect and understanding of ancestral knowledge is a vital to the long term health of our planet.