Dr. Rosalee Gonzalez on Indigenous and Climate Issues
On January 30, 2020, internationally recognized indigenous scholar-activist Dr. Rosalee Gonzalez spoke at the Law School about indigenous activists’ central role in climate justice and land protection movements. Gonzalez, who is the North America Co-Coordinator for the Continental Network of Indigenous Women of the Americas and a Co-Founder of Indigenous Women Rise, also spoke about the key contributions made by indigenous women in the negotiation processes leading up to the adoption of the Paris Agreement.
As a result of indigenous peoples’ strong relationship to rivers and other features of their land, Gonzalez explained, encroaching on indigenous lands threatens the livelihoods of their communities.
She herself was tasked with identifying the needs of threatened communities for investors to fund while working as a senior researcher and consultant for Native Americans in Philanthropy. Many philanthropists, she explained, quickly became interested in the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and the Dakota Access Pipeline protests.
Standing Rock stands out among other movements in U.S. civil rights history, according to Dr. Gonzalez, because of its use of “multiple strategies.” Standing Rock used a “legal strategy” as leaders litigated and argued for treaties; a “civil disobedience strategy” as locals camped out on the area of the pipeline to “reoccupy their land” and defend “their right to use their own land;” a “political strategy” as leaders lobbied in Congress under the Obama Administration; and a “spiritual strategy.” Standing Rock, she argued, became indigenous peoples’ moment “to defend life [and] show the world how to live.”
Gonzalez emphasized that “it is easy to look abroad” to climate injustices like the burning forests in Brazil and Australia. But she urged the audience to think locally as well, about the tribes “at risk of extinction” and “vulnerable to rapid disappearance.” She highlighted the intersection between the fights for climate justice and indigenous rights, showing a video arguing that, when a resource is being exploited on a Nation’s land, indigenous people’s voices are rarely heard and their communities are often harmed.
In the video Gonzalez presented, “Mni Wiconi: The Stand at Standing Rock,” Standing Rock’s former tribal chairman David Archambault II alleged that North Dakota was looking to develop oil but hesitated to do so near a white community and opted instead for the installation of a hazardous pipeline under sacred indigenous land and waters. As a result, the video explained, over three hundred tribes from across North America congregated in Cannon Ball, North Dakota, the site of the pipe’s construction, to defend the Sioux Nations, the Arikara, the Mandan, and the Northern Cheyenne’s sacred native lands and the Missouri River’s water supply. The protests continued in the face of bulldozers and the National Guard as indigenous activists called on oil companies and the governor to end the project.
According to Gonzalez, the construction of the pipeline was a “threat to ancient burial grounds and sights of historical importance.” The protests, in her view, served as a “call to the world to stand up for the human right to clean water” because, in addition to defending their own right to self-determination, the protesters were “uniquely and intentionally” branding themselves as the “protectors of the waters.”
Gonzalez is a scholar-activist, identifying with both institutional and grassroots approaches to change. In addition to the Standing Rock protests, she discussed the importance of the first delegation of indigenous peoples to the United Nations. She felt that this first encounter in Geneva between indigenous leaders and U.N. ambassadors and officials helped establish a political relationship that enables indigenous leaders to vocalize their concerns. In the 40 years since, she believes that indigenous people have finally gained an “influential role” in the international arena.
Through the “unprecedented approach” of simultaneously “accepting, contesting and altering” the structural opportunities and constraints of the U.N. system, Gonzalez explained, indigenous activists have used formal gains to empower indigenous voices on the international stage. She cited, for example, acquiring a U.N. badge as one formal achievement that has expanded opportunities for indigenous participation. The badge guaranteed indigenous peoples’ entry into certain mechanisms of the U.N. they could not otherwise have accessed. Gonzalez emphasized that understanding “the road leading up to the Paris Agreement” requires understanding the politics and history of “getting through the gates.” She also highlighted the establishment of the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues in 2000, an advisory body to the United Nations Economic and Social Council that has helped indigenous leaders voice their demands and negotiate compromises. The Forum, Gonzales said, has provided tribes all over the world with the “opportunity to mobilize at a global scale.”
Gonzalez, herself, worked for two United Nations Secretariats — the Expert Mechanisms on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in Geneva and the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues in New York. Her work included the coordination of the United Nations’ first World Conference on Indigenous Peoples and the negotiations leading up to the Paris Agreement.
Gonzalez recalled having spoken to a group of young indigenous women who raised concerns following a conversation with Dean S. James Anaya of University of Colorado Boulder Law School, a former United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. According to Gonzalez, the women asked the Special Rapporteur why it is that when he is given an invitation to visit a country, he only visits and interviews indigenous men to discuss human rights cases. In response, according to Gonzalez, Anaya explained that it was his “priority to not only normalize, but legitimize indigenous institutions.” Because tribal councils are recognized as legitimate institutions, he chooses to visit them — even though they often consist of all male leaders. Gonzalez emphasized that today indigenous women invoke land and resource rights as well as their own individual rights in their “fight for equal representation” in tribal councils.
Gonzalez highlighted the disconnect between women’s movements and indigenous women’s rights. As indigenous women in particular have organized themselves into a global network, Gonzalez explained, they have challenged their exclusion from other coalitions and creatively used existing frameworks of rights. For example, she said, when indigenous women first began organizing on the international level, women’s movements did not include “the full diversity of women.” She described how members of the Commission on the Status of Women have wanted to steer the conversation towards economic justice and gender equity. Indigenous women, she said, emphasized that in order to consider economic justice, there needs to be greater awareness about the lack of opportunity for indigenous women in rural communities to own land, titles, and thus natural resources.
In her work on the Paris Agreement, Gonzalez was part of the human rights, women’s rights, and indigenous peoples’ rights delegations to the United Nations. “Something beautiful came of the agreement advocacy through those three constituency groups,” she said. She learned to navigate the tension…between advocating using a “human rights approach” versus a “collective rights approach.”
With the “opportunity to mobilize at a global scale” in the past decades, Gonzalez asserted that “no other social movement has accomplished what [the Indigenous peoples’ rights movement] has.”
