Cries from Our Forests — Listening to Eriel Tchekwie Deranger
By Cyndi Fontyn
Eriel Tchekwie Deranger is a Dënesųłiné woman (ts’ékui), member of the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation and mother of two. She comes from a family of Indigenous rights advocates fighting for the recognition, sovereignty and autonomy of their Indigenous lands and territories in what is now known as Treaty 8, Canada.
Eriel is a co-founder of the organization, Indigenous Climate Action (ICA), and formally stepped into the role of Executive Director in 2017. Prior to ICA, Eriel worked with her First Nation on the Indigenous Tar Sands campaign — challenging the expansion of Alberta’s Tar Sands and bringing international recognition to issues in her territory. As part of her role she brought international recognition to issues in her territory with celebrities like Leonardo DiCaprio, Darren Aronofsky, Neil Young, Daryl Hannah, James Cameron and many others, drawing attention across the globe.
Recently, at COP26 in Glasgow, UK, Eriel was invited to participate at the Real World Leaders on Climate session organized by Lily Cole, Flourishing Diversity and Goals House.
In response to Farhana Yamin’s question: “What is the one thing you want to see the COP do?”, Eriel had this to say:
“My home and territory is inundated with the Alberta tar sands, the largest industrial project on Planet Earth. But to me, it is a place of beauty: a place full of medicine, full of stories, and full of the things that brought my culture, my identity, and who I am to life. My lands and territories are being ripped and torn apart for tar sands, for oil sands.
There were rivers that I used to swim and play in as a child that are completely gone altogether because these oil and gas companies drain our river systems to extract the oil from the ground. The process is not like anything you’ve ever seen before. For one barrel of oil, it takes four barrels of fresh water from our river systems to extract tar sands. To create one barrel of oil, you need three barrels of natural gas to produce one barrel of tar sands. This oil is going across the globe because we have hit rock bottom in our addictions to fossil fuels.
We stand up, we are resilient. We walk even further for our water. We fight even harder for our voices, but here in these spaces (COP26), we don’t have a seat at the table.
What it means to be in relationship with the natural world, to know what it means, to understand the stories of the water, the stories of the land, the stories of the sky, the stories of who we are as indigenous peoples and how those stories provide us answers and pathways to solutions that are not locked in markets and capitalism: systems of domination and war and violence, but in relationship and reciprocity with the land and with each other.
I once heard from my Sámi sister from Norway, she said ‘We, as indigenous people are not jam or jelly, we are not to be preserved and consumed. We cannot afford the continued co-optation of indigenous peoples and our knowledge. We need to be empowered to have a seat at the table and to speak for ourselves.’”
Communications pioneer, Matthew Freud then asked the question:
“It strikes me that COP, and actually Goals House, is not about individual agendas. It’s about a collective imperative. If the 193 countries come here with their own agenda, then they’ll leave with their own agenda and very little will be achieved. The question is what is the collective goal? Where’s the collective hope? From all of the different issues and problems that we’re trying in our different ways as activists to address through the global goals, but specifically for the people on the stage, how do you bring all these very different, nature driven, but geographically specific issues into a single and amplified voice?”
Eriel responded by saying,
“The reality is that we all brought one issue to the table: and the issue was that systems of capitalism and colonialism have robbed us of our dignity and our ability to enter into these spaces. We are coming with one unified voice as indigenous peoples, that there is something fundamentally wrong with these structures and systems. We are bringing one unified message. Not many. It is one message: We need to reconnect with our place in the natural world and understand our roles and responsibilities on this planet.”
Follow Eriel on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter.
Lily Cole recently spoke to Eriel for her podcast bonus episode: What the Shell is Going On?
Eriel is also featured on the podcast episode: New Year Ancient Wisdom: Indigenous Listening. Are we commodifying the sacred? Feat. indigenous leaders, activists, a Lord and a Prince.
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Main image credit: Alice Aedy.
