Melina Laboucan-Massimo:
You fly out of the airport area and you see the beauty, the initial beauty of the boreal, and then as you get more north going towards the mines, you start seeing Mordor, no longer forest, basically complete deforestation down into the Earth’s core.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
I am Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant, and this is a different kind of nature show, a podcast about the human drama of saving animals. This season we’re talking to all kinds of nature advocates from a paleoanthropologist who hunts fossils in conflict zones to someone who helped save an endangered species while in prison. We’re going to hear from real life heroes with widely different expertise and life experiences about what led them to be champions for the natural world. What transformation did they go through to create change within themselves, their community, and the world? Together, we’ll find out how these ordinary people fell in love with nature and became their most extraordinary selves. This is Going Wild. Today, I’m talking to Lubicon Cree climate activist and renewable energy entrepreneur, Melina Laboucan-Massimo.
Melina Laboucan-Massimo:
[foreign language 00:01:41]. Thank you for having me today. My name is Melina Laboucan-Massimo, that’s my language, nehinaw, also known as the Cree language.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
After experiencing firsthand the harm that extractive industries pose to the land and the lives of Indigenous peoples, Melina dedicated her life to fighting the atrocities of colonialism by campaigning internationally on the impacts of resource extraction and advocating for energy literacy and Indigenous rights. She’s also outspoken in highlighting how resource extraction is inextricably linked to violence against women and the ongoing crisis of murdered and missing Indigenous women in North America. And just a heads-up to our listeners before we jump into the episode, my conversation with Melina will touch on difficult topics about violence against women.
So Melina, before you became who you are today, a climate advocate, this fierce protector of mother nature, you’ve always had a deep relationship to nature in the land, and you grew up pretty far north in what’s today called Alberta Canada. But can you tell me what that was like? What was it like growing up and in particular in your Lubicon Cree community in Little Buffalo?
Melina Laboucan-Massimo:
Little Buffalo is about eight hours north of, if you’ve ever been to the city of Calgary. So it’s about an hour drive from Peace River, from the nearest hospital where I was born. My community is a very small remote community, especially when I was born, until, actually, 10 years ago there wasn’t running water and there was actually just a all-weather road being built in. So before that, there was not.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
As a young child growing up in her remote territory, being with nature was a way of life for Melina and her family.
Melina Laboucan-Massimo:
It just felt so peaceful, the times that I had the privilege of being in the horse and wagon with my grandparents or on the land or just even in the backyard, because in the reserve your backyard is the forest, so there’s no fences. You go outside and there’s trees out there, and then it just keeps going into the boreals.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
The town of Little Buffalo is surrounded by the boreal forest that stretches across the northern parts of North America. This huge expanse of woodland covered by coniferous and deciduous trees, mosses, and wetlands is home to some of the most majestic mammals in North America, like elk, moose, wolves, and even bears. Growing up in this landscape in the ’80s, there were still people back then who are living off the land in a very traditional way.
Melina Laboucan-Massimo:
We’ve lived off of the forest for millennia, and so we know the berries and the medicines that grow and we gather.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
She was lucky enough to experience this firsthand from the elders in her family, especially her nimosôm and nôhkom, that’s grandfather and grandmother in Cree.
Melina Laboucan-Massimo:
My nimosôm, he would be gone for days, weeks, at a time into the forest to go hunting or trapping. I remember eating what he would catch from the land. Of course, moose was a huge sustenance food, and still is for all of us. The way in which we harvest animals is it’s very ceremonial, it’s an honor and respect for that life, and every single piece of that sacrifice of that animal is used. Nothing is thrown away. If you were able to take down a moose, you shared it with the whole community, you shared it with the elders. That’s an integral teaching, and that’s something that I feel like I was privileged to be able to experience as a child because not every Indigenous child had that.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
A lot of Indigenous children didn’t get to experience a traditional way of life that Melina was able to glean from her grandparents and her dad.
Melina Laboucan-Massimo:
My dad was also one of the last children raised in a traditional way in that generation, where a lot of children his age were taken from their families and put into residential schools, which were really horrible places for children to live. There was abuse from all different kinds, from physical, emotional, spiritual, sexual, starvation, medical experiments. It was a hellhole for children to live in.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
It was only because of Melina’s grandparents’ deep knowledge of the land that her dad was able to remain safe for a big part of his childhood.
Melina Laboucan-Massimo:
So my dad was hidden from residential school, Indian agents, that would literally come and forcibly remove these children kicking and screaming. Even though my grandparents would’ve been arrested, it was basically a jailable offense to keep your children in your own home, my nimosôm was a trapper and so knew the back areas very well, where a lot of non-Indigenous peoples would not. Every fall, my nimosôm, his dad would say, “Oh, okay, well, we’re going to the trap line,” and my dad would be like, “Oh yeah, okay, let’s go to the trap line.” So they go with the horses and go out into the bush, as we call it, into our homeland. That’s how he was able to be hidden in the forest in the trees, and my nimosôm wouldn’t come back until they knew he was safe and he would come back to the community and every single kid was gone, all of his siblings and all of his cousins, he was the only child left.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
So for the first nine years of his life, every fall Melina’s dad would go live in the forest with his father to hide for months at a time until he was old enough to not be sent away to the residential boarding schools.
Melina Laboucan-Massimo:
My dad talks about how it was a very sad time. Every fall he would get, people call it seasonal depression, but he would get this very depressed feeling of he would miss his siblings immensely and his cousins, all the children his age, he basically grew up with elders. And that’s how he learned a lot of the old stories, stories that have been passed down through generations. That was his traditional education, so he carries those with him. And so for me to have the privilege of going into our traditional territory with my nôhkom and nimosôm, my grandparents, that lived off the land until they passed away, was something that not all Indigenous children had access to.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
On top of this cultural erasure, as Melina grew older, she became more and more aware of all the other ways her community’s way of life was systematically destroyed as extractive industries continued to flood into her community.
Melina Laboucan-Massimo:
I was one of the last generations that was able to experience what my grandparents lived their entire lives. There was fracking, logging, conventional oil and gas. So it was all of the type of extractivism that you can think of in and around our community and many northern remote communities in Alberta.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
One of the worst forms of these resource extractions is called tar sands, or oil sands, which is different from the oil drilling most of us are more familiar with.
Melina Laboucan-Massimo:
The tar sands takes up 141,000 square kilometers. That’s massive, right? So one mine is equal to Washington DC, and there’s multiple mines. So it’s quite immense. It’s one of the biggest industrial project on the face of the planet.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
Because of the massive scale of these mining operations, you can really only get a sense of its enormity from above. And over the years, Melina was able to get a firsthand experience of this aerial view because, as part of her activism work, she would organize helicopter flyovers with media crews to capture photos and videos of the tar sands mining operations from over 3000 feet above, using them for her campaign efforts to raise awareness about the impact of the tar sands. And what she saw was deeply unsettling.
Melina Laboucan-Massimo:
You fly out of the airport area and you see the beauty, initial beauty of the boreal, and then as you get more north going towards the mines, you start seeing Mordor, no longer forest, basically complete deforestation down into the Earth’s core. And you just see the biggest dump trucks in the world that are three stories tall, and then you also see where they basically put all of the byproduct. There’s these tailing ponds that look as big as really big lakes, like hundreds of square kilometers of just toxic sludge. If birds land on it, they die, and so we’ve talked to workers, anecdotally, where their job is just to pull out dead birds.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
Just an absolute nightmare. Oh my gosh. At the time, when the tar sands operations started flooding her community, there was very little information about what tar sands mining was. There was no conversation around the fact that there was this switch from conventional oil to expansive, harder to reach oil.
Melina Laboucan-Massimo:
When I was growing up, it was just called the rigs. I had some friends that worked on the rigs. One of them passed away because it’s a very dangerous job. And so I actually had to go to do my master’s in environmental studies to be able to study the tar sands. A lot of times people would say, “Oh, what’s your research on?” And I said, “Oh, I work on the issues of tar sands impacts.” And they said, “Tar sands and Jane? Tar Sands the movie?” They didn’t even know the word tar sands. And so this is the dirtiest form of oil on the planet, and yet nobody knew about it. They called it the bottom of the barrel for a reason, because it is literally just sand, silt, clay.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
Unlike conventional oil that gets pumped out of the ground, the reason it’s called tar sands or oil sands is because the oil, in this case, has to be extracted out of the mixture of sand, silt, and clay, and only a small amount of oil, about 18%, comes out of this process.
Melina Laboucan-Massimo:
So you can imagine how water-intensive, chemical-intensive to extract it, and then also greenhouse gas-intensive it is.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
For a long time, impacted communities had no information on how these tar sands operations would impact the long-term health of the people and other beings living in the area.
Melina Laboucan-Massimo:
There was literally zero information being shared with communities, but Indigenous peoples are so connected to our homelands that we know the changes from the land, from the animals, from the trees, from the water. So people knew that there was something amiss, because women started miscarrying.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
People in Melina’s community continue to live in this state of alert with little information to go on regarding the health and environmental impacts that extractive industries had. But in 2011, all of this came to a head when a massive tragedy struck the Little Buffalo community, and there was no denying just how catastrophic the impact of oil extraction was.
On the morning of April 29th, 2011, the people of little Buffalo started feeling sick from very strong fumes. At first they thought it was a propane leak, but when they went outside to get away from the smell, it was actually worse outside.
Melina Laboucan-Massimo:
So my aunt, she texted and she said, “We can’t breathe. Our eyes are burning. Our stomachs are turning. We don’t know what’s happening. Can you find out?” So I went online, I was looking online, no news stories, no government reports. Nothing. The only thing I found was a business website that said there was a spill and a pipeline had been shut down for business purposes. And so I started calling around, but they won’t let us into our territory to even see the immensity of the spill, and so I started calling around to helicopter companies to be able to do a flyover, and they were literally hanging up on me. They’re like, “Oh, I know who you are. We’re not going to fly you over. Click.”
So we finally found somebody that worked with the logging industry that was willing to fly us over, and we flew over and it was horrible. I cried. It was just oil everywhere. And you could see that the oil had consumed beaver dams. People had saw bears and cubs, the wildlife that were coming into contact with this toxic substance.
I actually still feel sick in my body if I actually tap into how I felt, not just sick from visually seeing, you’re just like, “How is this even humanly possible?” But also physically sick because the smell was so overwhelming and the fumes would like on the community and just stay there and you could just smell it. It was worse at nighttime because it was when the air wasn’t really flowing, so people were just having trouble breathing.
There was a federal election happening at the time, so they didn’t want it in the news cycle. So they released the information after the federal government was elected. And so then, five days after, they released the information to the community. The fact that there was no evacuation for a spill so close was also something that was pretty enraging for me. No one comes, no government officials or company comes. They basically just send a one-page fact sheet and say, “Oh, FYI, you’re beside one of the largest oil spills in Alberta and Canada’s history.”
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
The effects of this spill were disastrous and long-lasting, 28,000 barrels, or over 1 million gallons, of crude oil contaminated miles of dense forests and soaked into the vegetation, aquifers, and wetlands
Melina Laboucan-Massimo:
Going back after the company had “remediated” 15 months later, and you could still see just dead zones. There was no life. There’s no biodiversity that’s happening within that system. That means that that area’s not well.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
And even years after the initial spill, the land, the wildlife, and the community are still feeling its impact.
Melina Laboucan-Massimo:
Many hunters across the north say this, “There’s less and less moose, elk, deer, and caribou.” My dad, who’s a hunter, one time took down a moose and my dad said the carcass of the moose was yellow.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
I mean, that is shocking to me. But in case any of our listeners don’t necessarily know what moose meat is supposed to look like when it’s healthy, could you explain, “Healthy moose meat is this color.”
Melina Laboucan-Massimo:
Healthy moose meat is vibrant red, like deep, rich colors. And yeah, to see a yellow insides of a carcass of a moose is just so foreign. A lot of the fumes that waif into the community also fall onto vegetation that animals are eating, onto berries that people pick, and so that means that this moose had ate vegetation that basically made it very ill. And so this is what we’re seeing across the north.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
This devastation to the ecosystem and the animals that had reverberated through Melina’s community in Alberta became a turning point for her. Melina realized that help for her community wasn’t going to come from the outside, and if there was going to be environmental change, she would have to be the one to find the solution.
Melina Laboucan-Massimo:
I really wanted to start building and seeing what’s the visioning that we can change? We can say, “No, no, no,” but what does the “yes” look like? And so for me it was, “What does this look like on the ground?”
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
We’ll hear more about Melina’s vision for a just transition to renewable energy after the break. Today, I’m talking to climate justice activist Melina Laboucan-Massimo, who, for years, witnessed extractive industries wreak havoc on her Lubicon Cree community in northern Alberta. For Melina, the last straw was the pipeline oil spill that happened six miles from her hometown of Little Buffalo. The tragedy in Little Buffalo became a catalyst for Melina. She wanted to raise awareness on just how bad the impact of tar sands mining was, so she started ringing the alarm bells and campaigning to educate people across North America and Europe about the reality of what was going on.
Melina Laboucan-Massimo:
I developed PowerPoints and presented them everywhere at town meetings and universities and just so many places, and yet it just seems like it doesn’t matter. I can talk until I’m blue in the face and just say, “These are the issues,” and yet people refuse to stop this addiction to oil. And that was a big eye-opening experience for me because I felt like I really wanted to start implementing solutions, because we needed a paradigm shift, but we didn’t have a path forward of, “What do those solutions look like? How are they implemented on the ground?” So I went back to finish my master’s in 2012, and in my master’s entrance thesis was to start building solar projects with Indigenous communities across the country.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
And so, through Melina’s thesis project, Sacred Earth Solar was born. She wanted to implement this shift to solar energy in her own community first, the very first Sacred Earth Solar project was powering Little Buffalo’s community health center. And to Melina, this is more than just about renewable energy, this solar project is a lifeline for the people in her community.
Melina Laboucan-Massimo:
I wanted to build into my own home community because of knowing the impacts that my family and community live. We are literally working for the industries that are destroying our homelands, and that’s the only place to receive employment because that’s the only economically-viable option for our communities. So what does other alternative look like? And so that was a part of building the 20.8 kilowatt system that powers our health center, and it’s built right beside the community school so children that have never seen solar panels can see them every day and know that that exists. It’s possible that there is alternative to oil and gas that our community is completely surrounded by. So that was exciting because even elders, my auntie who came to the solar launch, we had a ribbon cutting ceremony and a launch, and she said to me, “I never thought I would see solar panels in my life. I’d only see them on TV.” And so that was a part of bringing it to life, and for young people to really have that light bulb moment of, “Oh, there’s something more out there.”
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
Melina, one thing that I so appreciate about the activism work that you engage in is that you’re making sure to draw a very direct connection between the violence against planet earth and the violence against humans, and in particular women, Indigenous women.
Melina Laboucan-Massimo:
Yeah, it’s just a values difference, right? Because with Indigenous peoples, we see the earth as connected to us, we call her Mother Earth for a reason because Mother Earth provides everything for you and all of us to be able to have life here on the planet. We very much see her as Mother, as relational, as a way that we wouldn’t want to hurt her, just like we wouldn’t want to hurt our mother. And so when we see the colonialism of 150 years of hyperextractivism, the contamination of aquifers or the pollution into the air, we see it as violence. Violence against the land. Just like we’ve seen violence against women across North America, where we see murdered and missing Indigenous women, murdered and missing Black women. That is a major issue that we see. The connection too of violence against the land begets violence against women.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
The crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women and relatives that is taking place in Canada and across North America is not new, and more than just an epidemic, the high rates of assault and murder of Indigenous women and the lack of prosecution for those crimes is part of the wide-ranging violence that Indigenous women have experienced for centuries. And for Melina, this issue hit very close to home because her own sister Bella is one of the thousands of women who have fallen victim to this crisis.
Melina Laboucan-Massimo:
It was really a very brutal time. I was doing my master’s and also trying to find answers to her death. She was just finishing her degree and had graduated from school. We were so shocked that she had passed away, and the police just really did not help. It was very much the victim-blaming scenario where it was, “Oh, she must’ve been high risk,” and it was like, she’s literally a college graduate. It’s a really brutal experience to have to live through when you are hoping that the justice system will help you, and yet that was not our experience when Bella was killed.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
Despite years of fighting for justice for her sister and trying to find answers, to this day, over a decade later, Bella’s case remains unsolved. Bella’s unsolved case is part of a bigger pattern in the murdered and missing Indigenous women crisis. Melina and her family shared Bella’s story in the hope of affecting change.
Melina Laboucan-Massimo:
We also pushed, many families have for decades that have experienced what we have with the justice system, to have an inquiry. And that eventually happened, and our family testified in the Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women Inquiry that happened across this country.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
The Canadian National Inquiry into missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls took place from 2016 to 2019. It looked into law enforcement documents as well as community testimonies, like the one given by Melina and her family about Bella’s death. It’s very difficult to reach an accurate number of the murdered and missing Indigenous women due to a history of underreporting and failures to investigate suspicious deaths. But one Canadian government official has suggested that between 1980 and 2012, there were as many as 4,000 missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls, though the exact number is likely to be higher today. And to Melina and other Indigenous communities impacted by this crisis, it’s clear that this is a systemic injustice rooted in colonization.
Melina Laboucan-Massimo:
There has been a genocidal approach that happened across this country, where we still see people were murdered, missing, and raped, and that that continues today.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
From the oil spill that devastated her community and the continual destruction that extractive industries bring to the land, to the shocking loss of her sister, it seemed that Melina was immersed in the trauma she sought to heal. The trauma of having to constantly fight and protect. And after two decades of being immersed in the state of constant fight, Melina finally reached a breaking point.
Melina, you have been doing so much incredible and deeply meaningful work for decades now, and a lot of the time society will view high level activists or environmental protectors, they’re painted as superheroes to the public. And I wonder, for you, if you ever feel like sometimes you get praised for your strength without folks necessarily realizing these burdens that you’re carrying.
Melina Laboucan-Massimo:
Yeah, I mean, I find it interesting that a lot of times people say, “Oh, you’re so strong.” And sure, we are strong, but it’s because we have to be. There’s no other choice. We can’t just lay down and take it. And so, for me, I found urgency in the need to push where I was just working, working, working. And often it felt like not a choice to pause and take rest. It was only forced.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
And by forced Melina meant her body actually broke down.
Melina Laboucan-Massimo:
There was signs my body telling me, people even close to me, “Slow down, slow down.” And I just was like, “No, the work takes precedence.” At the time I even had bronchitis and I was still working through this reoccurring bronchitis that then eventually put my ribs out and I became bedridden, couldn’t move, lost 25 pounds, couldn’t even lift a cup of tea. It was so painful to be in my body, and I just thought, “Wow, this is where this work has brought me.” And this work is so important, I’m not saying it’s not, but I thought, “Where’s my reflection time?” For my elders to be wise? They’ve had reflection time. If I want to make it to a state of elderhood, if I have no reflection time on all of the things that I’ve gone through, how am I able to really tease out the wisdom if I’m just going to continue the same way?
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
Melina realized that continuing to ignore her own wellbeing in the name of her activism work the way she had for the past two decades was not an option, for her health and for the people around her. She needed to redefine what fighting for change looked like.
Melina Laboucan-Massimo:
We have to learn how to not only fight and push for change, but also how to heal alongside that so we’re not perpetuating the same systems of harm and trauma onto future generations. And so it was literally me needing to take a step back, still doing the work, but figuring out ways in which to do it where I am learning how to read signs of how my nervous system is reacting in a situation. And so how do we figure out ways of pause, breathing exercises, meditation, all the things that are easy to say, but hard to incorporate into your life in a way that’s meaningful and helpful for your nervous system. And so I think, for me, it’s trying to learn how to not live in a constant state of stress. And that’s hard in a world where we are in a constant state of stress. So how do we live in opposition to that?
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
And for Melina, finding a different way of being in a world that puts her and other marginalized peoples in a state of constant stress is not only a way of preserving her own health, but it’s also a long-term survival strategy, especially in the face of the impending climate crisis.
Melina Laboucan-Massimo:
Going back to Indigenous traditional teachings, even like I have sweetgrass here behind me, and I’ve heard elders talk about when we braid sweetgrass, it’s braided for a reason, and it talks about the physical, the spiritual, and the emotional. And for me, I’m responsible for the trauma work that I’ve had to live through. It’s so important, because not only am I teaching it to myself, to my son, to all those around me, but I really would hope that I’m a living example of not perpetuating the systems of harm of white supremacy that really prioritizes and uplifts hyperindividualism, hyperproductivity, and just this idea of perfectionism. And we need to find that balance and that is a part of the Indigenous values of living, and those are skill sets that will really help serve us in the impending climate crisis that we’re going to all encounter, because that’s a very stressful situation to be in, and how do we walk in ways that are responsive to that?
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
So Melina, just have to continue to applaud you because you’re doing very serious work to heal generational traumas, and to try to find more balance in your life and your lifestyle first for you, for yourself, but also to model that balance for other people. And so it brings me to ask, I was looking at your Instagram and I noticed a post you made which explained that you and your partner recently became parents literally overnight to your baby nephew. I’m wondering, can you tell me a little bit about that and also how that fits into this bigger value system that you have?
Melina Laboucan-Massimo:
We really wanted to keep him out of the system and to have a child taken like so many of our children have been taken, that was just not an option for me and my partner. It’s kind of alarming, actually, that there’s more Indigenous children in the system than there was in residential schools, so we thought there was a possibility of losing him. So to keep this child in our family, we had to fight for him. And so we made the decision to just move our lives over the mountains and go to court and become legal guardians of my little baby nephew who, yeah, now I consider my son.
Becoming overnight parents was quite different for us as people that have prioritized work. You’re now responsible for this tiny little beautiful being that you teach and they teach you accordingly, as he’s brought back a lot of joy and play into my life that I think when you’re a serious working professional, you don’t often play. And that just is so nice on the system and also on just your heart, connecting with this beautiful being. That also tests your patience very much so, especially when they learn how to scream.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
Not long after they adopted him, Melina took her son back to Little Buffalo to meet her aunts and uncles, all of whom are residential school survivors, and for her son whom they had to fight to keep out of the system, meeting his elders who survived the residential schools, it was truly a moment of joy and healing for her family.
Melina Laboucan-Massimo:
It was three generations of family and it was beautiful. I really, really wanted to make sure that every single aunt and uncle, there’s seven of them, so going from house to house and just spending time with them and being out on the lawn with them, having a fire, making some food, and just that beauty of being with family was such a precious moment and I really wanted to make sure that they met him before any of them pass away because they’re coming up into late eighties.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
Today as she continues to do the lifelong work of healing the generational trauma her family and community has endured and finding joy in raising her son. Melina carries on her work with Sacred Earth Solar to create the future. She envisions for her son, her community, and for the planet.
Melina Laboucan-Massimo:
So we just launched a massive guide that started with my research for my master’s over a decade ago called the Just Transition Guide, and it’s a guide that I wish I had 12 years ago when I started this work and I couldn’t find anything. I was like, “how do I implement these projects in community?” And there was no guide. That was a part of wanting to kind of gift that out back to the world as an offering of, “this is how I’ve been able to implement this is how other communities have been able to implement.”
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
On top of providing blueprints for local communities on how to start their own renewable energy projects like the Solar Project Melina did in her community, the Just Transition Guide made sure that equity is always at the forefront of this transition to renewable energy, promoting strategies and ways of being that ensure affordability and access so no community is left behind.
Melina Laboucan-Massimo:
It’s not just about renewable energy, Just Transition, it’s about bringing back sustainable ways of being, more eco-housing, more food security and sustainability, food sovereignty so people know how to grow their own food. It’s a whole host of ways of being in relationship with Mother Earth, because if we perpetuate the same systems of harm that we see in the fossil fuel era, we’re going to be no better.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
And in order to not fall into the same traps of colonialism’s hyperextractivism, the Just Transition Guide turns to Indigenous values and knowledge
Melina Laboucan-Massimo:
Here on Turtle Island, we call, so-called Canada, North America, was in such a pristine state of condition when European settlers came because we were living in reciprocity, we were living in harmony, and we didn’t take more than we needed from the land. And so that’s why it was such a thriving, beautiful ecosystem. It wasn’t coincidence. It was very specific to Indigenous stewardship for millennia on this land. That knowledge, it’s what has helped us live through the last ice age here in North America, and it will be what helps us live in the future. And so that’s what we try to incorporate into our work at Sacred Earth. It’s not just about transition, it’s also about living those Indigenous teachings that are so critical.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
So it absolutely makes sense to me for the environmental justice movement to really turn towards and adopt Indigenous teachings and knowledge, especially since it is Indigenous groups that have been stewarding this land and protecting it for literally millennia. And what I also want people to take from your story is this understanding that even though Indigenous communities are so strongly on the forefront of environmentalism, they shouldn’t be the only ones doing that. We talked before about how environmentalists are sometimes seen as superhuman, extra strong all the time, but ultimately, the planet isn’t going to be saved by just a few super strong, badass individuals. It takes this collective effort. And I’m curious, do you have an opinion of how particularly people from privileged groups can take on some of this work so that we don’t continue to see, in the future, just people from oppressed backgrounds doing so much of the work?
Melina Laboucan-Massimo:
Yeah, there’s definitely positions of privilege, and oftentimes people want to stay in those positions, so it’s really hard to break that barrier. And I do see the younger generation starting to question those positions of privilege that they’ve inherited, the generational wealth inheritors, and really becoming introspective and figuring out how to give back the wealth. And I think we need to see more allies like that doing that work and standing in solidarity with Black, Brown, and Indigenous peoples because there is reparations to be made.
And also, every single person that lives wherever they live, if they’re Indigenous or non-Indigenous, it doesn’t matter if you are just hiking or going for a walk in your nearest park or forest, that forest that you hike in or that place that you go to for reprieve, you have relationship with that, and therefore, with relationship, you also have a responsibility to protect where you live, protect the aquifers, protect those forests, those forests that give us air to breathe the water that gives us life. That’s where I hope for all people, that paradigm shift to know that each single being, from smallest to largest, on this planet is a sacred relation to us. And that’s definitely why you see Indigenous peoples on the front lines. They’re literally putting their bodies on the line to protect all living life.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
That’s beautiful. Doing right by those communities who’ve been historically oppressed is complicated, but necessary work, and all of us, whether we come from a privileged background or a marginalized identity, we all have a role to play in the fight for climate justice. There are all kinds of ways to be an ally and to take meaningful actions that align with our abilities, our strengths, and our joy. If you’re interested in learning more about Melina’s work, you can go to Sacred Earth Solar’s website at www.sacredearth.solar. You can also learn more about Indigenous-led climate initiatives by going to Indigenous Climate Action’s website at www.indigenousclimateaction.com.
