On the Dec. 8 broadcast of Democracy Now!, Amy Goodman asked her guest, 15-year-old Mohamed Axam Maumoon, youth ambassador from the Maldives Islands to the U.N. climate talks in Copenhagen, for a message to young people everywhere about what climate change meant to him. Without hesitation, Axam turned to the camera and asked, “Would you commit murder . . . even while we are begging for mercy and begging for you to stop what you’re doing, change your ways, and let our children see the future that we want to build for them?”
What does it mean to take Axam’s question seriously? For many of us in the wealthy and so-called “developed” countries of the world, it means learning about the very real and life-threatening ways that climate change is affecting some of the world’s poorest populations. From the rapidly submerging islands of the Maldives, Kirabati, and Tuvalu, to the melting permafrost in native lands across the Arctic, indigenous peoples around the world are confronting some of the worst effects of the climate crisis, despite having done so little to cause it. Axam’s question prompts us to confront the injustice of a situation in which the wealthiest 20 percent of the world’s population has been responsible for over 60 percent of global warming emissions.
The Indigenous Peoples’ Climate Summit role play grew out of the Portland Area Rethinking Schools Earth in Crisis Curriculum Workgroup and the Oregon Writing Project. It was designed to introduce students to the broad injustice of the climate crisis and to familiarize them with some of the specific issues faced by different indigenous groups around the world as they confront climate change. The role play was inspired by the actual Indigenous Peoples’ Global Summit on Climate Change, held in Anchorage, Alaska, in April 2009, when representatives from around the world exchanged experiences and observations from the front lines of climate change and agreed on a unified strategy for leading a worldwide campaign. The Anchorage Summit highlighted how indigenous peoples are combining traditional knowledge with new practices to adapt to climatic changes, and the important role that indigenous perspectives can play as the rest of the world attempts to respond and adapt to the realities of a quickly changing climate.
We wanted to give our global studies students—9th graders at Lincoln High School, a large public school serving Portland’s predominantly white, relatively prosperous west side—the opportunity to educate one another about how indigenous peoples are confronting the effects of climate change. (Although we were not team teaching, we met daily to plan the unit and to share student responses.) Following the example of the Anchorage Summit, we wanted to model a collaborative decision-making process and give voice to the concerns and solutions of groups who are often left out of international climate talks. (Even the name of the most prominent climate monitoring organization, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, marginalizes indigenous peoples, who rarely have their own national governments.) So we developed a role play in which students are divided into small groups, each of which represents an indigenous group that attended the Anchorage Summit. We wrote a profile sheet for each group that details how they are being affected by climate change. The groups have an opportunity to discuss their own situation, teach and learn from the other groups, and, finally, agree on a common list of demands.
The role play includes six groups: the Dine (Navajo), Alaska Native (including the Yup’ik and the Iñupiaq), the Bambara of sub-Saharan Africa, and indigenous groups from Kiribati (central Pacific islands), the Caribbean, and the Amazon—peoples most of our students knew nothing about. In each of the roles, indigenous people, as farmers or hunter-gatherers with intimate ties to the land, are validated and honored as legitimate observers to climate change.
Many nature shows, environmental groups, and even our own Oregon Zoo have highlighted the plight of the polar bear; and, like a word-association test, when we first brought up the issue of climate change in class, it was inevitably followed by “those poor bears” comments from our students. We built on that association by putting it in a larger perspective, with an exploration of the overall environmental consequences of climate change and the impact of these changes on the survival of peoples and cultures. For example, the Alaskan Native role includes the following passage: