indigenous rights: the answer to modern environmental crises

when i first started out doing environmental work at 17, i struggled to find answers to some common critiques people would tell me:

oh you against plastic… what about your spectacles, your clothes, your bag? all made out of plastic; don’t be stupid. 

oh you’re against fossil fuel expansion? then don’t charge your phone, take flights and sit in air-con rooms; don’t be idealistic. 

it was disheartening at first, but even more disheartening for me that i did not know how to respond. how do you reconcile these contradictions? isn't it hypocritical to call out Big Oil when i also have benefitted from such resource-intensive lifestyles?

The corporate world likes to paint things to either extreme: you’re either for human economic development or you’re not. Most of the time if you stand up for the environment, you automatically fall into the latter. And this false binary has shaped much of the lessons we learn in the modern world: one being that exploitation of the environment is necessary for human welfare, and by that reasoning, exploitation must be endless. 

something didn’t feel right about that logic, but trying to battle against this narrative has left me confused and frustrated for so long. yet in the meantime Indigenous peoples have been simply laughing at the ludicrosity of it all. This dilemma would never had come into existence, they would say, if we had respected indigenous rights from the start.

i cannot recall an exact point in time i began paying attention to indigenous voices. maybe it was at COP27, where i attended various environmental rights side events, and constantly felt so inspired by the Indigenous speakers there. despite the many struggles their community faces, like land grabs and enforced disappearances, i distinctly remember one Indigenous person from the Philippines who concluded with emotion: “Despite all that has happened, we do not want to be seen as victims of the climate crisis. We know how to take care of the land; we want to be seen as holding the solutions to the crisis.” despite the outcomes of COP27, the two weeks left me feeling deeply empowered by all the rising indigenous movements. the solutions we in the modern world have been struggling to conceive for so long have already and always been here. to activate them, we quite simply need to empower the people who have been marginalised for too long to do just that.

now, at Indigenous rights organisation SAVE Rivers, i realise this cause is where my heart lies. without Indigenous rights, the whole concept of environmentalism does not make any sense to me. truly, after five years of trudging through forests, knocking in caves and swimming in lakes… this was the answer all along.

maybe to some people it would sound strange, and i don’t disagree. i’m not indigenous. i didn’t grow up with a strong connection to my heritage or the land. i didn’t even learn about the concept of Indigenous peoples until i was 20, and even then absorbed it with scepticism. surely we can’t all go back to live in the jungle in this day and age; what does protecting Indigenous rights really mean?

i grew up buying into myths that in the past, ‘uncivilized’ and ‘barbaric’ peoples lived in jungles, then died early because they don’t have modern medicine. when i was 17 i remember my teacher mocking the lifestyles of Indigenous peoples, characterising them as animals who go about killing random people. 

i am quite mortified at what i had absorbed as a child… speaking volumes again to the uncountable ways my modern society has stronghandedly, systematically and skilfully chopped away the status of Indigenous peoples. 

in this respect, i must unpack the injustices in my homeland as well that have been swept under the rug in national history education. From Asnida Daud, I learnt how the indigenous peoples of Pulau Sudong used to hide their identities because they were looked down upon and thoroughly shamed. From Wan, I learn how residents of Pulau Ubin continue to suffer the slow erosion of their cultures, or how Indigenous knowledge are often treated inferior to ‘expert’ recommendations by those with high educational qualifications. From academic articles, I learn that in the mandatory transition from kampong to HDB, an undocumented number suffered severe mental health issues (with some even committing suicide) because they were ripped away from the Indigenous ways of life they had known.

all around the world, Indigenous peoples appear to suffer the same plight one way or another. the destruction of Indigenous knowledge and governance systems. the removal of Indigenous peoples from their land. the forced assimilation of Indigenous peoples into a new religion, new language and new culture. and within these pillaged structures, they are bounded by the careful, expert crafting of legal and political systems that steadily eat away at their rights, livelihoods and very essence of life in both conspicuous and innocuous ways.

the modern world is now scrambling to fix the mess that mega profit-making systems have created… and yet the solutions also have always been deafeningly obvious: protect Indigenous rights. go back in time and you’ll so often find that environmental issues are tied to the displacement, marginalisation and disempowerment of Indigenous peoples, whether by colonial powers or the present-day government.

for if you dig deeper into the ecological extinction crisis, you realise that Indigenous peoples have always practiced environmental protection (as has been for millenia);

dig deeper into the global plastics crisis, and you realise that Indigenous peoples have always created biodegradable clothes and bags, produced and disposed sustainably; 

dig deeper into the climate crisis and you realise that Indigenous peoples are generally averse to drilling so deep and extensively into their ancestral lands.

but strangely the solution to the climate crisis we are presented with by the industry is to dig and extract even more to power the rising renewable energy economy, not to create a circular metal recycling industry. the solution we are presented with by those with a poor environmental track record is more carbon capture to extract more oil, not reduce the drill sites. We are dealing with the greenhouse gases, they protest. But - aside from the fact that their solutions often, ironically, increase their greenhouse gas output - our environmental crises at their core are NOT about greenhouse gases. Rather, it is about the systematic removal of people's environmental rights. Real climate solutions address this. Unfortunately with industry leading the charge, this is why despite the increasing hype about ‘climate action’ globally, our environmental crises of almost every shape and form continue to accelerate at breakneck speed. 

So bring back the calls for protecting Indigenous peoples. without empowering indigenous peoples and affirming the value of their knowledge systems, without protecting and making it possible for them to practice their traditional knowledge systems, we will continue to see an exodus of indigenous cultures as more and more of them leave for the city, hide their ancestral roots, or adopt unsustainable practices because the traditional approach is no longer applicable in a destructed ecosystem. 

as some of the most marginalised peoples in our society, Indigenous peoples face challenges today so urgent and extensive that it should not be the sole responsibility of Indigenous peoples to tackle single-handedly.

non-indigenous counterparts, who often possess the resources, capital and tools needed for survival in the modern world, must step up and make them known again. without serious consideration of Indigenous rights, and by deluding ourselves that modern science has all the answers, we will continue to watch the ruthless rampaging of our very last ecosystems here on earth. it is distressing that my generation already has so few left to see. but for indigenous peoples, it is devastating because they already have nowhere to go.