Syilx-led Climate Justice in a Global Context
Authors:
Jeannette Armstrong
Naomi Klein
Onyx Sloan Morgan
Date:
December 9, 2023
ISBN: 978-1-988804-54-5
On November 3, 2023, Dr. Jeannette Armstrong and Professor Naomi Klein came together on UBC Okanagan’s campus for the Department of Community, Culture, and Global Studies Annual Speaker event and in collaboration with UBC’s Centre for Climate Justice to discuss what syilx-led climate justice would mean from a local to global perspective.
Climate justice seeks to address how climate crises disproportionately impact communities and people already experiencing injustices rooted in colonialism, capitalism and intersecting structures of power. Although communities on the frontlines of climate injustices have intimate experiences and understandings of climate crises, their expertise and knowledge are often not reflected in climate-related research, policy, resource allocations, or decision-making.
Syilx Okanagan Nation, whose traditional and unceded territories span northward towards Mica Creek or what is today known as Revelstoke, BC, eastward between Kootenay Lakes and Kaslo, westward into the Nicola Valley, and southward beyond the US-Canada border near to Wilbur, Washington, USA (syilx Okanagan Nation, nd), have always responded to changes on the land and water. Despite syilx laws existing to govern relations to and with local territories, including responding to changes on the land and water, self-determined syilx knowledges and laws are not reflecting when addressing climate injustice.
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Dr. Jeannette Armstrong (Order of Canada) is an Associate Professor at UBC Okanagan in Indigenous Studies. A recipient of the George Woodcock Lifetime Achievement Award for Literature as a novelist and poet, Dr. Armstrong has received the Eco Trust USA’s Buffett Award for Indigenous Leadership and serves on Canada’s Aboriginal Traditional Knowledge Subcommittee of the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada (COSEWIC). Dr. Armstrong is a Lifetime Fellow of Okanagan College; she was named to the Class of 2021 as a Fellow in the Royal Society of Canada and, in June 2023, was named an Officer of the Order of Canada.
Prof. Naomi Klein is an award-winning journalist, columnist, and internationally bestselling author of nine books published in over 35 languages, including No Logo, The Shock Doctrine, This Changes Everything, No Is Not Enough,On Fire, and Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World which was published in September 2023. Her writing has appeared in leading publications around the world, and she is a columnist for The Guardian. She is Honorary Professor of Media and Climate at Rutgers University, an Associate Professor in Geography at UBC and the founding co-director of UBC's Centre for Climate Justice.
Dr. Onyx Sloan Morgan’s research is most often conducted in partnership with and at the direction of communities who experience disproportionate impacts of climate injustices. As a white settler of Irish and Scottish ancestries who grew up on unceded Lekwungen territories, Onyx’s research interrogates how persistent forms of coloniality intersect, fuel, and normalize extractive and exploitative relationships at multiple scales. Onyx is an Assistant Professor and Principal’s Research Chair in the Community, Culture, and Global Studies Department at UBC Okanagan, situated on ancestral and unceded Syilx Okanagan Nation territories.
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climate jutice, syilx, colonization, British Columbia, Canada
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