Viviam: When I was aware that I would participate in Sail for Climate Action, I thought about the great responsibility that this required: being a voice within a group that raises environmental demands from a regional perspective to a global audience. Many of these spaces are still closed and indigenous peoples are still thought of in the singular and understood as abstract knowledge, making their understanding and approach even more complex.
The indigenous community I come from is made up of more than 40,000 Arhuacos and Arhuacas. The spiritual authority figures are the mamos, responsible for imparting traditional knowledge within the different settlements that make up the set of the black line – the territorial space that has been delimited through the union of a series of sacred points interconnected as an ancestral territory. This is a territory in recovery because it coexists on its northern side with a tourist expansion front, on its western side with a zone of agricultural and livestock exploitation, and on its eastern side with one of the largest open-pit coal mines in the world. There is also the additional strong paramilitary presence that seeks and controls key drug transit points.
All these are factors that frame the environmental struggles of indigenous peoples, both those who inhabit the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, and also those who inhabit Colombia, which is currently the most dangerous country for environmental defenders. According to the Human Rights Watch, since 2016, 400 social leaders have been killed.
The environmental struggles are much more diverse and complex than we can imagine, and so the inclusion of profoundly diverse visions requires rethinking the environmental struggle as a whole. This is where the concept of frontline actors, represented by those who face the serious consequences of the climate crisis from a personal dimension, becomes so powerful and important. Opening these spaces and listening to each other are efforts that we must make in order to begin to generate more concrete proposals that involve those who racism has denied the possibility of expressing themselves. Sail for Climate Action and all those who were involved and supported, have joined efforts to realise the idea of expanding spaces of representation.
Finally, I share with you a concept “seimuke”, a word that most closely translates to ‘innocent’. This concept of innocence that exists in our language refers to one who is still clouded in his reason, unable to understand that we have a responsibility to protect nature because it is an extension of ourselves.