Indigenous peoples and global climate change: Intercultural models of climate equity

Rebecca Tsosie focuses on issues concerning indigenous peoples in the US and global climate change. Many Native communities were forced to adopt short-term, survival thinking during the nineteenth century when federal policymakers sought to appropriate Native lands, relocate Native communities, and extinguish traditional Native economies. When one looks at the issue of climate change, the consequences of deforestation and mining are significant. The indigenous communities in Latin America are in many ways victims of these policies, lacking a separate, sovereign voice within the domestic political structure. At the international level, the main concern is how to get multiple values into the discussion, given the dominance of economic analysis. The equity issue at the international level involves a tension between the rights of industrialized nations to continue to support their economies and the rights of developing nations to develop in a way that that allows them to compete economically with industrialized nations.