A Home for Us All
Intertwining the In-betweeners
PHOTO BY JESS DRAWHORN
How can we organize our communities to catalyze lasting transformation? Why is it important to work within and outside of systems to effect change? What does it mean to remember forward?
These inquiries are just a few of the questions that writer, singer, orator, and creative Ruth Łchav’aya K’isen Miller (Curyung Tribe) grapples with in the following essay.
First published in 2022 in our “Black & Native Attention As Miracle” magazine, Ruth’s reflection on learning how to leverage her “in-between” identity to cultivate community and build thriving movements is medicine for this moment. As the former Climate Justice Director at Native Movement, Ruth brings an intimate understanding of policy to this conversation. But she’s also a fierce creator whose commitment to healing work has helped to model new narratives for so many of us.
In the face of genocide, ecological collapse, and political strife, we need every one of us engaged right now—relational, present, committed. It’s our prayer that Ruth’s work on indigenizing climate advocacy and intersectionality can support each one of us in continuing to show up strong for movements that matter.
Re-scripting climate advocacy towards Indigenous futures
I am a Dena’ina woman, named for the wind– winds that are twirling, changeable, disruptive, and hell-raising.
In our culture, you must always lead with your introduction: to name and place yourself in the constellation of your relatives, to honor your homelands, and to let yourself be known by others: to give them the chance to say “Are you Heather’s daughter?” or “Oh, do you know the Ballutas!”
My English name ‘Ruth’ is derived from an ancient Hebrew name, after both of my grandmothers. Rut Shlomo da Ysrael, Ruth Scott daughter of Lloyd. My father is the first in his genetic lineage to marry outside of the Faith, and I am the first mixed-race child. I was not bat-mitzvah-ed, and as Judaism is passed matrilineally, some might question my belonging in this religious and cultural community. That void of being unclaimed left me with an uncertainty of where to place myself, how to understand myself and my responsibilities.
Unlike some of my Alaska Native friends, I was not gifted a Dena’ina name by my community when I was born. My mother bears no Dena’ina name, after her mother passed away at an early age. Our mother tongue left our family two mothers ago, and I carry our spiritual hurts in my physical body, increasingly so as I reach the age where I might consider motherhood myself. From the chronic pain of my womb that I understand to be activated by epigenetics, I intuit that I must heal those womb wounds before I can carry forward descendants. My Western medical diagnosis and disease is only one lens through which I must address my need for healing. For years, my mother witnessed this physical pain and the pain of not being able to name myself, to say “I have been called something that tells you I belong.” Because of this, she invited my first language teacher to choose a name for me. We held ceremony for hours in our home, savored tea and feasted on traditional foods: moose stew, red salmon, herring eggs, maktak. The day in Spirit and ceremony was memorable but challenging. I was in intense physical pain– carrying the wounds of our generational trauma in my womb. The moment we began to pray, my pain disappeared.
Despite the distance between the two cultures of my upbringing, my parents were aligned in their fight for justice. As two prominent Native American Rights lawyers, they each mobilized their experiences to complement one anothers’ varied tactics: my mother, Heather Kendall Miller, fought alongside our villages, working to organize communities at the grassroots level and bring lawsuits that would expand our ability to exercise Tribal sovereignty; while my father, Lloyd Miller, used his privilege and intellect to litigate and lobby on behalf of Tribes and Native communities, leading to some of the biggest financial reparations for Indian Country in history.
I was raised wrapped up in discussions at the dinner table about whose strings to pull and which approaches were strategic. I now know that I was watching the rules of a complicated game. I learned there were things that my Native mom could say that my white dad could not, and that there were things others would hear better if the same words came from my white dad. Their partnership made them strategic and powerful as advocates. And as I sat between the two, embodying their intersection, I realized somehow I would have to learn how to sit at both sides of the table. I would have to learn the strange and mercurial work of code-switching. At that age, I felt ripped apart by the in-between space of feeling the loyalty and familiarity of my people and my culture, experiencing racism and slurs for being Native while learning to own and leverage the privilege of being ethnically ambiguous– always being expected to navigate seamlessly.
This tension (eventually) taught me an important lesson– the diversity of experiences I had been given allowed me to relate to vastly different people, reach different spaces, and have experiences that were made inaccessible to many. This became a crucial part of my advocacy journey and a pillar in what I believe to be effective climate communication.
This work needs those who bridge worlds, who walk the in-between of identities, maybe accepted fully in none yet familiar with all.
Slowly, the story that I told myself about myself began to evolve. I realized: This work needs those who bridge worlds, who walk the in-between of identities, maybe accepted fully in none yet familiar with all. This work needs those who may give the gift of translation. It is an uncomfortable place, but finding purpose and ways to greet all my pieces with love has been a crucial lesson that empowers me on my journey.
Towards Indigenizing Climate Advocacy
I am often asked at what point I decided to step into climate justice advocacy: “How did you know this was your passion?”; “What got you interested in the environment?”; “Did you always want to be an activist?” To me, these questions are akin to asking “Have you always wanted to make your ancestors proud?” or “Why did you start needing to drink water?” I do this work because of the moral and ancestral imperative that compels me, as it feeds my community. It is simply who we are as Indigenous peoples. The world cannot heal from the climate crisis without those who know its medicines. Climate justice work must be culturally-informed, accessible, and center the lands’ first and eternal stewards.
Our fight for climate justice is a fight for our right to exist as Indigenous peoples: living from and with the lands and non-human relatives that have sustained us for millennia. It is a fight to drink clean water, protect our bodies from the toxic chemicals that pollute our watersheds, and heal our airways from polluting extractive development projects.1 It is a fight to save the permafrost tundra that we live, hunt, and subsist on from crumbling away beneath our feet, decomposing as it thaws to release millions of tons of methane gas into the atmosphere and accelerating the rate of climate change. It is a fight to save our sea ice from melting, hoping that it reforms each year strong enough to protect our coastal villages from winter sea storms, dense enough to refract the warming rays of sunlight away from the ocean, and consistent enough to prevent global sea-level rise from impacting all coasts. It is a fight to save the marine ecosystem that we rely on from extinction-level die offs as our Arctic waters warm and acidify, becoming inhabitable for our Arctic species. It is a fight to save our relatives, the old-growth trees, from genocide, preserving them as sovereign beings worthy of life and asking them to continue to sequester carbon so that we may breathe clean air. It is a fight to save our women, girls, and two-Spirit siblings from the violence and predation of imported laborers who mine and drill our homelands as they ravage and murder our people. It is a fight to preserve the elements of our language that have reflected our landscapes for millennia and articulated the most minute aspects of life on the land, translating our knowledge, stories, and histories so that they may be passed on.
The holistic impacts of the climate crisis are spiritual as well. We suffer spiritually as our non-human relatives are exterminated, and we lose our ability to access the lands and waters that shaped our people. Being Indigenous means being place-based. Our knowledge, languages, and life-ways have geographical precision, allowing us to know our ecosystems and relate to them better than anywhere else. In 2018, at least 31 Alaska Native villages were already facing climate change impacts so acutely that coping may require relocation, at a cost of as much as $200 million each.2 Already each village tracks increasing relocation needs for homes and community buildings which are imperiled by quickly eroding coastlines and riverbanks. Federal programs to assist threatened villages in preparing for and recovering from disasters are limited and unavailable to some villages.3 We are in a constant state of triage to slow the destruction of our homes.
In my region of Southcentral Alaska and Bristol Bay, it is often said that salmon are our blood. Just as love of the land flows in our hearts, so too the salmon fill our riverine veins. They are the relatives that carry nourishment through our bodies, and the blood that seeps away from us when the land and waters are wounded.
Last year, in the heat of the summer of 2021, our state was petrified by heart-wrenching news: salmon were not returning to the Yukon river for the first time in memory. Years prior, in my own Dena’ina homelands, I watched our salmon dying of heatstroke as skyrocketing temperatures slowly killed them. Our salmon, that fill our fish racks and smokehouses and freezers, that are the primary contributor to food security along our waterways and the deep core of our Alaska Native cultures, were scarce and disappearing. The State of Alaska shut down all fishing in an attempt to save the few fish that made the migration, and villages up and down the Koyukuk and Yukon rivers were primed to starve. We mourned together.
The State’s dedication to maintaining the high-grossing commercial fishing industry comes at the expense of our people’s food security, and the health of the fish populations. Alaskan pollock from the Eastern Bering Sea and Aleutian Islands serve the rest of the world McDonald’s Fish-O-Filets, while the trawler bycatch discards millions of dead and dying fish back into the high seas, damaging our millennia-old access to local and subsistence foods.
That summer of 2021, Governor Mike Dunleavy requested a federal disaster declaration for the salmon fishery and coordinated airlifts of about 90,000 pounds of fish to villages in need, but the people were not pacified. Traditional activities were unable to continue, and each family only received a fish or two to store in their freezer.
The climate crisis is already upon us.
Learning self through many languages
I formally began my advocacy work in 2012 at 15 years old, working with United Tribes of Bristol Bay to prepare for upcoming Environmental Protection Agency hearings against the proposed Pebble Mine at the headwaters of the Nushagak and Kvichak Rivers in my home region of Bristol Bay, Alaska. This fight to protect the Bristol Bay watershed from a proposed copper and gold mine has spanned over 20 years. I worked out of a condemned Conex shipping container in the harbor, where I met with community members to articulate testimony of why we must think “fish-first” and oppose the mining project. I spent hours learning all the flashy facts about how the mine would, one, undermine our $1.5 billion commercial and sport fishery and threaten 14,000 jobs in the region; two, contribute to the creation of the world’s largest earthen dam for storing terribly toxic waste; and three, devastate the more than 30 Alaska Native Tribes in the region who have cultivated reciprocal relationship with the salmon for more than 30,000 years and who would be devastated financially, physically, culturally, linguistically, and spiritually by the loss of our salmon.
But in the end, what mattered most wasn’t the pieces of evidence I could point to– it was the stories of the salmon, and of the community who lived in relationship to them. It was the memory of wakeful nights roiling on the sea to pull in the nets, recognizing familiar faces across the fleet and shorelines, and the fresh taste of the first catch. Instead of asking, “Why do you oppose the Pebble Mine?” I learned to ask “Why do our salmon matter to you? What would you lose if you lost them?” I realized my work there was to enable commercial and subsistence fishermen to defend what they love, on their own terms.
Soon after, I traveled to Washington, D.C. as an intern for the former Senator Mark Begich of Alaska. At 16 years old, I was at the time the youngest person to ever intern on Capitol Hill, and my imposter syndrome fueled my fire to do as much as I could, as well as I could. But it all felt so distant from the smell of low tide and saltwater, the sound of waves clapping under the dilapidated wooden frames of the docks, the whisper of the cool breeze along my face. The work was important, but policy writing and research felt removed, sterile, and I didn’t yet think I had worth in my role in that prestigious office. Between research memos and note-taking, under my still-beloved-mentor Andrea Sanders, I had the opportunity to draft a section of a bill that Senator Begich was championing. It was called the Traditional Foods and Nourishment Act, which would empower communities to serve traditional subsistence foods in public facilities such as schools, elderly care centers, and hospitals. The findings section–the “why we need this” part– was my responsibility. “Finally,” I breathed, “I know this!” I sat down to write pages and pages on why our traditional foods are best for our bodies, how they bring unique nourishment, vitamins, and antioxidants, while providing means for community connection and cultural continuity. Our traditional foods are our healing, our medicine.
Though my pages were inevitably cut down to a few lines, the Traditional Foods and Nourishment Act of 2013 was passed. After its passage, public facilities across Alaska were able to serve caribou, moose and salmon, beach asparagus, fiddlehead ferns, herring eggs, fish pies, wild berries and even akutaq (‘Eskimo ice cream’). I was proud to have contributed to righting such an obvious wrong, but it still seemed abstract–until last fall when I traveled to Sitka to seek the guidance and company of a dear Elder in my life, the renowned Herring Protector Kh'asheechtlaa Louise Brady. We went hiking together and talked story for hours. She was telling me of her recovery from multiple hip surgeries, and her healing journey as she mended. When she first became injured, her recovery was arduous and she was frustrated by how slow her progress was in the care center she stayed at during rehabilitation. But one year, she shared, some law was passed and the care center began serving salmon head soup every morning. She ate her local salmon for every meal and recovered astoundingly quickly. Her body healed, and she knew it was because she was finally able to access her traditional foods. I nearly fell over on the trail– after so many years, I heard at last how the first federal policy I was involved with impacted the health and wellbeing of someone I love.
Now I reflect on my early years working in a new light: all my life I have been a translator, with feet grounded in different identities, languages, ways of speaking, of understanding. I have come to understand that this is a crucial role for community organizing, one that serves to bring our people closer to achieving liberation by breaking down barriers.
Indigenizing Climate Education
Although Indigenous communities guard 80% of the world's biodiversity, Indigenous relationship to land is often written out of the climate change narrative. In fact, Indigenous Environmental Network’s “Indigenous Resistance Against Carbon” quantified the metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent emissions that have either been stopped or delayed in the past decade after the brave (and highly persecuted) actions of Indigenous land defenders. Adding up the total, Indigenous resistance has stopped or delayed greenhouse gas pollution equivalent to at least one-quarter of annual U.S. and Canadian emissions.4 We must write ourselves back into the story of the climate crisis, and be authors of climate solutions. Climate education and policy must be culturally-informed, meaning two things:
First, climate education must be communicated in a way that is resonant and accessible to Indigenous frontline community members. We must share global climate science so as to contextualize on-the-ground effects with their broader causes, and we must do so in a way that resonates with our communities and our ways of life. We must speak explicitly about how the thawing permafrost and melting sea ice, raging wildfires, and food insecurity that leaves our freezers empty are directly tied to fossil fuel extraction within our own State, connections that are often obfuscated by powerful political interests. Our people deserve to have all the resources they can in their hands to ensure their own survival through this crisis and those yet to come. We deserve to retain narrative sovereignty in the story that is told of our climate change experience.
I have served as the Climate Justice Director for the Indigenous, matriarchal, Alaska-based nonprofit Native Movement for the past years, building out our advocacy work based on these approaches. Our work has included diverse tactics, targeting local, national, and international decision-makers, but always relies on our core understanding– climate work can’t just be done by Indigenous peoples, the work itself must be Indigenized. In the fall of 2021, Native Movement partnered with the University of Alaska Department of Theater and Film to establish the first Indigenous Filmmakers Intensive. This collaboration created opportunities for Native community members to receive mentorship from Native film professionals to develop camera, audio, lighting, and editing techniques to enhance the stories they wanted to tell. The theme was “Climate Justice,” and through the accompanying workbook that we created, we provided self-paced trainings and lectures that broke down the science of the climate crisis and elevated independent visual narratives of lives on the frontlines. This workbook incorporated both Western and Indigenous climate science, reflective exercises, storytelling prompts, and language translation. Through this program, a dozen students designed, filmed, edited and produced original stories of climate justice, which we later showed at the global climate conference, the COP26 in Glasgow, Scotland, and will soon be on exhibit at the Anchorage Museum. Their voices reached international audiences, and their visual poetry released the victimhood often placed on Indigenous communities while reclaiming our sense of leadership in this crisis.
The second meaning of creating culturally-informed climate education is that broader climate dialogue must grow to include cultural wisdom, Indigenous language terms, firsthand accounts, and other forms of Indigenous science, so that it may be a conduit for empowering Indigenous sovereignty and informed decision-making. Western climate science and Indigenous ways of knowing must be complementary and co-produced– without dominance and with equal validation and funding. Climate education must be actively anti-racist by uplifting non-Western modes of thought– Indigenous creation stories, cultural beliefs, and subsistence practices, formed from millennia of rigorous observation and inference, experimentation, and data collection. Education and policy alike must decolonize to incorporate Indigenous voices and ways of being.
Faced with the existential threats of colonization and its resultant climate crisis, we need to create a shared vision for the future where our Indigeneity persists past these times and towards the next 30,000 years. In “Dancing on Our Turtle’s Back”, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg) emphasizes the need for Indigenous peoples to engage their unique cultural teachings in how they theorize and work against state oppression and for Indigenous empowerment. She speaks from a Canadian context:
“[W]e need to engage in Indigenous processes, since according to our traditions, the processes of engagement highly influence the outcome of the engagement itself. We need to do this on our own terms, without the sanction, permission or engagement of the state, western theory or the opinions of Canadians. In essence, we need to not just figure out who we are, we need to re-establish the processes by which we live who we are within the current context we find ourselves.”5
Towards this end, Native Movement mobilized in seeding brave partnerships to grow into the Alaska Climate Alliance– a new partnership of nearly 80 climate and environmental organizations in the state who together work to align Alaska’s climate action community with Just Transition principles to address the climate crisis head-on at all levels of society, shifting our state towards a joyful, interdependent and Indigenous-led future. We have recently instituted an Indigenous Navigating Council, which will be the decision-making and guiding voice of the Alliance, truly shifting power away from historically white-led and often racist institutions and deepening our collaborations across the environmental movement. Building creative allyship and then fundamentally shifting resources and decision-making is a crucial model to empower Tribal sovereignty and reach true justice in climate solutions. This also allows us to engage in policy discussion, apply a values filter, and measure holistic impact on our Indigenous communities before mobilizing action.
Indigenizing Climate Policy
It is Indigenous peoples' ways of knowing which will now be the light forward. Our epistemologies– based in respect, reciprocity, holistic and community thinking– are diametrically opposed to those of colonial powers. We must fight against the domination of our knowledge systems, and revalidate Indigenous wisdoms as the path forward for climate recovery. Our existence itself is resistance.
The advocacy spaces where we try to push our communities’ interests are often exclusive, undiverse, and hard-pressed to change. As we advocate for climate policy, in-state, nationally and internationally, the struggle is complicated by the challenges of reaching mutual understanding between decision-makers and those who directly face their consequences. Real climate advocacy therefore has a responsibility to be decolonial– it must open pathways for grassroots leadership, it must educate on the root causes of the climate crisis, and it must revert capital and resources back to those in the group. The healing of our complicated wounds will only come from investigating, unraveling, and tending to their root causes. Solutions will not come from the same ideologies and inequalities that created the problem.
When we, as Indigenous peoples, engage in climate policy dialogues, we enter a complicated political landscape, almost as foreign petitioners to the United States. Many feel so much discomfort that they do not see a pathway for just engagement with the settler state, especially one that continues to systematically disenfranchise our peoples. The fact of the matter is, US laws dictate, regulate, and deny life and liberty within their colonial borders, and are responsible for regulating (or failing to regulate) the industries and endeavors that continue to lead us to climate chaos. Whether or not we as Indigenous peoples, and citizens of sovereign Tribal governments, share identity or sentiment as Americans, it is not our sovereign Tribal governments that are perpetrating violence against our lands to the scale of the US and its subsidiaries. In this way, engaging with US policy, as we simultaneously work to transcend US colonial dominance, is a necessity to stem the wound our climate is facing.
In this way, engaging with US policy, as we simultaneously work to transcend US colonial dominance, is a necessity to stem the wound our climate is facing.
In action, this means that our Tribal nations must exercise their sovereignty in planning for climate chaos and recovery. Culturally-informed climate education and policy are primary tools in enabling Tribal self-determination and ensuring that climate adaptation and mitigation plans, emergency community planning, housing models and more are reflective of and answer the needs of our local communities. Tribes must lead their own recovery. We must look towards regenerative climate finance models that provide concessional finance mechanisms to low-wealth communities, even within high-GDP countries so that Tribes are able to access non-predatory loans and grants to actualize their own climate adaptation solutions.6 Making climate policy, climate education, and climate finance accessible to Indigenous communities is necessary in order to rewrite Indigenous peoples’ engagement with the US settler-colonial state. In managing the climate crisis that has been imposed on us, we will be sovereign, knowledgeable and holistic in pursuing our own place-based solutions.
This past year, Native Movement and the Just Transition Collective came together to support the THRIVE Agenda and to push the Green New Deal towards our vision of collectivity, sustainability, and justice. The THRIVE Agenda is a multi-year economic and social recovery plan that centers jobs, justice, and climate. It uplifts 8 pillars– concomitant attributes of what it would take to achieve real justice at the scope, scale and standards of what we need to heal the intersecting jobs, justice, economic and climate crises. The 8 pillars include: creating millions of good, safe jobs with access to unions; building the power of workers to fight inequality; investing in Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities; strengthening and healing the nation-to-nation relationship with sovereign Native Nations; combating environmental injustice and ensuring healthy lives for all; averting climate and environmental catastrophe; ensuring fairness for workers and communities affected by economic transitions; and reinvesting in public institutions that enable workers and communities to thrive.
We created the “Alaska’s Time to THRIVE” zine to communicate what this may look like on the ground. This zine was the vehicle for translating Federal policy into our own terms and Native languages, both for legibility and to measure and aid understanding of what real impact might look like on the ground. We chose a large span of Indigenous languages, and relied on our cultural metaphors to build up a network of meaning. This was done with the intent to engage our Indigenous audience while also investigating the potential for cultural relevance of the policy– if it did not fit our home, then we would not support it.
In this way, our endorsement of the policy came with a litmus test: Can you see yourself in this new vision, and will these policy pillars help us reach it? This narrative work was crucial for communicating far-away policy back to the ground–and was lauded by our national partners. We similarly held virtual “Fireside Chat” listening sessions with our far-reaching community, bridging new partnerships and introducing cross-cutting allyship that we had not previously explored; we heard from new partners across diverse justice movements including Alaskan union organizers, houselessness advocates, renewable energy initiatives, food hubs and more.
Remembering Forward
When we as organizers look towards the future we hope to build, we know it must grow from the past. When Just Transition framework came to Alaska,7 we brought it to our Elders, and they named it “Kohtr’elneyh” in the Benhti Kenaga’ language– “Remembering Forward.” Our time is circular, and we serve our communities as future ancestors, accountable to both the generations that have come before and those that will come after. We must hold ourselves to a standard of integrity and holistic thinking that will create more liberated worlds for our descendants in ways that our ancestors will recognize.
Achieving effective change within our political landscape must consist of three approaches: “Stop the bad,” “Change the Rules,” and “Build the New.”8 Intervention must be bold within all sectors of our state and country. Our theory of change at Native Movement and the Just Transition Collective has led us to concentrate on “Stopping the Bad:” challenging extractive and irresponsible resource development, opposing conservative legislation that attempts to shortcut health and environmental safeguards, and generally trying to put out fires everywhere. We additionally invest our energy and time in “Building the New:” placing resources, support, and love into regenerative economic projects, particularly those owned and run by Native rural community members, such as small-scale hydroelectric, solar panel installation, cold climate agriculture and more. We are growing our “Change the Rules” campaigning as we build our campaign partnership with the Green New Deal Network and other national movers. However, at the core of these pillars is bringing up community and building people power: in all we do, we never do it alone.
Not all organizations are obliged to work in all three pillars, and some might thrive in “changing the story” and “moving the resources” to better support narrative work, or to finance transformation. But we all must find our movement home, relying on our interconnectedness in order to build multifaceted and diverse grassroots efforts. We must continue decolonial work that pushes back the colonial worldview while we simultaneously advance our Indigenous worldviews. The questions that might arise for the future are exciting: What would it look like to pay reparations to the land we have harmed? What does a consent-based relationship with the land look like? In what ways will all people thrive when we are offered wellness and true reciprocity with the land? As we transform ourselves, our movements evolve as well; in the face of crisis and extinction, we are brought closer to healing.
We all must find our movement home, relying on our interconnectedness in order to build multifaceted and diverse grassroots efforts.
We do have the means to rewrite this relationship and to overcome the dynamics that have been forced upon us. We see the illogic, we call it out, and we rebuild with love. I am no expert, but I write from my heart, my worldview, and my ancestry. I hold my lineages within me, as one whole thinker and creator, as I learn each day to better honor my lands and waters. I tenderly remember the times when I found no home for myself, timid and abashed, condemning myself to a mindset of scarcity and reduction. This movement does not need martyrs, and it does not heal from the tortured. We owe it to ourselves and the beautiful future awaiting us to love, celebrate, and contribute all we can, in the best and healthiest ways we can. Each day, with conviction and abundance, I learn to thrive within myself. There is home for us all in the world we will create.
Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are highly toxic at extremely low levels, and they are contaminating the drinking water of thousands of Alaskans from the North Slope to Southeast. PFAS have been linked with harmful health effects including immune suppression, decreased fertility, kidney and testicular cancer, increased risk of high blood pressure and pre-eclampsia, and increased risk of thyroid disease.
See Alaska Community Action on Toxics, Threats to Drinking Water and Public Health in Alaska: The Scope of the PFAS Problem, Consequences of Regulatory Inaction, and Recommendations (September 2019), available at https://www.akaction.org/wp-content/uploads/Report-Threats-to-Drinking-Water-and-Public-Health-in-Alaska-FINAL-web-version-9-24-19.pdf (ACAT Report) at 7
www.nrdc.org/stories/these-alaska-residents-are-watching-their-hometowns-slide-rising-waters
www.gao.gov/products/gao-09-551
Read more at www.ienearth.org/indigenous-resistance-against-carbon/
"Critically Sovereign” Introduction Joanne Barker (Lenape), 25
Concessional finance is below market rate finance provided by major financial institutions, such as development banks, multilateral funds and the World Bank, to developing countries to accelerate development objectives.
Movement Generation’s work on Just Transition was integral in shifting Alaska’s grassroots organizing into new vocabulary and frameworks: movementgeneration.org/justtransition/, Building from this work, we made it our own: justtransitionak.org/toolkit
Climate Justice Alliance honed this methodology and includes a total of five pillars in their organizing strategy: Stop the Bad, Build the New, Change the Rules, Change the Story, Move the Resources, Movement of Movements. Read more in their free online resource found at: climatejusticealliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/CJA_Curriculum_A_FinalWeb.pdf