COP26 UNITED NATIONS CLIMATE CHANGE CONFERENCE
Updated 12 November 2021
EARTH REVOLUTION: Walk Out At Cop26
November 12, 2021 | Native Children’s Survival
Indigenous Peoples from the frontlines of the climate crises brought Traditional Knowledge and Real Solutions to the Global Conversation in Glasgow — Was Anyone Listening?
Indigenous Peoples and hundreds of Global Civil Society Representatives walked out on the final day of the 26th Conference of the Parties on Climate Change, Friday, 12 November 2021. Before the walk-out, Native Children's Survival Youth Ambassador Ta'Kaiya Blaney addressed the People's Plenary.
“Cop26 is a performance. It is an illusion constructed to save the capitalist economy rooted in resource extraction and colonialism. I didn’t come here to fix the agenda – I came here to disrupt it. Colonialism is what caused climate change and I am not going to my coloniser for solutions. We reject colonial solutions for climate change.”
COP26 Glasgow, Scotland
“The International community can no longer circumvent its responsibilities to Indigenous Peoples. The time has come to honor our Human Rights, our Treaty Rights, and our Civil Rights and to implement and enforce the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) — for the well-being and protection of Mother Earth and the generations to come.”
Just days before, on 6 November 2021, in Glasgow, Ta'Kaiya, took part in a Global Day of Action march and rally. According to organizers, 250,000 people attended. Global Youth climate strikes and rallies drew thousands to the streets of Glasgow the previous day. According to Fridays for Future, climate strikes occurred in 81 countries, spread across 379 cities, and involved more than 270,000 participants.
COP26, the United Nations 26th Climate Change Conference, began in Glasgow, Scotland, on 31 October 2021. Hosted by the United Kingdom in partnership with Italy, the COP26 agenda is to bring parties together to accelerate action towards the goals of the 2015 Paris Agreement. According to a new climate watchdog analysis, Mother Earth is on track for at least 2.4 degrees Celsius of warming above pre-industrial levels by 2030 — well above the promise to keep the 1.5 Celsius target alive at COP26. The science community has reported that more than 1.5°C of warming would push the world's natural ecosystems past the point of no return.
Twenty-six years of talks and conferences on Climate Change, Who's Gonna Save You?
We, the Indigenous Peoples, have warned about what would happen to all our relations if natural law and the rights of Indigenous Peoples and Mother Earth were ignored and violated. Even now, with the catastrophic impacts of Climate Change at the front door of so-called developed countries (industrialized capitalist Nations with embellished economies and advanced technological infrastructures), profit, and the illusion of power, triumph over the well-being of our future.
In 1992, during the United Nations Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, we gathered at Kari-Oca. We made a declaration of our intentions for the future. The Kari-Oca Declaration is a prayer that our ancestors and future generations will help us. "We, the Indigenous Peoples, walk to the future in the footprints of our ancestors... we maintain our inalienable rights to our lands and territories..., to all our resources—above and below—and to our waters, we assert our ongoing responsibility to pass these on to future generations."
Over the years, Native Children's Survival (NCS) representatives have participated in COP Summits deemed critical. In 2009, with a sense of urgency and warning, NCS artists Robby Romero and Dakhóta Romero spoke and performed on Indigenous Peoples Day at the Copenhagen National Museum during the COP15 Summit in Copenhagen, Denmark. In 2011, as part of the NCS Project Protect Awareness Campaign: Music Picture Series, WHO'S GONNA SAVE YOU, broadcast on SABC Africa, brought a poetic call to consciousness for restoring life in balance during the COP17 Summit in Durban, South Africa. In 2015, during COP21 in Paris, France, prefaced by H.E. Laurent Fabius, French Foreign Minister and President of COP21, EARTH REVOLUTION premiered at the Conference of Youth. It screened at the Rights of Nature Tribunal, with a call to action by Indigenous Youth from around the world.
Last month, another Conference of the Parties (COP) dedicated to biodiversity took place virtually on 11-15 October 2021 in Kunming, China. It was Part 1 of the 15th session on biodiversity. Part 2, an in-person event in Kunming, will convene from 25 April - 8 May 2022. COP15 on biodiversity deals with the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD).
The Convention on Biological Diversity, signed by 150 government leaders at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, was ratified by 195 countries, plus the European Union, but not by the United States or the Vatican. The Convention on Biological Diversity entered into force on 29 December 1993. The first session of the Conference of the Parties was on 28 November – 9 December 1994 in the Bahamas and takes place every two years.
Fifteen years of talks and conferences on Biological Diversity, Is It Too Late?
Thirty-one years ago, Native Children's Survival's first music picture, IS IT TOO LATE, was broadcast worldwide from the Kremlin at the Global Forum of Spiritual and Parliamentary Leaders in Moscow. The broadcast was prefaced by then-President and the 8th and last leader of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev. Twenty Indigenous Peoples were invited from the four directions of the world — to help guide the future that honors Mother Earth and gives thanks for her gifts.
Later that year, IS IT TOO LATE, screened in the United Nations General Assembly in New York City during the United Nations Environment Programme, Children And The Environment. Then and now, we have all known that human behavior and man-made pollution causing the climate to change at an abnormal and alarming rate is an unsustainable lifestyle thrusting the world into peril. Elected officials remain complicit and powerless while the political culture of corporatism and capitalism runs amuck. It will now take the whole of humanity to change this direction and put us on a path of healing.
In the Spirit of our Youth, join us in resisting the forces that threaten Indigenous Peoples, Mother Earth, and All Our Relations.