Guardians of the Future
- Feb 13
- 9 min read
Updated: Feb 16
Climate Change is a Crisis of Relationship, and Indigenous Women Have Been Warning Us
Western climate discourse often centers carbon metrics and conservation targets while ignoring the human communities displaced by privatization, tourism, and extractive expansion. But climate collapse is not merely ecological — it's relational. It reflects a breakdown in the reciprocal relationships between land, governance, and community. Indigenous women have long articulated this truth, and their struggles illuminate what a truly transformative climate response would require.
This past fall, viral social media videos showed Wildebeest in Kenya’s Masai Mara at a standstill, blocked from proceeding on their seasonal migration — the construction of a Ritz-Carlton hotel disrupted natural migration pathways, according to local activists. Social media users expressed outrage towards the hotel over the environmental disruptions as a result of corporatized expansion, yet seemingly missing from the discourse was concern for how livelihoods of local populations were affected as a result of privatization and capitalist expansion in the Masai Mara region. Maasai populations in Kenya and Tanzania have long battled dispossession as a result of conservation enclosures, mass tourism, and big business. Exclusion of local populations in conversations around environmental disruption and degradation is misanthropic at its core, and is akin to West conceptions of the climate crisis — mainstream climate discourse has reduced the climate crisis to solely environmental, ridding the climate of its inherent intersectionality and relationality.
Prevailing conceptualizations understand the climate crisis as human activity exacerbating CO2 emissions, depleting the ozone layer, causing catastrophic global warming and extreme climate disasters. This is all true, but slow to make mainstream conversation, however, are factors such as climate refugees, war, genocide, and colonization. On the contrary, Indigenous peoples and local ecological frameworks have long emphasized the connective webs constituting climate.
The climate crisis is not only environmental but relational — a rupture between people, land, water, and community. UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), corporate ESG policies, and Western advocacy groups have put forth their versions of climate solutions that largely overemphasize the environment and green energy solutions, minimizing relationality, a crucial aspect that any serious approach to the climate catastrophe cannot disregard. In an interview with The Parlor, Osprey Orielle Lake, founder of Women’s Earth and Climate Action (WECAN) and author of The Story is in our Bones, describes just this. “Dominant Western worldviews treat the Earth as an object, something inert, available for extraction, and valued primarily through economic metrics. This worldview frames climate solutions in technocratic, market-driven terms such as carbon markets, geoengineering, offsets, and profit-oriented 'green growth' narratives. What these approaches fail to grasp is that ecological collapse is not merely a technological glitch, it is a spiritual and cultural crisis rooted in the severing of human relationships with land, water, and one another.”
To understand these intersectional webs does not require new strategizing, or fancy COP conferences. Indigenous peoples, and Indigenous women in particular, have been practicing and articulating ecofeminist principles far before the term existed. Across the Amazon, the Arctic, Turtle Island, and Bawaka Country (occupied Australia), Indigenous women lead climate defense and articulate the feminist climate future we need. To understand how ecofeminism can guide global climate policy, we must look to Indigenous women — whose struggle for land, safety, and community autonomy offers the clearest blueprint for climate resilience.
Ecofeminism as Indigenous Philosophy (Not Western Theory)
Western multilateral institutions, NGOs, and academia have largely repackaged ecofeminism as an abstract and theoretical framework — something to be taught to or imposed upon Indigenous and Global South communities, in turn appropriating the concept and excluding such populations from conversations and decisions. Ecofeminism, being an intersectional understanding of climate and the environment, is not something Western feminists invented, but rather how Indigenous peoples live.
A return to the SDG goals illuminates this tension. As per the UN, the SDGs, of which there are 17, “are an urgent call for action…that recognize that ending poverty and other deprivations must go hand-in-hand with strategies that improve health and education, reduce inequality, and spur economic growth — all while tackling climate change and working to preserve our oceans and forest.” The list has become a set of principles guiding the most powerful of countries to the smallest nonprofits. All 191 member countries of the UN have agreed to try and meet the goals by 2030, and many private organizations have used the list to design or measure their initiatives.
The SDGs have become, in effect, a universal standard, evoking a sense of legitimacy and practicality. The goals thematically cover poverty, climate, and gender. At a glance, this may appear as an intersectional approach to ensuring a sustainable future. For many observers, the SDGs reflect a neoliberal framework that privileges privatization and market-led development. Rather than confronting the structural drivers of climate collapse, this model can entrench inequality — including forms of economic disenfranchisement that disproportionately affect women.
For example, the ethnography Plantations, Women, and Food Security in Africa: Interrogating the Investment Pathway Towards Zero Hunger in Cameroon and Ghana shows how large-scale plantations introduced to meet food production targets under SDG Goal 2 (Zero Hunger) dispossessed communities of their land, restricted access to staple crops, and reproduced gender inequities. The paper quotes one Cameroonian village woman critiquing plantation companies that have emerged as a result of SDGs. “[They] have taken our land, and this has led to a reduction in our income…women used to work in farms, produced enough food for the home and to sell…Nevertheless, now they work in plantation nurseries with insignificant pay…they work for long hours in the nurseries and do not have time to work on their own farms…they have left their farms for nurseries…in return of hunger, poverty, and hopelessness.” This example conveys the contradiction between widespread celebration and implementation of SDGs, and lived local realities.
Many Indigenous populations already embody ecofeminism within local ecological knowledge frameworks. For example, in Bawaka Country, North East Arnhem land in occupied Australia, Yolŋju peoples comprehend life through a relational web of co-becoming, where humans are not the center of the universe, but rather are part of a broad network of kinship that involves more-than-humans, which encapsulates all non-humans: animals, water, land, and weather. In Yolŋju ontology, all entities are co-equal, exercise mutual care, are responsible to one another, and coexist. This is one of many examples depicting ecofeminism as a lived reality versus theorized. Indigenous feminist ontologies and understandings of life emphasize relationality, reciprocity, non-extraction and communal governance. Thus, Western ecofeminism names what Indigenous people, and Indigenous women in particular, have always done — defend land as inseparable from defending life.
Shared Oppression: Patriarchy and Colonial Extraction Target Both Women and the Earth
The feminization of the planet as “Mother Earth,” the association of environmental care with feminine nurturing, and widespread beliefs in women’s sacred connection to land across many Indigenous cultures have collectively positioned Indigenous women as uniquely tied to the Earth. Caro Gonzales, a woman from the Chemehuevi tribe and on the frontlines of anti-pipeline resistance at Standing Rock, said to the Guardian, “women are the backbone of every Indigenous community…whether feeding people or being on the frontlines…it’s all Indigenous women and two spirits.” Ecofeminism, as a lens and a way of life, allows for an understanding of how climate and gender intersect, and more specifically, how an assault on one is an assault on the other. Climate change as facilitated by colonialism and capitalism, is dependent upon the extraction of resources, unpaid labor, land theft, dispossession, and the erasure of Indigenous governance — and in a dominantly patriarchal world order both colonial and ancestral, the effect is gendered.
In the United States, pipelines built illegally on Indigenous lands have polluted water and air, degraded ecosystems, and coincided with increased violence against Indigenous women. With oil extraction expansion in the U.S., instances of missing and murdered Indigenous women have skyrocketed. Native populations have reported high rates of human and sex trafficking, specifically in areas of pipeline construction. The Fort Berthold Reservation in North Dakota, saw sexual assault increase by 75% when oil extraction began. Pipeline construction also carries significant consequences for reproductive health. Chemically contaminated water is linked to pregnancy complications and adverse health conditions for both mothers and children. When local water sources become undrinkable, Native communities are forced to rely on bottled water — an added financial strain that deepens the economic burden of raising children in communities already marginalized by racialized inequality.
In other contexts of colonial extraction, particularly in the Global South, the loss or contamination of local water sources often forces women to travel longer distances to obtain clean water, increasing their unpaid labor and reinforcing the shared economic and environmental violence inflicted on both women and the land. Climate disruption and displacement often increase women’s childcare responsibilities as livelihoods collapse and families are forced to adapt. The unpaid labor imposed on women under climate capitalism also appears in its most brutal form: exploitative extraction systems in which resource mining — including for so-called green technologies — is sustained by conditions akin to modern-day slavery, as seen in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Women working in mines for virtually no wage are susceptible to high rates of gender-based violence, with one study citing that more than 70% of women miners in Congo are subject to sexual violence.
And of course, we see shared oppression between women and the Earth when women defend land. In 2024, 146 land defenders were killed or disappeared; one-third were Indigenous or Afro-descendants. While women only constituted 10% of this number, they (and Indigenous women in particular) continue to be subjected to intimidation tactics, harassment, criminalization, eviction, and silencing from governments and corporations alike. Jakeline Romero Epiayuu, an Indigenous Wayúu woman from Colombia, was featured in a Cambridge research project documenting violence against Indigenous women who resist capitalist mega-projects on their ancestral lands. She described the simultaneous fear and courage she and other women experience when facing threats from corporations: “When the threats started, fear and terror invaded me…Fear is like Manta (Wayúu women’s dress). It is like a manta that falls on me when I am threatened. But, after, I have to take it off and wear the manta of braveness to carry on…I coexist with fear, but I do not let it dominate me.”
In using an ecofeminist lens, we see how colonial patriarchy treats women and land as expendable; when one is violated, the other is too.
Indigenous Women as Land Defenders and Keepers of Climate Knowledge
Globally, Indigenous women are leading resistance movements against colonial and capitalist projects that fuel the climate crisis. In Louisiana, Indigenous women led resistance groups to obstruct the construction of the Dakota access pipeline. In the Brazilian Amazon, women of the Indigenous Munduruku community lead land defense, despite death threats and silencing tactics, and as the government and companies encroach on the forest.
They stand at the forefront of land defense not only because extractive economies disproportionately harm them, but also because they possess generations of ecological knowledge essential to understanding and confronting climate collapse. In Brazil’s Munduruku community, Indigenous women are at the forefront of resisting capitalist expansion because extractive projects — rooted in settler colonial and, at times, genocidal policies — directly threaten their health and the survival of their children.
In a video shared by Amazon Watch, Maria Leusa Munduruku — an Indigenous leader resisting mining expansion on her community’s land — describes the health consequences of these incursions: “As the territory is being destroyed, we end up getting sick too. Especially us women who suffer a lot from this. With invasions comes a lot of disease, malaria…diarrhea, and the ones who suffer with their children are women. And there is also…contamination by mercury…especially from the consumption of fish.”
These struggles underscore a broader truth: the same women often portrayed as vulnerable victims of climate disaster are, in fact, knowledge holders with expertise in food systems, climate cycles, and ecological interdependence. Indigenous women embody ecofeminism in practice and have long outlined a climate future built on relational governance, sovereignty, and the protection of interconnected life. Yet their authority remains sidelined by the institutions that claim to lead global climate policy
Repairing the Relational Rupture— A Feminist Climate Blueprint
Indigenous communities have been clear in their frustrations and resentment of Western climate policies and approaches. At COP30 held in Brazil, Indigenous Amazonian peoples disrupted the corporatized event co-opting the climate justice struggle, demanding respect for Indigenous sovereignty and an end to policies exacerbating oil extraction, deforestation, and the dispossession of Indigenous peoples. Rather than gesturing toward “feminist climate policy,” policymakers must abandon buzzwords and growth-oriented climate strategies and adopt the specific, material demands emerging from Indigenous movements: ending extractive colonial economies; advancing land back and Indigenous sovereignty; protecting water and seed sovereignty; supporting land defenders; guaranteeing representation at climate negotiations; and recognizing gender-based violence as an environmental issue. These are not abstract ideals but material steps toward repairing the relational rupture at the heart of the climate crisis.
As climate refugees increase, ecocide accompanies war and genocide, and Indigenous communities continue to face environmental destruction and dispossession, the crisis demands an ecofeminist response — not as abstract Western theory, but as embodied Indigenous practice. Environmental survival requires centering Indigenous women’s governance and cosmologies, alongside material support and protection for the communities who sustain this knowledge. Returning to Orielle Lake, founder of WECAN, “the shift in consciousness we need is toward relationality, recognizing Earth as a living being and humans as participants in a vast web of interdependence. This includes those of us who are not Indigenous reconnecting with the land stories of our own ancestors, remembering that every lineage once had intimate ecological knowledges shaped by place. Reclaiming these lineages is part of transforming the colonial and patriarchal conditioning that has normalized domination. A relational worldview asks us to center care, reciprocity, kinship, and collective well-being—not as abstract ideals, but as practical principles guiding governance, economy, and daily life.”
Protecting Indigenous peoples and Indigenous women is urgent, particularly as state violence, border militarization, and extractive expansion continue to endanger Indigenous communities across the Americas.The world is looking for climate solutions — Indigenous women have already built them, and the onus is on us to listen and protect the guardians of the future.
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