Indigenous Peoples: Fight For Our Future! 2023 International Day Of The World’s Indigenous Peoples

We are coming together to celebrate our Fight for Our Future for the International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples.

Today is a celebration of Indigenous struggles. Amid the historical discrimination, oppression and erasure, we have overcome from our communities to the international arena to reclaim our rights as peoples. The colonial conquest and its continuing imperialist subjugation of our lands, resources, territories, self-governance and culture remains the biggest foe in achieving a self-determined future.

We look back on how 41 years ago today, the Working Group on Indigenous Populations was established to promote and protect the rights of Indigenous Peoples. Most of all, we pay the highest tribute to our indigenous martyrs, heroes, elders and leaders that fought for the freedoms we enjoy today and pushed to establish the working group.

And we are called to unite and hold on to our victories. This is even more important today as criminalization, harassment, terrorist-tagging and killings worsen among our ranks because of our unshakable promotion and protection of our right to self-determination.

Our frontline communities are unfazed in defending our lands from mega dams, extractivism, plantations and destructive projects and colonial investments. We take strides to assert recognition for our contribution in protecting pacha mama against the climate crisis.

We are agents of genuine sustainable development, and promoting a more humane society even though the response to us is often discrimination and lack of participation, silence, judicial harassment, militarization, bombings and evictions from our lands.

Our work is advancing in strengthening our solidarity together with other marginalized and oppressed peoples. There is hope for Indigenous Peoples movement as long as our indigenous knowledge, stories and traditions flow to our indigenous youth and indigenous women. They are the spring and new blood, our creative and courageous torch bearers of self-determination.

We have come far but we have a long way to go. And we are not going anywhere until our future is free from the current development models, environment, economic and socio-political systems of injustice.

With our collective spirits bound by an aspiration for a tomorrow with full enjoyment of our land, diverse cultures and rights, we chant “Indigenous Peoples, Fight for Our Future! Struggle for our Right to Self-Determination!”

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