Celebrate Earth Day With Our Struggle For Self-determination!

On this year’s Earth Day, the International IPMSDL reiterates our affirmation that the Right to Self-Determination is one of the most potent solutions and powerful weapons in protecting Mother Earth and fighting climate crisis.

Indigenous Peoples’ right to self-determination is the power to determine our future, self-govern, and manage the environment, biodiversity, waters, and resources within our ancestral territories.

Our right to self-determination as peoples includes deciding for and protecting our political, economic, social, and cultural life without foreign or outside imposition including resource exploitation and false, market-based climate solutions.

Upholding our right to self-determination means recognizing and respecting the autonomy to decide the pace of socio-economic progress that aligns with indigenous values of environmental sustainability and is beneficial to the whole community in the long term.

Our right to self-determination means preserving indigenous knowledge systems and practices, language, and art to contribute to the global goals of environmental protection.

Indigenous Peoples right to self-determination ensures land and forest rights, resource management, and land stewardship to stop ecosystem destruction.

Every day is Earth Day for Indigenous Peoples. And this has been our life for centuries even before the earth-destructive colonization and present-day occcupations and imperialist incursions.

We denounce every act of criminalization, terrorist-tagging, killing, and harassment against Indigenous Peoples for standing up and resisting the murder of Mother Earth by exercising our right to self-determination.

The environmental crisis we face demands no more begging but rather asserting and fighting for our right to self-determination in the name of Mother Earth, our communities, and our future generations.

© Scoop Media