* Any views expressed in this opinion piece are those of the author and not of Thomson Reuters Foundation.
Despite odds, indigenous youth in Peru are taking action, and implementing powerful local solutions to the climate chaos around them
Fires raging across the Peruvian Amazon these past few months have consumed a region three times the size of Manhattan. Brought on by drought, the flames hit an Ashaninka Communal Reserve, home to 5,000 people, turning forests that ten communities rely on to cinders.
The Ashaninka, like so many around the world, are least responsible for climate change yet are most vulnerable to its effects. Due to changing weather patterns and unpredictable natural disasters, their livelihoods, lands and cultural identities are at risk. For many indigenous people, these climate impacts are the new face of colonial devastation.
Despite these odds, indigenous youth in Peru are taking action, and implementing powerful local solutions to the climate chaos around them.
Following massive floods and landslides in 2010 near Pisac, Cusco, indigenous students and teachers of a local school set up an organic farm aptly named Kusi Ñan (Happy Path), where they grow crops such as quinoa and amaranth from native seeds. They sell the produce to nearby hotels and restaurants catering to tourists, and also use it for the celebration of ceremonial dates of the Andean Ancestral Calendar.
The farm provides young people the opportunity to protect local crop varieties, and cultivate climate resilience through agricultural diversity. It also supplies youth with income that prevents them from having to migrate to a large city such as Lima.
In the capital city of over eight million people, 30 percent of the population is below 28—and only one out of ten young people have formal employment. Among them are indigenous youth of the Quechua nation, pushed to work in the city in part because retreating glaciers, and a drop in rainfall, have reduced the amount of water available for farming back home in Southern Peru.
Indigenous youth living in Lima, far from their ancestral homes, can easily lose connections to their culture and tradition. But one Indigenous community in the city demonstrates that this need not be the case.
In 2000, Shipibo indigenous people from the Central Peruvian Amazon built a community on a landfill near downtown Lima. On the banks of the city’s polluted Rimac River, they constructed Cantagallo, which has become a satellite Shipibo community.
It houses Lima’s only bi-lingual elementary school, which instructs students in Spanish and Shipibo. It also hosts one of the city’s most important indigenous cultural festivals, Shipibo Soy (I am Shipibo), an annual event featuring food, dance and music.
But like many indigenous people in Peru, the Shipibo living in Cantagallo have no legal claim to the land, and are currently facing the prospect of displacement to make way for a massive infrastructure project. Community members are fighting to protect their right to adequate living conditions, with the support of young activists who are raising awareness through art and hip-hop.
The profound inequities and injustices facing indigenous communities can’t be blamed on climate change alone. But the changing climate compounds the challenges already posed by policies and practices that take land and natural resource rights away from indigenous people; and propagate inadequate health and educational systems.
The challenges facing indigenous youth are many. Their worlds are drastically changing as fossil-fuel-driven climate change alters the natural environments that have supported and shaped their communities for centuries. In Peru and beyond, continuing stigmatization, and economic and social inequality, further contributes to an overwhelming sense of uncertainty.
Indigenous youth must not face these challenges alone. And they are not the only ones to lose out in the face of climate chaos and oppressive inequality. What is at stake, and what we must humbly take heed of, is their knowledge and wisdom regarding our intimate relationship with the Earth, and how to safeguard and cherish those connections - for our collective survival.
Majandra Rodriguez Acha is an anthropologist, educator and activist from Peru. She is an Advisor to Global Greengrants Fund’s Next Generation Climate Board, which supports young climate activists around the world, and a Young Feminist Fellow for Climate Justice at the Women's Environment and Development Organization and FRIDA.
