Indigenous Peoples' Day at Yale: Indigenous Peoples and Climate Change - Yaku Pérez Guartambel
Wars, pandemics and conquests are the causes of the biggest genocides in the world. Rwanda and Burundi, Cambodia with Pol Pot, Stalin’s purges, the Holocaust of the First and Second World Wars. The Black Death, smallpox and even HIV AIDS brought us to our knees. But we forget the biggest genocide in the history of humanity: the massacre and dispossession of indigenous peoples in Abya Yala that began on October 12, 1492. Bartolomé de Las Casas estimated that at least 40 million natives died in the West Indies, depopulating some 4,000 leagues, “something never heard of, had never happened, had never been dreamed of.” In one century, 110 million indigenous people were reduced to 3 million in Abya Yala. It was not only genocide but the beginning of an epistemicide, ecocide and terricide. This crime encouraged extractive capital (mining, oil, lumber, etc.) and at the same time the dispossession of the territories of indigenous peoples, the mita system, the labor exploitation and the exploitation of the Pachamama (Mother Nature), the environmental degradation and eco-social contamination. In the last 300 years we have consumed the energy that has costed the planet 300 thousand years. Global warming stopped being a threat to become a reality. In Lytton (British Columbia) the temperature reached 50 degrees Celsius; it is so hot that it seems the devil sold us to capitalism. At this rate we will die roasted. The indigenous people are 5% of the world's population, but we care for 80% of the planet's biodiversity. Global Witness indicates that every week, 4 and a half defenders of nature are murdered and of them, half are indigenous. If there is no hope for the dispossessed, there will be no hope for the billionaires either. Without the 'cosmovivencias' of the indigenous peoples, there is no future.
Yaku Pérez Guartambel is a Kichwa Kañari leader, lawyer, professor and author of 9 books. As a water defender, he has led historic judicial processes in defense of the rights of nature in the Andes and the Amazon. He was criminalized and detained for defending human and nature rights on 6 occasions; he also suffered kidnappings and attempted murders, obtaining precautionary measures from the IACHR (2018). In international matters, he is a judge of the International Tribunal for the Rights of Nature and achieved the recognition of ancestral marriage by the UN CERD (2022), a global legal precedent that establishes self-determination.
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This event is in Spanish, and English translation will be provided via Zoom. Headphones and an electronic device are required to access this translation.
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This is a hybrid event. If attending over Zoom, please register at https://yale.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_OohGtoT-RtyyLYM8LsFv8Q.