Centring Indigenous Women’s Rights in Climate Justice: The importance of listening to the direct voices of Indigenous women

Overview

This article is written as a series of organic conversations between four women working in gender and climate change in south-east Asia. It is situated through storytelling of an Indigenous Bunong woman from Cambodia and a woman of Hmong ethnicity from Lao People’s Democratic Republic (PDR). They discuss the inequitable effects of climate change on women and girls in their communities, from water scarcity, increased poverty, decreased family health, and cultural identity. Forests are spiritual places for Indigenous people, with their loss not only limiting access to traditional foods and medicine, but also to sacred spaces such as burial sites. They discuss the similarity of their roles and those of other Indigenous women in their communities as holders of traditional knowledge developed over generations on sustainable approaches to climate change adaptation. The conversation is joined by two Australian feminist development experts who have worked in Cambodia and Lao PDR over decades. They share their reflections on ways of working within colonial patriarchal aid infrastructures that can subvert their privileged international status in support of the voices of local Indigenous women in climate change discussions. They challenged themselves throughout the process of this paper to give power forward, provide space, and listen to the wisdom of these Indigenous women. The process organically unfolded into a series of conversations between the co-authors over several months. Trust and understanding were built through this process with the dialogue moving more deeply into the context and work of the two Indigenous authors, and the happenstance that enabled them to become leaders catalysing the knowledge of Indigenous women in climate change in their communities, from the village to the global stage. The final conversation concludes that without more conscious and systematic efforts by development actors, the vital voices and leadership of Indigenous women will not be heard in the spaces of power.