Leading the eco-revolution
Activist Clayton Thomas-Muller is building an 'inclusive movement for climate justice' in Canada.
http://www.rabble.ca/news_full_story.shtml?x=61919
by Nina Winham
September 4, 2007
It was a lake without stories that first signaled something wrong to Clayton Thomas-Muller and fed the future activist's passion for justice. A lake with no stories and no life, spread thin across his peoples' traditional territory.
“I was raised in Winnipeg, but we spent summers back home, near our reserve,” he says. A member of the Mathais Colomb Cree Nation, Thomas-Muller's Pukatawagan Reserve is on the Churchill River near the Manitoba-Saskatchewan border. His summers consisted of hunting, fishing, working his family's trapline, and learning traditional culture and ways of living—experiences his mother was intent on providing to her urban-raised children.
“There was a lake near our cabin where we would swim,” he remembers. It was beautiful, wide and shallow, the floodplain of the Churchill River. “But we never fished in the floodplain—there was nothing in it. And in my culture, there were stories about the other bodies of water, stories of animals and sacred beings. But there were no stories about this lake. I just had this feeling about it that something was wrong. It wasn't until much later [when he learned about the damming of the Churchill River for hydro-electric power, and the flooding of traditional land], that I realized the sacrifice that our Cree people, and my family, had made.”
It was not a direct line from awareness to action. Thomas-Muller describes his involvement in inner-city aboriginal gangs as a youth, “selling drugs, leading a gangster lifestyle.” But his older brother quit the gang to move back north, and he appealed to Clayton to get out too. That led to a program for urban aboriginal youth that included training in leadership and community economic development, and culminated in an opportunity to travel to Mexico to live with the Zapotec Indians.
“Spending time with the Zapotec Indians gave me a profound appreciation for what little we do have up here in the north,” he says. “Growing up as an urban Indian I definitely contended with poverty. But the level of disparity in the south, where there are rich greedy landowners, and the indigenous people are only allowed to farm for eight months of the year during the coffee season, and then for four months they're kicked off the land… it made me humble and appreciative for what little my mother was able to provide me when I was growing up. I mean, these are people who are forced to put their children into orphanages for four months a year so they can go to the factories and stitch jeans.”
The experience also left Thomas-Muller with clear themes that have underpinned his work ever since: the connections between human rights and economic justice, between environmental degradation and the colonization of indigenous people. The extensive list of his engagements on these topics is impressive for an activist just turned 30: youth delegate to a conference of UN ministers (Portugal); World Indigenous Youth Conference (New Zealand); World Summit on Sustainable Development (South Africa); Social Forum of the Americas (Ecuador)—to name a few.
“I've been fortunate to travel across Mother Earth,” he says simply. “I see consistent patterns of industrialization and impoverishment everywhere I've gone. Occupying government forces at work with corporate power, working to erode indigenous sovereignty for resource extraction: energy, oil and gas, copper, forestry. Always in the background the international financiers: Citibank, the IMF [International Monetary Fund], World Bank. Always people struggling to practice traditional culture and lifestyles. In Africa, Southeast Asia, South America—the timing might be different but it's the same situation everywhere.”
If leadership requires vision, it is clear why Thomas-Muller has been chosen over and over to speak on behalf of others, to bring forward arguments and help efforts gather momentum. His vision of global indigenous challenges is clear and multi-faceted, expressed in a language that mixes socio-economic analysis with calm passion and traditional wisdom. He breaks the frame where discussions of indigenous rights are so often trapped: this is not a question of evaluating lost rights or paying compensation for the marginalization of regrettably bygone cultures. His argument goes straight to the core, to the survival of us all.
“The western scientific industrial experiment of the last 150 years is psychotic,” he says with no hint of sarcasm. “In this day where the last pristine wilderness is under threat, where we have psychotic, suicidal, homicidal corporate interests—mining, industrial fishing, oil and gas—what we're seeing playing out across Mother Earth is a last stand of 350 million indigenous people left. Those 350 million represent 87 per cent of all languages and cultural diversity on the planet.”
“Biodiversity and cultural diversity are inextricably linked: within that cultural diversity are highly sophisticated systems of ecosystem management developed over millennia as part of the system—the circle of life, biodiversity, whatever you want to call it. Every time an indigenous language is lost it's like the burning of the library at Alexandria. We lose a deep understanding of ecology of that one part of Mother Earth. What we're seeing is a genocide unparalleled in the history of the earth, to replace this diversity with commodification.”
Psychotic—a loss of contact with reality, an inability to think rationally; incapability of normal social function. In the context of the looming collapse of our planet's life support system, while our global economic machinery blithely continues business as usual, it seems Thomas-Muller has a very solid point.
“Ai yi!” he yelps suddenly. Having left full-time employment with the Indigenous Environmental Network as its Native Energy Organizer, his latest gig is as stay-at-home dad. His 14-month-old son has just bitten him in jealousy at his long telephone conversation. He scoops the child up and searches for a snack, returning to his political, spiritual, economic, psychoanalytical discourse without skipping a beat.
“Climate change is a civil rights issue,” Thomas-Muller says, dishing out a cookie and cuddling his son. His latest project is to develop a national environmental justice training program for grassroots leaders of marginalized people to develop an 'inclusive movement for climate justice' in Canada. “Poor people—and others marginalized because of class, race, gender—have been systematically excluded from high level debate about climate change,” he says. The training sessions are slated to begin this fall, and take place in five locations across the country.
Meanwhile, he is working to mount an indigenous peoples' campaign against the tar sands project in Alberta. He fumes about the multiple barrels of pristine water and natural gas required to produce a single barrel of oil, leaving huge toxic waste pools and disinheriting local people.
“This is all so that Canada can be ‘the new Saudi Arabia,’” he says incredulously. “Look at what's happening in Saudi Arabia! Do we even want this? Does Canada even realize the geopolitical implications of this?“ For a brief moment, he reverts to a gang leader's pugnacious stance. “For the next 10 years,” he says, “I'm definitely focused on shutting that big bad daddy down.”
Recognized by the Utne Reader as one of the “Top 30 under 30 Young Activists in the United States,” Thomas-Muller is philosophical about the honour. “One of the reasons I've got this is that I'm good at pulling kick ass teams together. This work can't be done in isolation. So the individual Hollywood-esque recognition—I can credit that to the fact that I surround myself with, and I work with, incredible activists and communities.”
Thomas-Muller impresses as a person well capable of leading a cultural and political revival focused on saving people who have been marginalized by massive economic forces run amok. Indigenous people, yes. And maybe all the rest of us too. As world-wide social, environmental and economic issues converge into one large question mark about the survival of the human community, his may be the type of leadership we need at the centre, not just from the side.
Thomas-Muller's brother still lives on the reserve, continuing to trap, fish and hunt. “He always gives me a hard time about coming back north,” says the young activist. “But I tell him I have a lot of work to do before I'll be able to come home.”
Nina Winham is a former journalist and business consultant specializing in engaging people in the shift to sustainability. Her company, New Climate Strategies, works with business, non-profits, and government to develop new solutions for workplaces, communities, markets, and campaigns. Based in Vancouver, she is a strong believer in the power of storytelling for social change.
