Ed. note: This article was originally published at Deceleration, a nonprofit online journal producing original news and analysis responding to our shared ecological, political, and cultural crises.
The first tribally hosted World Wilderness Congress that convened the last week of August, 2024, had an ambitious agenda—placing Indigenous knowledge at the center of global resolutions to protect biodiversity.
RAPID CITY, S.D.—Humanity stands at a crossroads and must come together to realize dramatically different and supportive relationships with one another, the Earth, and all life on the planet, if we are to surmount cascading ecological and social crises now underway.
That was the message of Arvol Looking Horse, the spiritual leader of the Lakota, Dakota, and Nakota peoples, who welcomed hundreds of attendees to the 12th World Wilderness Congress convening the last week of August in the Black Hills, or Hé Sapa in the Lakota language.
“Either we face a lot of chaos, global disasters, tears from our relatives’ eyes … or we come together [and] unite as people of the world,” Looking Horse said.
Though these gatherings, dedicated to assessing and often resetting global conservation work, date back to the 1970s, this is the first such congress being convened by a tribal authority. The agenda is dedicated heavily to centering Indigenous perspectives in the global struggle to protect wild lands and waters.
Looking Horse, the 19th Keeper of the Sacred White Buffalo Calf Pipe and Bundle, is as revered among the original people of this land as the Dalai Lama is by the people of Tibet or the Pope for Catholics around the world.
“We warned that some day you would not be able to control what you had created. And that day is here. … Mother Earth is sick and has a fever,”
Looking Horse told the group assembled from nations, tribes, and communities across the world.
The chills of that “fever”—the accelerating shocks of climate destabilization caused by centuries of colonial extraction, fossil fuel combustion, and ecological destruction—rocked communities around the world in 2023, with 2024 continuing to break heat records.
People across the world sweltered in 2023 through the hottest year on planet Earth in at least 125,000 years. A “State of the Climate” report that drew on the work of nearly 600 scientists pointed to unprecedented levels of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere as the cause of Earth’s overheating. Records were similarly broken for ocean heat, sea-ice loss, and sea-level rise. In all, industrially-driven global warming exposed nearly 80 percent of the people on the planet to at least 31 days of extreme heat, another study found.
As temperatures surged, more than 37 million acres burned across Canada—an area roughly twice the size of Ireland and twice the range of Canada’s previous record-setting fires of 1989. Cities across the United States, including here in San Antonio, have suffered through their hottest years ever, killing the poorest and sickest. This level of heat was virtually impossible if not for the burning of fossil fuels and development-driven deforestation, Climate Central researchers have reminded us.
Additionally, mass bleaching of coral reefs—the “rainforests of the sea”—were reported around the planet, even reaching Garden Banks, a relatively deep and less-spoiled reef off the Texas and Louisiana coast.
“You have volcanoes. You have hurricanes. You have drought. You have lots of devastating extreme weathers happening and that’s because of what they call global warming,”
said Philimon Two Eagle, the executive director of the Sicangu Lakota Treaty Council, who was critical to bringing WILD12 to Lakota Country.
“Even though we didn’t cause it, now we have to jump up and help,” Two Eagle said.
But organizers and attendees at WILD12 aren’t there to haggle over carbon credits or debate the benefits and risks of carbon capture technologies and blue hydrogen, the substance of so many climate gatherings and debates. Instead, The WILD Foundation, through decades of international gatherings, aims to interrupt one driver of climate crisis that gets far less air time than carbon emissions: the global loss of the planet’s wild spaces, which for millions of years have served as the planet’s lungs and carbon sinks.
Yet even conservation spaces and agendas have offered a shallow understanding of problems and solutions, overlooking the deeper cultural—and thus colonial—roots of ecological collapse.
What makes this year’s congress so significant is its aim to reformulate the global conservation agenda not only by placing Indigenous leadership at the forefront of conservation action, but more foundationally, by centering Indigenous knowledge and worldviews in understandings of what Western cultures call wilderness.
“The climate change events we face have been brought about by a dangerous and deadly separation of culture, especially technology, from nature,” Indigenous scholar Dan Wildcat, one of the speakers at Wild12, writes in “Red Alert! Saving the Planet with Indigenous Knowledge.”
In other words, the cultural roots of the collapse of our shared biosphere lies not in the make, model, or brand of the tools we use to clearcut forests or fuel plastics production. Rather, it lies in a fundamental misunderstanding that goes all the way to the bottom of Western thought: the hierarchical dualism that imagines the “human” as both separate from and superior to “nature” (a binary that historically has been mapped onto others: male/female, light/dark, mind/body, and active/passive).
What needs to be understood and challenged, then, is the very basic conceptual groundings of Western culture itself, which gave birth to capitalism as a global economic system for extracting profit both from the bodies of people racialized and gendered as “others” and from land, treated as a dead thing or “resource” to extract from. For it is these philosophical and economic assumptions that—especially from an Indigenous perspective—facilitated colonization and enabled the genocides, slavery, and racial capitalism that followed.
During the 500 years since those first Spanish and English expeditions to the “New” world, it is estimated that more than 100 million original inhabitants of the Western Hemisphere have been killed or died an early death as a result of contact with Europeans and their descendants. It has been described as “the worst human holocaust the world had ever witnessed.”
Juan Mancias, the tribal chair of the Carrizo/Comecrudo Tribe of Texas, sees the continuation of that genocide in the violence directed at migrating peoples at the U.S.-Mexico border—many of whom are fleeing climate shocks caused primarily by the so-called Global North economies.
“How can you be illegal on stolen lands?” he asks.
And he sees it in the destruction of ecosystems and sacred sites by oil and gas development in the state.
“We had one science—and that was how to keep and protect the land,” Mancias told Deceleration of his ancestors, who once lived and traveled freely across what is today South Texas and Northern Mexico. ”And look what they are doing to it.”
To help reorient global conservation efforts around Indigenous thinking on wilderness, the organizers of WILD12 are advancing a series of resolutions over the course of the conference. These range from philosophical statements unpacking the colonial legacies of Western thinking on wilderness to proposals for an Indigenous conceptual framework “through the eyes of buffalo” to very concrete calls to protect specific lands and relatives. Of particular note is the call to make space to protect white animals, viewed in many Indigenous cultures as “messengers of peace,” including in the founding history of the Wild Wilderness Congress.
DRAFT WILD12 RESOLUTIONS
- Resolution One: On Sovereignty and Wilderness: Deepening the Wilderness Concept Through Indigenous
- Knowledge and Wisdom
- Resolution Two: Through the Eyes of Buffalo
- Resolution Three: Advancing the Rights of Antarctica
- Resolution Four: Mainstreaming Mentorship of Young Conservationists
- Resolution Five: Guardianship of Nature
- Resolution Six: Ratify the High Seas Treaty
- Resolution Seven: Making Space to Protect White Animals, Messengers of Peace
- Resolution Eight: Empowering Ecological Outcomes by Honoring Treaties
Looking Horse, a leader in resisting the Dakota Access Pipeline in the Standing Rock struggle that captured the world’s attention, told WILD12 attendees that they too were being called in response to a prophecy surrounding the recent birth of a white buffalo. Named Wakan Gli, meaning “Return Sacred” in Lakota, the calf appeared in Yellowstone National Park this summer.
“Today we are here because all the white animals are being born. Especially the white buffalo calf with a black nose, black eyes, and black hooves,” Looking Horse said.
That birth was prophesied to herald troubled times—but also an opportunity for humanity to choose a new way forward, he said.
“These are great messages for us to maintain peace and balance,” Looking Horse said. “It’s a very important time in our history that’s happening right now. And I pray that you leave here you’ll be a messenger for the white animals, the peacekeepers of the world. May peace prevail on Earth.”
Deceleration has traveled from Texas to cover WILD12. You can support our work here.
