What do we mean when we say “progress”?

 

The Issue: Media narratives often frame Indigenous environmental activists as opponents of “progress”. But what do they mean when they say “progress”? What is progress, and progress for who? Normally, the settler stakeholders are corporations and businesses who have an economic interest in extracting resources that Indigenous groups are trying to protect. These businesses are looking to extract resources from the land in order to earn income and profits, to grow their bottom line. This economic and financial view of progress is limited and short-sighted. Serving the financial interests of shareholders is not a form of progress that benefits all Canadians. Especially when this form of “progress” results in devastating land use changes that fuel climate change and cause problems like air and water pollution, carbon emissions, deforestation, and other ‘externalities’ that shareholders don’t have to pay for.

Change the Narrative: We have to ask ourselves, what is progress and who is it for? What everybody can agree on from western scientists at Environment Canada and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to Elders and Knowledge Keepers, is that we need to make progress on preserving and conserving the natural environment. To reduce our emissions and extractive practices that degrade the land, the waters, and the air. Keeping trees in the ground, protecting rivers from waste, ending pipeline construction that serves the fossil fuel economy, this is climate progress.

New Narrative on Progress: Protecting and preserving the natural landscapes that remain, that is progress. Ending our reliance on fossil fuels and therefore ending pipeline construction, that is progress. Refusing to accept industrial waste dumped into riverbeds, that is progress. Preserving migration patterns and habitats for Canada’s remaining wildlife, that is progress. Thinking in terms of the land itself as having rights, rights that supersede those of shareholders, that is progress. This is how we will preserve the world that we know and love for future generations. Learning to take only what one needs and no more, ensuring that enough remains for our descendants, that is spiritual and moral progress.

Earning Warnings: Indigenous Canadians are the most directly involved in witnessing with their own eyes the impacts of extractive capitalist economic activities driving climate change. When they dispute a pipeline company’s right to uproot a forest, they are fighting on the behalf of all Canadians, even though it is not acknowledged in the media. They are fighting for progress on climate action, even though they are framed as fighting economic progress. Indigenous nations are on the front lines, they are providing settler Canadians with early warnings, raising red flags, seeing things that city-dwellers do not see or notice. Let’s change the narrative. Let’s wake up and pay attention. Let’s respect centuries of accumulated Traditional Wisdom and the practical, real-time expertise that Indigenous Knowledge Keepers bring to the climate debate. They are the canaries in the coal mines, and they are trying to tell us something. Let’s open our ears and listen before it is too late.