Ta’Kaiya Blaney at COP26: “My land and waters are under genocidal illegal occupation”

Still from video by Eriel Tchekwie Deranger.

At the COP26 summit in Glasgow, Tla’amin land defender Ta’Kaiya Blaney stated:

“My land and waters are under the genocidal illegal occupation of the Canadian government, resource extraction industries and international corporations that are bleeding us dry of our birthright, the salmon, the cedars, the soil.

Climate change bleeds of our birthright, but climate change is merely a symptom of the most significant destructive force responsible for taking our lands and lives everyday and that is colonialism.

Myself and all my relatives here have been criminalized, surveilled and experienced violence at the hands of the police, the hands of RCMP and injunctions issued by colonial governments to remove us from our lands when we get in the way of profits.

COP26 is a performance, it’s an illusion constructed to salvage capitalist economies rooted in resource extraction and colonialism.

I didn’t come here to fix the agenda I came here to disrupt it. Colonialism is what caused climate change and I’m not going to my colonizers for solutions.

We reject colonial solutions for climate change. Nature-based solutions and carbon markets are false solutions rooted in the commodification of nature.

Everyday Indigenous people are criminalized, incarcerated, murdered, and disappeared because of industries propelling climate change. Climate change is not a blameless phenomenon, there are names behind it.”

To listen to her full speech, please click here.

You can follow Ta’Kaiya on Instagram.

Photo by Adrien Salazar.