Supporting ‘Land and Peoples’
This August’s lunch was itself a follow-up to a similar event two summers ago when team officials including CEO Tod Leiweke and Vice President of Community Engagement and Social Impact Mari Horita invited Native leaders together to brainstorm how the Kraken and Climate Pledge Arena (both unnamed back then) could best support and engage our Native community.
Over frybread tacos, kale salad and quinoa succotash, the main objective of the gathering was to share and receive feedback around various initiatives the Kraken and Climate Pledge Arena have been working on to engage with and amplify the stories and voices of Native peoples.
In the same space where Kraken General Manager Ron Francis learned via NHL lottery that Seattle would be picking second overall in this summer’s amateur draft, leaders from Salish tribes and other Native organizations met recently for a lunch and an inclusive dialogue.
Following the 2019 lunch, the Kraken hired members of Pyramid Communications' Indian Country group to help put ideas and aspirations into action, and to do so in a way that centered the voices of the Native community. Among the outcomes was the crafting of a Land and Peoples Acknowledgement, developed over six months, with input from a number of Coast Salish Tribal leaders, including Leonard Forsman, chairman of the Suquamish Tribe since 2005.
Forsman urged the Kraken and Climate Pledge Arena to add “Peoples” to what is typically a land acknowledgement.
“It was just a suggestion,” Forsman said at the recent lunch, smiling among his peers.
But Forsman’s addition clearly resonated.
Andrea Wilbur-Sigo was the first speaker at this month’s lunch, a Native American master carver and active member and educator of the Squaxin Tribe. Wilbur-Sigo is one of seven Native artists hired in connection with the Kraken and Climate Pledge Arena. She discussed her commission from the NHL franchise to create a welcoming art piece at the entryway of Kraken Community Iceplex.
Wilbur-Sigo’s work will feature seven large paddles (representative of seven generations of ancestors and the next seven future generations, plus the traditional canoe journey) and one hockey stick (“the eighth generation,” says the artist, and, yes, she did make a connection to tentacles).
Everyone venturing to see the Kraken practice or to skate themselves or partake in so many other planned activities at the new training center will see the paddles and stick.
“When I was approached about this job,” said Wilbur-Sigo, “the first thing that got may attention was climate pledge aspect [of carbon-zero Climate Pledge Arena]. That is exactly part of our daily thoughts and activity. It is not something we teach our kids in a classroom. They have a responsibility to know [about caring for the planet]. I try to do that with my art.”
Wilbur-Sigo started her five minutes of sharing by presenting her ancestry, naming several tribes and pledging she is “doing my best to represent all of you.” She was happy to report her view of progress, noting Tulalip Tribes artist Ty Juvinel is creating a piece for inside the Kraken Community Iceplex.
“Twenty-five years ago, it was hard to get Salish work out there [in public spaces],” said Wilbur-Sigo. “Fifteen years ago I am not sure our work was understood … Now we’re here and these pieces are going up [the Iceplex opens to the public in September].”
Juvinel’s carving will present his interpretation of the Kraken’s secondary anchor brand mark and it will hang in the hallway inside the Kraken Community Iceplex.
“We are putting our heritage up,” Juvinel said when presenting at the luncheon. “In our own voice and words … I can’t be more proud of this team. The Kraken wants the meaning to come through. It’s more than symbolic gesture.”
In presenting the Land and Peoples' Acknowledgement, on display via large screen for the U-shaped table of leaders to see while enjoying that lunch from Off the Rez Truck and Café, Horita echoed Ty’s comment about symbolism.
“So often these statements are performative and perfunctory,” said Horita. “People say and hear the words without understanding what they mean or why they’re being said.
“The words are just the starting point. It is our job to ensure they have real impact, for our Native community and for those of us not in the Native community who have so much to learn.”
Here’s the statement the leaders were reviewing and discussing:
Land and Peoples Acknowledgement Statement
The Seattle Kraken acknowledges that we are on the homelands of the Coast Salish peoples, who continue to steward these lands and waters as they have since time immemorial. We recognize Washington’s tribal nations and Native organizations, who actively create, shape and contribute to our thriving communities.
The Seattle Kraken are committed to doing our part to engage with, and amplify the voices of, Native peoples and tribes.
“The statement needs a call to action,” said Temryss Lane, Lummi Native and director of Pyramid’s Indian Country practice. “We have the opportunity to extend this message beyond [from Climate Pledge Arena and Kraken Community Iceplex] to digital spaces. One priority is to engage Native youth.”
Both the Kraken and One Roof Foundation, the philanthropic arm of the Kraken and Climate Pledge Arena, are committed to creating opportunities to engage in skating and hockey on and off the ice.
“We are working to get young people to the rinks,” said Eric Pettigrew, Kraken VP of Government Relations and Outreach, during a presentation about youth hockey and figure skating programs that will provide access and equipment to kids as needed. “We intend to more than just develop hockey players.
“We ultimately want to help develop good people who know what happened before them and who will work hard to move the next generation forward.”
Denise Stiffarm, an inaugural One Roof board member who served many years in a similar role with Chief Seattle Club, said she the luncheon’s “intentions and action to engage blew me away.”
“From the first gathering I had an appreciation for the thoughtfulness on how to involve the Native community,” said Stiffarm, a partner at Pacifica Law Group, an enrolled member of the Gros Ventre (A’aninin/White Clay) Tribe of Montana and an active Urban Indian community member here in town. “Native people are still very present and the Acknowledgement exposes that Native people are here.”
“I am excited to see the involvement with the youth [Native and all BIPOC], to really invest the time and resources. There are so many urban Natives in Seattle from all around the country.”
Lawrence Solomon, chairman of the Lummi Nation, started the luncheon with a song that moved every person in the space.
“These songs are not just songs,” said Solomon. “They are prayers in our hearts for our communities and a prayer in hearts for Mother Earth. It is called ‘Survivor’s Song.’ "
Solomon translated the Lummi lyrics for the group: “My highly respected people … we come from the survivors of the Great Flood … we come together my Indian people and stand strong … I am a survivor of the Great Flood.”
“I felt great emotion with that blessing,” said Tod Leiweke, introducing the luncheon’s purpose. “We want our fans to feel the same thing at each and every home game.”
Ty Juvinel, for one, looks forward to NHL action at Climate Pledge Arena. He is a long-time hockey fan and a regular at the Western Hockey League Everett Silvertips games.
Seattle is such a big sports town,” said Juvinel after the day’s event winded down. “We know that from the 12th man. It’s going to be an amazing NHL town too.”
Minorities are ‘key partners’ in saving planet’s biodiversity – UN expert
Under a UN-backed global biodiversity framework draft agreement, countries have agreed to protect 30 per cent of the planet and restore at least 20 per cent by 2030.
While acknowledging that the plan is essential to conserving biodiversity, UN Special Rapporteur on human rights and environment, David Boyd, warned that it “must not be achieved at the expense of further human rights violations against indigenous peoples and other rural people”.
Draft of the #post2020 global #biodiversity framework plan to preserve and protect nature must be amended: “Leaving human rights on the periphery is simply not an option” if we are to ensure the future of life on our planet – @SREnvironment.
👉 https://t.co/b8zadjyQMU#ForNature pic.twitter.com/Sk3lPQNpEe — UN Special Procedures (@UN_SPExperts) August 19, 2021
He said that special attention must be paid to indigenous peoples, people of African descent, local communities, peasants, rural women and rural youth – none of whom is adequately prioritized in the current draft plan, despite recent improvements.
Natural partners
These individuals and groups “must be acknowledged as key partners in protecting and restoring nature”, Mr. Boyd said. “Their human, land and tenure rights, knowledge, and conservation contributions must be recognized, respected, and supported.”
The independent rights expert, who was appointed by and reports to the Human Rights Council in Geneva, cautioned against what he called “fortress conservation” approaches that aim to restore “pristine wilderness” where no humans live.
This approach has had devastating human rights impacts on communities in these targeted areas, the Special Rapporteur insisted, including on indigenous peoples and other rural dwellers.
“Leaving human rights on the periphery is simply not an option, because rights-based conservation is the most effective, efficient, and equitable path forward to safeguarding the planet”, Mr. Boyd said, before urging Member States “to put human rights at the heart of the new Global Biodiversity Framework”.
Biodiversity Framework
The call came ahead of a UN biodiversity summit, known as COP15, which is to be held virtually in October and in-person next April in Kunming, China.
At that time, representatives of 190 Governments will seek to finalize the UN Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework.
The draft text released in July highlighted the need to address threats to biodiversity, human well-being and the future of life on Earth, while seeking to establish a “world living in harmony with nature” by 2050.
Maintaining that the Framework agreement does not go far enough to preserve and protect nature and its essential services to people, Mr. Boyd urged States to make rights-based approaches obligatory to conserve, restore and share the benefits of biodiversity, including conservation financing.
“It is also imperative that the Framework acknowledges that everyone, everywhere, has the right to live in a safe, clean, healthy and sustainable environment, a right which includes healthy ecosystems and biodiversity”, he said.
Healthy biosphere
Expanding on his report to the General Assembly last October, “Human Rights Depend on a Healthy Biosphere”, Mr. Boyd unveiled a policy brief calling for a more inclusive, just and sustainable approach to safeguarding and restoring biodiversity.
The document outlined the human rights costs and limited efficacy of so-called exclusionary conservation, where local people are viewed as threats to natural ecosystems and kept away.
Special Rapporteurs work on a voluntary basis. They are neither UN staff nor paid for their work.
Australia’s Indigenous people face COVID crisis within a crisis
Cases have been reported in far west of New South Wales in Aboriginal communities already suffering from poor health.
As the Australian state of New South Wales (NSW) battles to contain a third wave of COVID-19 that saw a record 681 new cases on Thursday, a crisis within a crisis is unfolding for Aboriginal people experiencing disproportionately higher rates of infection and hospital admission.
A statewide lockdown was introduced last weekend after clusters of COVID-19 emerged in inland towns and remote rural communities in the west of the state, where one in four people identify as Indigenous.
Some 300km (186 miles) west of Sydney, the sheep-grazing town of Dubbo that had been virtually untouched by the pandemic is now the epicentre of the western outbreak, with 167 active cases. Seven out of 10 of those diagnosed with the virus are Aboriginal people and nearly half of those are Aboriginal children and teenagers aged between 10 and 19.
“It’s spreading very fast in the Aboriginal community. There hasn’t been a comparable outbreak in such a concentrated space anywhere in regional Australia,” Dubbo Mayor Stephen Lawrence told Al Jazeera.
“It’s a double whammy because the health outcomes and vulnerabilities are particularly acute in these communities, and that makes them more vulnerable.”
Generational health gap
Aboriginal people in New South Wales’ rural and outback west often live in crowded houses with extended family and have poorer health than non-Indigenous Australians [File: Ian Neubauer/Al Jazeera]
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), Australia’s 670,000 Aboriginals and Torres Strait Islanders have long suffered from poor health and still suffer from preventable diseases like trachoma that are found nowhere else in the developed world.
One-third die by the age of 45, and the average life expectancy for Indigenous people is more than 10 years less than non-Indigenous Australians. The rate of rheumatic heart disease among Australia’s “First Nation” peoples is the highest in the world – 75 times higher than the rate of non-Indigenous Australians. Gastroenteritis, kidney disease, diabetes, influenza – the list of chronic illnesses goes on and on and explains why Aboriginals and Torres Strait Islanders were identified as “a clearly defined vulnerable community” at the start of Australia’s vaccine rollout in February.
Nevertheless, vaccine uptake has been sluggish. Only 29 per cent of Indigenous Australians have had one dose compared with 50 percent of the general population, while only 15 percent are fully vaccinated compared with the national average of 26 percent. The numbers are even worse among Aboriginal people in Western New South Wales with only about 8 percent fully vaccinated, according to NSW Health.
Dr Kalinda Griffiths, an Aboriginal woman who lectures in data research for health at the University of New South Wales, says confusing messaging from the government about the safety of the AstraZeneca vaccine for young adults and church groups who are opposed to vaccinations are heightening vaccine hesitancy in Indigenous communities.
“We know a couple of church groups have gone out and told people not to take vaccines. The church has a very strong influence on people in remote areas, so it’s caused a lot of confusion,” she said.
Housing problems
Some 500km (311 miles) west of Dubbo in the poverty-stricken town of Wilcannia where 69 percent of the population is Aboriginal, six new cases of COVID-19 were identified this week.
A dog sleeps by the roadside in an Aboriginal community in the west of New South Wales [File: Ian Neubauer/Al Jazeera]
“Right now, people are running scared,” a community elder in Wilcannia told Al Jazeera on condition of anonymity. “We have incredibly high unemployment, inter-generational socioeconomic disadvantage – and now this. It’s created a sense of resignation. People just shrug their shoulders and say I’m Black and poor and life is s***.”
A chronic housing shortage in Indigenous communities has exacerbated the outbreak in Wilcannia and other population centres in the arid lands in the far west of the state.
“The reality of living in remote rural communities is that there is still a housing crisis in 2021, that abject poverty is the norm and you are sharing a home with your aunties and uncles, nieces and nephews, and there are people sleeping rough on your couch,” the community elder in Wilcannia explained.
Dubbo Mayor Lawrence says large households make compliance and enforcement of lockdowns difficult.
“Lockdowns mean different things to people living in a nice house in the city to those in the country living with large family groups in crowded housing estates,” he said.
“We have a massive compliance operation under way right now but we’re facing big challenges because Aboriginal people in Dubbo are very tightly connected to communities in Walgett, Burke and other towns in the north. We’re the hospital base for those communities, so anyone who gets sick has to come here which also increases the chance of transmission. It’s not a double whammy, it’s a triple whammy,” he said.
Some 200km (124 miles) west of Wilcannia, the outback mining town of Broken Hill recorded its first case of COVID-19 since the start of the pandemic on Tuesday.
“The key strategy to reduce transmission is lockdowns,” said the town’s mayor, Darriea Turley. “But how do you lockdown in a small remote community like the ones surrounding us that don’t have many services, where the hospital has no intensive care unit or isolation ward and where essential workers are going home to houses where people are sleeping rough. How do you safely manage a workforce when you have housing problems like that?”
Military enforcement
With transmission rates still climbing and the lockdown in western New South Wales extended until August 28, the government has sent in the army to help with welfare, enforce lockdowns and vaccinate people in the area.
Starting on Saturday, five “highly mobile, highly flexible and highly trained” teams of about 70 army personnel will monitor walk-in vaccination clinics where appointments are not needed for a Pfizer jab in Dubbo and other vulnerable communities out west. A further 50 unarmed soldiers will be assisting police with compliance and the distribution of care hampers to people who are self-isolating.
“We’re working closely with the Aboriginal community to keep them safe, to make sure that people are getting tested and making sure that people who have been in contact with other cases are aware that they need to isolate,” Dr Jeremy McAnulty, the executive director of Health Protection NSW, told reporters in Sydney on Tuesday.
But the community elder in Wilcannia says the statement only shows how out of touch bureaucrats in Sydney are with the far west: “With so much overcrowding, the idea of isolating at home is ridiculous. There are just no places you can go to isolate.”
Official reports have shown a huge gulf between the health of Australia’s Aboriginal and non-Indigenous communities. Aboriginal people suffer disproportionately from diseases such as diabetes and heart disease and were identified as a ‘clearly defined vulnerable community’ at the start of the COVID-19 vaccine rollout [File: Lokas Coch/EPA]
Mayor Turley of Broken Hill voices similar sentiments.
“What is happening now was expected because when the outbreak started in Sydney, the state government refused to address regional travel. Vaccines take a month to start working so what they’re doing now, it’s too little, too late. All we can do is hold our breaths and see what happens within the next 48 hours,” she said.