ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at a brief history of the global Indigenous movement to understand its unique relation to and shared discourses with the Indigenous climate movement. Indigenous Peoples worldwide find themselves in the unenviable position of being amongst the most vulnerable to climate change, and amongst the groups least powerful to thwart it. The global Indigenous movement can be said to have emerged from the engagement of various Indigenous governments, organizations, networks, professionals, and individuals who discovered each other over decades of engagement with the United Nations human rights systems. Most significantly, the identity-based social movement is responsible for developing an Indigenous rights framework and related vision that can be an effective tool for tackling climate change, and can serve as a framework for the larger environmental movement going forward. The international Indigenous climate movement took that framework and applied it to the issue of climate change.
