The nine countries – home to the Latin Amazon – PERU, BOLÍVIA, BRASIL, COLÔMBIA, EQUADOR, VENEZUELA, GUIANA, SURINAME e GUIANA FRANCESA have been threatened by commercial logging, mining and illegal exploitation for decades. People may not know or choose to ignore its history but these countries have been vowing to safeguard the Amazon for decades even pledging to reverse forestation by 2030 but deforestation prevails. 

However, many tribes have always understood the need to respect their environment without non-native or foreign people present, for humanity’s wellbeing and healing. The Amazon has over 400 tribes each with its own language, culture, and territory. We believe the stigma towards Black Indigenous People of Color exists because of misleading narratives by oppressive groups that must also be reversed to reverse deforestation, not the other way around.

RFM’s BIPOC Amazon Project expands on this fundamental understanding and seeks to directly address the historical gaps in building true and sustainable solidarity for natives in the following way:

Mobilizing the regional communities who share a goal of racial empowerment by reversing the historical ways BIPOC have been viewed and treated in their own native lands. Our mobilization focuses on the importance of respecting the natives, being pro-indigenous culture and ceasing foreign supremacy.  

These pillars are internalized and show up in mutually reinforcing, distinct, and specific ways within Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) communities and must be reversed as they impede efforts to protect the environment and collaborate across differences without destruction, violence, corruption, and inequality.

Our fieldwork disrupts the call for “global accord” by highlighting explicit dynamics of the imbalance of power across intersectional sectors and identities by focusing on the root causes of environmental degradation and the racial hierarchical power struggles that is underpinned by native invisibility, anti-indigenous activities, foreign supremacy, and the historical disadvantages of BIPOC communities who are living on the margins of oppressive regimes.

We seek to educate by intentionally reframing the Indigenous/Foreign binary to cultivate a deeper analysis of the environmental crisis among a wider group of BIPOC and native communties to call oppressive regimes into racial climate justice work; and

we entertain the young adult instead of bringing their generation to despair by offering a vision of environmental solidarity rooted in a reimagined relationship between BIPOC to their land, heads of states and policies that are pro-indigenous and anti-white supremacist society.

This approach is the only promising way forward, as long as Black Indigenous People of Color and local communities are not only fully consulted in the process by leaders who are checking a box we will not solve the climate crisis.