"Indigenous knowledge keepers take their clean energy expertise abroad" 20 June 2024

“For our family personally, renewables have been about us reclaiming our rights and living on country and being economically independent,” says [Chris] Croker, a member of the Luritja Nation...

This is not generally the case in Australia, where Aboriginal people make up 3.8% of the population and struggle to assert a whole host of rights...

With Australia setting ambitious goals to make its power supply 82% renewable by 2030, Croker set out to create an organization that would help advocate for a just energy transition – one that did not leave Aboriginal people out, nor leave them with meager scraps...

His research brought him to Canada, where Indigenous communities are the largest asset holders of clean energy projects after utility companies and the Crown. There, he found Indigenous Clean Energy (ICE), a not-for-profit organization that has been building capacity and expertise around clean energy and how to make it a tool for Indigenous sovereignty since 2016....

There are more than 200 renewable-energy projects – hydro, wind, solar and bioenergy – that have Indigenous participation in Canada, according to a report released by ICE in 2022...

“The lessons learned from so-called Canada we can share with our Indigenous kin around the world,” says Global Hub manager Daphne Kay, who is from Cowessess First Nation, on Treaty 4 Territory in Saskatchewan. “It’s not a silver bullet, it’s not a one size fits all, and our nation-to-nation relationship is about learning from each other.”...

The transition should be about empowerment for Indigenous Peoples, Balanta says, noting they comprise 6.2% of the global population but safeguard 80% of the planet’s biodiversity...

“For us clean energy is a bridge to asserting our sovereignty, to being leaders in this space, to building systems that work for us and are in a different way, in the [Global] South things look very different,” says [Freddie Huppé Campbell, ICE’s director of energy and climate and a Michif woman from the Ktunaxa Kinbasket territory, in British Columbia]