The Southeastern Indigenous Coalition Environmental Conference, held March 7 and 8, saw around 200 participants looking to learn about the environmental issues facing Native communities today.
The conference was hosted by 7 Directions of Service, a nonprofit organization dedicated to advocating for Native land and rights and headquartered in Mebane. The two-day event took place at Rockingham Community College in Wentworth and the Haw River State Park in Browns Summit — both in the land of the Occaneechi Band of the Saponi Nation, which covers a majority of Alamance and Orange counties, including the land that Elon University sits on.
Co-founders of 7 Directions Crystal Cavalier-Keck and Jason Crazy Bear Campos-Keck — both of who have spoken at Elon University — have traveled the world for similar conferences and decided there was a need for something similar in North Carolina.
The conference hosted 15 tribes from across the world within the 200 people who attended both in person and online, according to Campos-Keck. Panels included traditional ecological knowledge, land and resource sovereignty, food sovereignty and sustainable agriculture, climate change and indigenous resilience, cultural landscapes and sacred sites protection, and youth leadership in environmental justice.
Campos-Keck said the intention of the conference was to bring communities together to find common solutions to issues they are all facing.
“It’s about sharing with other communities because we understand that anything we preserve, anything we solve, we’re doing it for the benefit of all, and we’re doing it,” Campos-Keck said. “It has to be done together, and so we can’t be divided in this.”
Ramona Moore Big Eagle is a Tuscarora Cherokee storyteller and environmental educator. She was part of the land sovereignty and Indigenous foodways panel and discussed the importance of being connected with the Earth and growing food.
Moore was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2017 and was given the option of surgery or chemotherapy. Going home from her appointment, she watched “What the Health?” — a documentary about the connection between diet and disease. She decided to see how changing her diet would affect her cancer.
She stopped eating all meat, dairy, sugar and processed foods and grew her own food for a year before going back to the doctor. In her 2018 mammogram, her cancer was gone.
She grows her own food using tower gardening, a process of vertical hydroponics, which ensures that there are no pesticides or other harmful chemicals in her food. She encouraged attendees to share their methods of life with younger generations to make sure they are continued.
“I’m just saying y’all, there are things we learn from our grandparents that we need to pass on to our children and our grandchildren, and if we don’t, they will not know,” Moore said. “They aren’t learning about how to survive by taking their health, healing, wholeness, their survival, their foodways in their own hands. It’s up to us to teach them, and you have to do it with love.”
Throughout, panel speakers shared their experiences and tips on how to build a stronger community and overcome the issues they are faced with. With panel speakers ranging from states across the East Coast, there were a variety of perspectives and environmental issues shared, including mercury in fish in the Florida Everglades and flooding in western North Carolina.
Keynote speaker Brandy Brown led the Office of Climate and Energy in Michigan created under Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. Brown shared her difficult experiences being a Black, Indigenous woman in politics, standing up for Native land in Michigan.
While in Whitmer’s office, people didn’t know she was Indigenous. She was working on Line 5 — a pipeline in Michigan that has brought controversy over leaks and infringing on Native treaties. After a meeting one day, another state employee saw Brown’s Facebook profile, where she doesn’t hide her Native identity. The other employee asked, “Brandy, are you, like, Indian?” Brown said, “I am.”
“After she saw who I was, guess what miraculously disappeared from my schedule? All Line 5 meetings. Guess what information I was locked out of? All Line 5 meetings,” Brown said in her speech. “I’m sharing that experience with you so you can understand that in these rooms, even with the people who seem the crunchiest, people that say they care about climate, environment, when it comes to making decisions about our people, we have to be in that room doing it ourselves.”
Campos-Keck said the organization — and others in the Southeast — will continue to have events like this to build and strengthen relationships to fight back against environmental issues.
“We have to build a network of communities because one community by itself has a voice, but a very small voice. But all of our communities together have a huge voice,” Campos-Keck said.