Open letter to organisers of the People’s Climate March

The People’s March for Climate Justice & Jobs in London on Sunday, 29th November, was led by the Wretched of the Earth, a bloc made up of Indigenous people and people descended from communities from the global south.

Indigenous delegates who had travelled from the Pacific Islands and from the Sami Nation in Sweden were invited to join the London march, after the attacks in Paris meant they could not attend there, and they were accompanied by UK Tar Sands Network. Our communities, in both the global south and the global north, bear the heaviest burden of climate change and environmental degradation. This is through the deprivation of water and food, and the destruction of culture and life itself. The impacts of climate change are continuous with, and a consequence of, colonial and imperial violence that sees these lands and lives as expendable. Our place at the front of the march was therefore rightful, because we are from and of frontline communities.

However, like the history of any just cause, our place at the front of the march was neither given nor guaranteed. In planning for the march, you approached our groups to lead it - but only, it seems, to pat your own backs for your racial liberalness and to tick your narrow diversity box. The fact that we spoke for our own cause in our own words resulted in great consternation: you did not think that our decolonial and anti-imperialist message was consistent with the spirit of the march. In order to secure our place at the front, you asked us to dilute our message and make it ‘palatable’.

On Sunday, our bloc arrived at the march only to find that you were already preparing to block us through a colourful form of sabotage. Our place had been given to a group of people dressed in animal headgear. After having invited the Pacific Island and Sami people to lead the bloc, you then took away the main banner of the march from their hands and asked them to hold your signs instead. Your people covered up the banners made by indigenous communities. Signs that proclaimed indigenous and global south communities as the ‘Wretched of the Earth’, and charged ‘British Imperialism causes climate injustice’, were removed in favour of those that projected a more ‘positive message’. What for our peoples is positive about climate change?

But our bloc responded to the situation in solidarity and allyship to hold the space for the people who had travelled for weeks to be present with us at this time of great change. To repeat: you stole the place of indigenous, black and brown people and gave it away to people dressed as animals. Let’s say it again: so long as indigenous, black, and brown people were unwilling to merely add decorative value – to remain reduced to an aesthetic – you thought they were replaceable by animals.

This is archetypal colonialism. The history of conquest, genocide, and slavery is the foundation of our modern economic system – the very system responsible for the global disaster that is climate change. This is the same history that compares indigenous, black and brown people to animals and treats them as such. The history of colonialism is the resulting legitimisation of theft, occupation, and erasure.

Your decision to overshadow the indigenous communities’ banner and to replace our bloc with animals indicates at best your historical amnesia, and at worst your own colonial mentality. It also highlights the wilful hypocrisy of the climate movement in the global north: well before you started caring about polar bears and recycling, colonised and postcolonial peoples were already fighting to reclaim and heal their connection with the earth and all its life forms that were so brutally violated by European colonialism and its extractive industries.

At various points during the march, you thought it appropriate to call the police on us, on the pretext that the coffins we carried to commemorate the victims of environmental and climate genocide were a health hazard. You later called on the police to kettle us during a brief die-in near BP’s headquarters so that the rest of the march could by-pass us and continue uninterrupted.

In case you missed it: you, the organisers of the climate march, called on the official agents of colonial and capitalist power to separate indigenous, black, and brown people from the march, portraying us a protesters against the march rather than frontline community members and soldiers for climate justice.

separated bloc surrounded by police / ghettoised bloc of the climate march

That day, the climate movement in the UK took off its mask and showed its true colours. And we showed them ours. Within minutes of being robbed and overtaken, ‘The Wretched’ joined in solidarity with each other, charged ahead of the colonial henchpeople, reclaimed our space, and proclaimed our message with non-violent direct action. London’s climate march was indeed led by representatives of the Sami peoples in Scandinavia and of Islander peoples of Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia, as well as black and brown UK activists.

These are peoples who bear a long history of resisting colonial domination and erasure in all its forms. The banner that they held while leading the march read ‘Still fighting Co2onialism’, bearing testament not only to this long history but also to their treatment by the organisers of the march. The chants that were heard first as the march headed through the streets of the city were those charging genocide, and demanding decolonialisation as the only viable solution to climate change, ending with the traditional songs of the Sami people.   

The organisers of the march, of course, were not the only ones intent on erasing us. We were erased too from mainstream footage of the event.

All of this is just one of the many ways in which our communities are consistently erased as frontline fighters against climate change. While you have since attempted a weak apology for your misconduct, you have not yet owned up to your numerous and deliberate efforts to sabotage the bloc and deny our message.

Your attempt to replace the reality of the genocidal impacts of climate change on indigenous communities with bobbing animal-heads adds insult to injury – not because the protection of animals among all life forms is insignificant but because who other than frontline communities can better speak to the utter devastation of flora and fauna on their own lands.

We face an uphill battle in fighting climate change as part of the wider system that has created and enables it: capitalism and colonialism. But the incidents at the march also made clear that the climate movement itself perpetuates these very oppressions.

The climate movement, in the UK and globally, will be decolonial or it will be nothing. In London, the Indigenous communities and Wretched of the Earth bloc proved this: the first to die, the first to fight, the first to march.

To paraphrase Utah Phillips: The climate movement is not white, but it is being white-washed. And those white-washing it have names.

The Wretched of the Earth Bloc is: Algeria Solidarity Campaign, Argentina Solidarity Campaign, Black Dissidents, Colombia Solidarity Campaign, Environmental Justice North Africa, Global Afrikan People's Parliament, Global Justice Forum, Indigenous Environmental Network, Kilombo U.K, London Mexico Solidarity, Movimiento Ecuador Reino Unido (MERU), Movimiento Jaguar Despierto, PARCOE, The London Latinxs, South Asia Solidarity Group, This Changes Everything UK. In solidarity: The UK Tar Sands Network.

This article is part of a Climate Stories project.