On April 22, 2016, the North Brooklyn Boat Club hosted a Global Canoe event that brought together indigenous people’s leaders from all over the world in an action that sought to highlight the exclusion of indigenous peoples from the Paris climate accords signed with great fanfare that day at the UN.

The event was organized by the Mesoamerican Alliance of Peoples and Forests, an alliance of grassroots indigenous and local community organizations from across Central America. In addition to NBBC, other groups that supported Global Canoe included COICA, the main coalition of indigenous
organizations from the Amazon; AMAN, which represents millions of indigenous peoples in Indonesia; the Rainforest Foundation US; If Not Us Then Who?; and Advice Project Media. Global Canoe sought to bring three points to the attention of the world leaders at the UN and world public:

• Stop the murder of indigenous leaders
• Allow access to climate funding to indigenous peoples organizations
• Recognize land titling of indigenous territories

At the Broadway Stages Boatyard, speakers included Candido Mezua, from AMPB; Mina Setra, from AMAN/Indonesia; Jorge Furagaro from Coica/Colombia; Sara Omi, from the Alto Bayano Congress in Panama; and Chief Phil Lane Jr., from Four Worlds International. We were joined by members of the Onondaga Nation from upstate New York.

The speeches and ceremonies at the boatyard highlighted the struggles of indigenous peoples, whose rights are ignored and whose people are murdered by both the forces of globalization and the very governments celebrating their “accords” on the other side of the river. Chief Lane spoke of a 500-year-old prophecy that predicted that the peoples of the eagle, the condor, and the coatl would come together in a time of danger and that their meeting would usher in a new age of healing for the world. He declared that that day had arrived and that the prophesied meeting was taking place right there in Greenpoint.

After the ceremony, we loaded up both of NBBC’s 25′ canoes and every tandem canoe on the site to take these members of paddling cultures across the East River to just below U Thant Island, opposite the United Nations. Despite close attention from the NYPD, we peacefully lit a ceremonial tobacco pipe, and Chief Lane led the boats in an invocation that the world might hear the simple plea we made:

• Stop the murder of indigenous leaders
• Allow access to climate funding to indigenous peoples organizations
• Recognize land titling of indigenous territories

All the peoples, including the Brooklynites, then gathered together back at the boatyard to sing and play and be together and hope that the plea had been heard.