October 20, 2019

By Izzy Colón

Four Directions is an MU student organization that has been dedicated to advocating for Native American and indigenous students’ concerns on campus and throughout the community since the 1980s.

Four Directions President Ryder Jiron said a major goal for the club is to educate other members of the community who may not be aware of the issues affecting the Native population at MU.

“Our overarching goal and purpose is to serve as a way to cultivate a native community between native students, faculty, community members,” Jiron said. “We work towards advocating for indigenous students and faculty to the administration. Working towards indigenous visibility rather than erasure.”

Jiron said he has always been invested in indigenous advocacy, which pushed him to participate in other types of advocacy, including the climate justice movement.

“I’ve always been involved in indigenous advocacy and realizing that climate change is affecting our communities rapidly got me spurred into it,” Jiron said.

But he said the climate justice movement has not always been accommodating to the indigenous perspective, despite the fact that native people are at the forefront of facing the effects of climate change.

“Indigenous people are going to be the hardest affected and they already are being affected,” Jiron said. “Making sure our voices are heard and that people understand what’s happening to indigenous communities right now is vital.”

Jiron represented Four Directions and spoke at the MU climate strike on Sept. 20 to spread a message of indigenous inclusion in climate advocacy.

Geography professor Mark Palmer researches how geography affects cultures around the world, including indigenous people in the U.S.

Palmer said the climate justice movement should be a bottom-up effort where groups threatened by climate change work together. Palmer said he believes it is important that indigenous perspectives are given a platform and are incorporated into climate justice movements.

He also said it is necessary to balance respecting and providing indigenous people a platform in the climate change movement without placing the sole responsibility on indigenous people to solve the issue. He said the most effective movement will come from everyone doing their part to incorporate indigenous ideas into the movement.

Jiron said Four Directions is always willing to participate in climate justice advocacy and education as the opportunity arises in the future.

“Indigenous people have solutions to these problems,” Jiron said. “Overextraction and overuse of minerals is very rooted in western thought. In indigenous ways, that’s completely foreign. It’s about a reciprocal relationship with the land and non-human beings around you.”

_Edited by Ben Scott | bscott@themaneater.com_