Indigenous youth are at the center of major climate lawsuits. Here’s why they’re suing.

"If I don't do it, who will?"

On Aug. 8, 2023, 13-year-old Kaliko was getting ready for her hula class at her mother’s house in West Maui. The power was out, and she heard there was a wildfire in Lāhainā, where her dad lived, but she didn’t think much of it. Wildfires happened all the time in the summer.

Within hours, Kaliko learned this wasn’t a normal fire, and that her dad’s house was gone. The Lāhainā fire consumed the town, killing 102 people and destroying more than 2,000 buildings, the flames fanned by a potent combination of climate change and colonialism.

Today marks the one-year anniversary of the deadliest wildfire in modern United States history, one that changed Hawaiʻi forever and made Kaliko more determined to defend her community.

This summer she was part of a group of plaintiffs who forced the state of Hawaiʻi to agree to decarbonize its transportation system, which is responsible for half of the state’s greenhouse gas emissions. (Grist is only using her first name because she is a minor and filed the lawsuit without her surname.)

Now 14, she has spent the past year going to protests and testifying at water commission meetings to defend Indigenous water rights. She sees her advocacy as part of her kuleana, a Hawaiian word that connotes both a privilege and responsibility, to her community in West Maui where her Native Hawaiian family has lived for 19 generations.

“I’m from this place, it’s my main kuleana to take care of it like my kupuna have in the past,” she said, referring to her ancestors. 

Across the country and globe, young people are filing lawsuits to try to hold governments and companies accountable for their role in promoting climate change. At the center of many are Indigenous youth like Kaliko who feel an enormous urgency and responsibility to step up and protect their land and cultural resources from this latest colonial onslaught on their way of life. 

In May, eight Alaska residents age 11 to 22 — half of whom are Alaska Native — sued the state to block a liquid natural gas pipeline project that’s expected to triple the state’s greenhouse gas emissions. In June, Indigenous youth and environmental groups in New Mexico won a key initial victory in a lawsuit challenging the oil and gas industry. 

In July, the Montana Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Held v. Montana, a lawsuit brought by Montana youth challenging the state’s law that forbids agencies from considering climate change in their environmental reviews. The plaintiffs include Native American youth who say worsening wildfires and warmer days are making it harder to continue their cultural traditions. 

It’s not just the United States. In 2022, Indigenous youth in Australia won a major victory against a destructive coal project. A few years earlier, Indigenous youth in Colombia joined a broader youth lawsuit that affirmed the rights of the Amazon to protection and conservation. 

The cases are part of a major upswing in climate change litigation globally over the last decade, including a rise in climate cases brought by Indigenous peoples in countries ranging from Argentina to New Zealand. 

Korey G. Silverman-Roati, a fellow at the Columbia Law School’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, said there’s growing recognition that not only are Indigenous people uniquely susceptible to climate impacts but their unique human rights protections can lend extra power to climate cases. 

The lawsuit Kaliko helped bring wasn’t centered on Indigenous legal rights but most of the plaintiffs were Native youth like her, and they collectively secured one of the most successful outcomes in the history of U.S. climate litigation. “That might be a signal to future folks interested in bringing climate litigation that these might be especially persuasive plaintiffs,” Silverman-Roati said.

To Katy Stewart, who works at the Aspen Center’s Center for Native American Youth, the willingness of Indigenous youth like Kaliko to take the lead in these cases makes sense. Her organization recently surveyed more than 1,000 Indigenous youth and conducted focus groups to learn what they care about. When it came to climate change, emotions ran hot. 

“What we are seeing and hearing a lot was anger, frustration and a want to do something,” she said. “It was hopeful to me that there wasn’t sort of a ‘giving up and this is over for us,’ more of, ‘we need to do something because we’re the ones seeing this right now.’”

For teenagers like Kaliko, litigation offers an opportunity to force change in a political and economic system that has long resisted calls to climate action. It also feels like a necessary step to protect her home. 

“It’s really important to me that other kids don’t have to go through what I’ve experienced and that’s what drives me to do this stuff,” Kaliko said. “But it’s really just like the thought of, ‘If I don’t do it, then who will?’”

When Johnny Juarez from Albuquerque thinks of climate change, he thinks of New Mexico’s oil fields, vast and expansive and dominant in the state’s economy. Juarez is 22, and in the time he’s been alive, the state’s oil production has ramped up 10 times.

The drilling has expanded even though there’s scientific consensus that burning fossil fuels is causing incredible damage to the earth. It’s ramped up despite harmful air pollution affecting neighboring communities, and regardless of the deadly risks to workers, such as in the case of Randy Yellowman, a 47-year-old Native American man killed in an explosion in 2019.

Talking about the harms of the oil and gas industry is hard in New Mexico, though, because it’s such an entrenched economic driver. Yellowman had been on the job 17 years when he was killed. Juarez, an enrolled member of the Pueblo of Laguna, knows Native families whose parents and grandparents worked in the oil fields and see it as a viable career for themselves and their children. 

“What a just transition looks like to us is centering those families that are going to be most impacted and making sure that they get the support they need,” Juarez said. Juarez has talked a lot about the “just transition” in his job as a community organizer, the concept of moving away from fossil fuels to rely instead on green energy and doing so in a way that respects the rights of marginalized peoples. 

He thinks it’s an essential step, and that’s one of the reasons he’s one of the plaintiffs in a lawsuit in New Mexico that contends the state is violating its constitution by failing to control pollution caused by the fossil fuel industry. 

To Juarez, suing to stop the fossil fuel industry feels like a necessary continuation of his family’s legacy of standing up against environmental racism. Long before he was born, his great-grandfather sued the Jackpile Mine, a gigantic open-pit uranium mine, for violating their property rights. The family lost their suit, and decades after the mine closed, Indigenous families continue to deal with the environmental fallout of the mine.

Juarez’s family left the reservation because of the uranium pollution, and Juarez grew up in Albuquerque, where he was raised by his grandfather, a former sheep-herder and graduate of a federal Indian boarding school. Still, they returned to the reservation to celebrate feast days and Juarez’ childhood is peppered with memories of fishing with his grandfather and watching cultural dances. 

“As Pueblo people, we’re really fortunate that, despite very violent attempts, we were never removed from our ancestral homelands and reside exactly where the colonizers found us,” he said. Environmental justice feels like another birthright. 

“This was actually a fight that I was really born into,” Juarez said. “The fossil fuel industry and fossil fuel extraction and fracking and oil and gas exploration is really just the next chapter in colonial extractivism in New Mexico.”

That’s exactly how Beze Gray of the Aamjiwnaang First Nation in Canada feels. In 2019, they joined a group of seven young people, three of whom are Indigenous, who sued the government of Ontario for weakening its climate goals. Gray grew up in the shadow of dozens of chemical plants and oil refineries and saw firsthand how their pollution hurt their community. Now, compounding that harm are climate change-fueled shorter winters that are making it tougher to continue Indigenous ways of living. 

“We used to have a month to do sugar bushing and now it’s spread out into days,” Gray said of their traditional practice of collecting maple water and boiling it into sugar. “This feeling of loss and grief of experiencing life with climate change  — it impacts so many of our traditional ways.” 

Even though Juarez’s lawsuit passed its first legal hurdle, it’s far from clear whether it’ll be successful. Gray’s case, too, has faced setbacks and is awaiting a ruling on appeal. Many climate lawsuits don’t go anywhere — a court decides that the people suing don’t have standing, or the law doesn’t say what the plaintiffs think it does, or a judge decides that their concerns are valid but they sued the wrong defendants the wrong way. 

Those disappointments have taught plaintiffs to be persistent. Our Children’s Trust is an Oregon-based nonprofit that has spearheaded many of the youth-led lawsuits in the U.S., including the cases in Montana and Hawaiʻi. When their attorney Andrew Well talks about their Alaska case, he clarifies that their current litigation is called Sagoonick v. State of Alaska II. A previous lawsuit, Sagoonick v. State of Alaska, with the same named plaintiff, failed after a judge ruled that the youth couldn’t sue the state for its systemic actions but could challenge particular state agency decisions. So that’s what they’re doing this time, challenging the state’s support of a proposed 800-mile liquified natural gas pipeline stretching from north to south. 

Sagoonick was just 15 when the first lawsuit was filed. Over the past 10 years, climate change in Alaska has accelerated, with the state warming twice as fast as the rest of the country. Permafrost is thawing, salmon are disappearing from the Yukon River, and crabs are missing from the Bering Sea. By the time this next case resolves, the Alaska that she grew up with may not exist.

Globally, Indigenous peoples are often the first to experience the effects of climate change because of their dependence on land and water. In the U.S., modern-day reservations are more susceptible than Indigenous traditional homelands to drought and wildfires, extreme weather events expected to worsen as the earth warms. 

Stewart from the Center for Native American Youth said not only are Indigenous youth watching their climate change firsthand, but they’re also experiencing climate loss on top of existing trauma. Youth like Juarez are just a generation or two away from government boarding schools that ripped Indigenous children away from their homes in an attempt to assimilate them. Now, many are in the process of trying to reclaim the cultures and languages that were stolen from generations before, but are confronting the reality that a warmer earth could prevent many traditions from persisting. 

Becoming plaintiffs in climate lawsuits is a way of combating that grief and turning it into something productive.

“If you can take this despair and anger and frustration and be able to put it somewhere, that does wonders for your own self esteem and your own belief in the future and your own hope for the future,” Stewart said. “The starting point of believing that you matter is being listened to. And I think we’re seeing young people stepping into that role and having hope that things can get better.” 

Holding onto that hope isn’t easy. The day Lāhainā burned, Kaliko was shocked, but thinks it may have been easier for her to stomach the loss because it wasn’t the first time she had lost a home.

She was just eight years old back in 2018 when a tropical storm hit Maui. No such storm had ever made landfall on the island before, but her mom had a bad feeling about this one and so she told Kaliko to pack up some of her things and they left. 

Theirs were the only family in the valley they knew of that evacuated, and when they came back, theirs was the only house that had been completely destroyed by flooding. Gone were the paintings in Kaliko’s bedroom, including the pretty one of the cardinal above her bed. Gone were her dresses, including her favorite pink-and-green one with a lei on it.

In that way, the grief of the Lāhainā wildfire felt familiar. But this time, her whole life was upended. Suddenly, school was completely online. Then she and her classmates were moved to a temporary campus. She couldn’t go to the beaches where she used to swim after the state blocked off the burn area. She didn’t see her friends as often because they were moving around a lot and missing a lot of classes. 

Kaliko felt grateful that she had her mom’s house, that she hadn’t been in Lāhainā the day of the fire, and that she hadn’t lost loved ones the same way that other kids did. But she also felt scared. 

“This is just going to keep happening,” she thought. The realization is motivating her to join the Department of Transportation’s youth council created by her lawsuit’s settlement so that she can hold the state accountable to its decarbonization promises. 

More recently, in a lot of ways, life has gone back to normal. This summer, she attended her eighth grade banquet, graduated from middle school, and competed in the state championships with her outrigger canoe paddling team. 

Still, she feels acutely aware that everything can change overnight. And she doesn’t want what happened to her to happen to anyone else. 

Twenty-one years from now — the deadline for the state of Hawaiʻi to decarbonize its transportation system — Kaliko hopes to still be living at home, doing what she can to make a difference. 

“I want to mainly be advocating for my community,” she said. “I don’t think I can imagine myself doing anything else.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Indigenous youth are at the center of major climate lawsuits. Here’s why they’re suing. on Aug 8, 2024.