February 23, 2023
Sec Haaland gets Māori climate views
Māori climate change activist Mike Smith says a call by US Secretary for the Interior Debra Haaland for indigenous knowledge to be incorporated into climate change planning resonates with Māori.
Secretary Haaland from New Mexico’s Laguna Pueblo nation was welcomed to parliament yesterday by Māori ministers and leaders.
Mr Smith says it was a pleasure to share origin stories and mātauranga with the first Native American to hold cabinet rank in the United States.
“We also impressed on her the need for indigenous peoples, both here and in the United States, to have power to have agency to be able to ensure these perspectives are not just there at the whim of governments or they’re somehow modified or sanitised to fit with existing frameworks of undertanding but that we must have authority to implement out world views,” he says.